PLAY AND THE PLEASURE PRINCIPAL (two days)
Devising is collaborative writing and play is the sharpest tool in the box when you’re devising. Play is the discipline that keeps the ideas coming. You always work harder and with less apparent effort when you’re enjoying yourself. This workshop explores the ways and means of generating play. We’ll explore; conscious and unconscious play, finding the game, revealing the game, hiding the game and opening up texts and situations through play.
THE GENTLE ART OF FACILITATION (One day)
If you don’t know what you’re going to do the only thing you have to direct is he group. But if the group are to have the space to follow their own ideas and generate their own initiatives the last thing they need is a director telling them what to do and how good they were. This is a course on facilitation for directors and devisers. We’ll examine the ways and means generating an ensemble and enabling the group to work together and evolve material.
COMPLICITY: THE ART BEHIND EVERYTHING (one day)
How you play, how you interact, generate ideas and enable things to happen is dependent on your complicity with yourself, with other people, the material you’re working with and the audience you’re playing to. This workshop draws on innumerable games designed to enhance and develop your taste for complicity.
THE WAY OF THE IDIOT (four days)
Devising is a process of collaborative writing. It’s what to do when a group of people come into a room united by the sole desire to make something together, be it a piece of theatre or a scenario for a film. Devising is a way of working to find and develop ideas. It is a way of working that involves stepping out of the conventional roles of playwright, designer, director, actor or production manager in order to become part of an ensemble.
How do you make a creative ensemble without an all-knowing director? How do you play to make a story? How do you play to find the structure? How do you play to find the image? How do you play to find the meaning? How does the group become the author of the piece? How does the director become a facilitator? How do you make your own work? How do you avoid blocking each other? And how do you write without a playwright?
The course teaches a range of strategies and processes to enable a group of people to make theatre from anything: A few objects, a picture, a piece of music, a story, a poem, the odd word, a piece of string, a mark on the floor, a way of standing or even a way of looking at each other.
GOD’S LITTLE MISTAKES (Three days)
This is an introduction to bouffant. Where the clown loves the audience, the bouffant hates the audience and everything the bouffant does is an attempt to reveal our hypocrisy. This is a course about playing with parody which is the game of imitation; of deliberately bed imitation designed to see how far you can go with it before the audience is offended.
WRITING WITH A STUPID FACE (two days)
This workshop is a development of the previous one. Here the archetypal masks are used to inspire devising. Through a range of specially developed games the masks will be used to develop images and to generate narrative.
GOING BEYOND YOURSELF (three days)
This workshop is essentially an acting workshop that uses masks designed to develop your imaginative range as an actor. We’ll be using ‘archetypal masks’ such as: The Trickster, The Huntress, The Child, The Crone, The Virgin or The Victim, to enable you to assume a persona of your choosing that might be way beyond your personal experience and to play that persona in order to give you an entirely different approach to a text.
STORY STRUCTURE (One day)
This is a course for devisers on structuring material. What makes a good story? What keeps our attention enough to make us want to know what’s going to happen next? Do we need a sequential story? Is montage the antidote to narrative?
STUPID WRITING (two days)
Clown is a vital key to playfulness and invention. Clown has little respect for form or convention. What better place to start from if you want to get to the heart of a drama and into all those places where comedy and stupidity rarely go? Stupid writing is a course on devising from Clown
MAKING METAPHOR (0ne day)
We’re constantly told how theatre trades in metaphor: a metaphor is an implicit comparison. This workshop is designed to enable you to develop a taste for creating metaphor. We’ll work with objects and materials – not to animate them, like puppetry, but to use them dramatically in a situation to externalize meaning and to create powerful visual imagery.
MAKING IMAGES (two days)
Images tend to stick in the mind more readily than what people say. This workshop investigates what constitutes an effective theatrical image, how to make images and how to use them to feed the scenario and structure the story.
MAKING MAGIC REALISM (two days)
This workshop explores an approach to theatre making based on an imagistic style that weaves together reality and fantasy to make a huge emotional landscape where anything can happen but you always come away with a complete story in the end.
PROVOKING HALF-MASKS (three days)
This workshop examines half-mask theatre and offers a modern take on Commedia dell’ Arte, which is the prototype of farce. We examine commedia masks, explore the master-servant relationship and investigate the bouffant qualities of Pulcinallo.
WRITING FROM COMMEDIA (two days)
This workshop utilizes the commedia structure of masked and unmasked characters, only using modern half-masks and explores a process of developing a scenario.
MAKING ADAPTATIONS (three days)
You can make theatre from films, novels, poems, songs photographs or paintings. This workshop explores the ways and means of building a scenario from very different inspirations.
MAKING MELODRAMA (three days)
Melodrama is a key level of play that‘s made a valuable contribution to our understanding of high drama. Forget the nineteenth century notion of the villain tying the victim to the railway tracks. Modern melodrama is more compelling than that. Films like The Colour Purple, Cockodile Dundee or Thelma and Louise all thrive on melodrama. Lecoq called melodrama ‘the theatre of feeling’, and at its best, it creates highly visual moments of drama that can have you on the edge of your seat one minute then cheering like a football supporter the next. This workshop explores the ways and means of making those things happen.
STUPID WRITING (two days)
Clown is a vital key to playfulness and invention. Clown has little respect for form or convention. What better place to start from if you want to get to the heart of a drama and into all those places where comedy and stupidity rarely go? Stupid writing is a course on devising from Clown
