Associate Professor
Directing
Acting
Movement
Clown
Devised Theatre
Office: Waller 206G
E-mail: rkemp@iup.edu
Phone: 724-357-1220
Rick Kemp has received numerous awards on both sides of the Atlantic for his work as an actor and director since graduating from Oxford University in 1980. In a career that has ranged from street performance to Shakespeare to stand-up comedy, he has performed with leading British companies such as Theatre de Complicite, the Almeida, and the Oxford Playhouse, as well as touring his solo clown show Coming Home worldwide. In 1983, he collaborated with Nobel Prize-winning playwright Dario Fo on the English language premiere of Mistero Buffo, which he both directed and performed in, and subsequently received the French Government’s CROUS Award for Theatre. He has been nominated as a BAC Young British Director of the Year and holds an M.A. in English Literature from Oxford University and an M.F.A. in Performance Pedagogy at the University of Pittsburgh
In 1991, he was supported by the Arts Council of Great Britain to form Commotion, which rapidly became one of the country’s leading touring companies. Under Rick’s direction, the company created seven original collaboratively written theater pieces between 1991 and 1998, playing to sell-out audiences in places as far afield as London, Casablanca, and the Edinburgh Festival. His work with the company received the British Telecom Innovations Award and was twice selected as a Critic’s Choice by Time Out London and the national newspaper The Guardian.
Rick began working in the USA in 2001. Since then, he has directed his own play, Shrew, and The Comedy of Errors for the Unseam’d Shakespeare Company, and Riddley Walker and Hamlet for the Pittsburgh Playhouse Repertory Company. With Squonk Opera, he has cowritten and directed three shows: Rodeo Smackdown, Your Home Town—the Opera, and Astrorama. He has also adapted and directed Hamlet for the University of Pittsburgh’s “Shakespeare in the Schools” program. At IUP, he has directed A Flea in Her Ear, Five Women Wearing the Same Dress, and Citizen’s Soldier. He is presently directing Boys’ Life in Spring 2009.
As an actor, recent stage roles include Baptista in Shrew, Dromio of Syracuse in The Comedy of Errors, and Hjalmar Ekdal in Quantum Theatre’s production of Ibsen’s The Wild Duck. This performance was voted one of the year’s best by a lead actor in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Shrew and Hamlet were also included in that paper’s Best of the Year lists in 2001 and 2003 respectively. Recent roles include the Duke of York in King Richard II, Hendrik Verwoerd in the U.S. premiere of Anthony Sher’s I.D., Belarius in Cymbeline, Giles Corey in The Crucible, and Ganache in the World Premiere of Di Trevis’ adaptation of Le Grand Meaulnes. Rick’s work with Quantum Theatre has recently been acknowledged by an invitation to present The Collected Works of Billy the Kid at Madrid’s prestigious Festival de Otono, where it will be seen alongside work from the National Theatre, La Comedie Francaise, and Peter Brook’s company. Rick continues to work with Quantum Theatre, appearing most recently in The Museum of Desire, directed by the internationally renowned Dan Jemmett.
In 2004, Rick received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Rockefeller Foundation to cowrite and direct Squonk Opera’s Rodeo Smackdown, which premiered to a standing ovation at the Byham Theatre and has toured nationally and internationally. Rick also received the 2004 Heinz Endowments Creative Heights award to create and perform e-lectricity, a clown show about modern life and death, at the Pittsburgh Playhouse. In 2010, Rick received the IUP Distinguished Faculty Award in the Creative Arts. He also completed his doctorate in Theatre Arts at the University of Pittsburgh in 2010. His dissertation focused on the way in which recent discoveries in cognitive neuroscience can be used to create an actor training program that integrates physical and psychological approaches.
