FINDING YOURSELF IN THE TEXT (one day)
Phillips Gaulier once said ‘You are more interesting than anything you can make up’ This workshop is designed to enable you to play a text as if it were your own thoughts and feelings. We’ll examine the way we handle these things in colloquial speech and explore the ways and means of applying these qualities to a text on stage.
CAN YOU SEE ME MOTHER? (two days)
This is a workshop on playing audience. Theatre changes radically once it’s openly acknowledged that we’re all in the same room. Playing the audience makes perfect sense in playing clown but what happens if the style of play is more like psychological realism? What changes in your relationship with the audience when you’re story telling as opposed to playing a scene? And how can one form influence the other? And finally: what happens when the audience is in a different configuration than being end on?
FELDENKRAIS AND NEUTRAL MASK (two days)
This is an approach to Neutral Mask using the ‘awareness through movement work’ of Moshe Feldenkrais. How do you stand, how do you hold yourself, how do you breathe and how do you move? All these questions are instantly revealed the moment you put a mask on. And the same questions are experience and understood by the simple movement work you do on the floor, without the mask. Having identified the changes and played the mask we then take those movement quality into a dramatic interaction.
GOING BEYOND YOURSELF (three days)
This workshop designed to develop your imaginative range. You’ll be working with ‘archetypal masks’ like: The Trickster, The Huntress, The Devil The Child or The Victim to enable you to assume a range of different personas that are most likely way beyond your personal experience. The game is to assume your chosen persona and play it with different texts and in different situations.
CHALLENGING THE WRITTEN TEXT (two days)
This workshop is designed to explore the ways and means of working a text through action that never requires you to play a scene with the script in your hand. This is an action-based approach to textual analysis featuring The Tape Game and The Feeding Game
WHEN THE CLOWN BECOMES THE KING (three days)
This is a course in tragic clown. What happens when roles like Hamlet or King Lear are played as clowns? Clown play in the theatre is more subtle and more nuanced than it is in the circus and the moment it becomes clear to us that you know you’re a fool we start to empathize with you. How can a clown be head of state? This is a course for those with some experience in clowning.
FROM THE SUBLIME TO THE RIDICULOUS (ONE DAY)
This workshop explores the similarities and the differences between neutral mask and red nose, for people who are familiar with either of these masks. Essentially this is a workshop about power and authority coming face to face with bizarre anarchy. This course offers a fresh look at two seminal starting points in acting, namely Neutral Mask and The Red Nose. The workshop is designed to explore the questions: What’s the difference between neutral play and red nose play?