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ACTION THEATER AND CLOWNING

ACTION THEATER AND CLOWNING
Wednesday August 03, 2016 - Sunday August 07, 2016


A WEEK COURSE liamwide
Join us for an exciting journey of research on the edges of Action Theater and Clowning.

Course description

Both Action Theater and Clowning have spontaneity, creativity and play as key values and practice in their work. The course aims to explore alternative ways of speaking about the world and about ourselves through play and the imagination.

NOTE: Some experience of EITHER Action Theater or Clowning is recommended as the course intends to explore the relationship between these two practices.

Action Theater

The practice of Action Theater incorporates the disciplined exploration of embodied exercises that lead to increased skills of strong, clear, spontaneous, and artful communication.

Through playful and rigorous exercises, the Action Theater method explores space, time, sound, movement, language, and relationships. It expands expression, examines habits, focuses the mind, and opens the heart.

Students increase their ability to hold and express emotion, dance with their own poetry, and recover lost material. Composition, listening, and relationships are deconstructed and then reassembled with greater awareness. Acting from a sense of play, students are encouraged to venture into transpersonal realms, accessing intelligence more encompassing and boundless than their personal experience. Awareness and play are fundamental to the practice, as both are portals to the imagination.

Action Theater is also a performance method, although many of the practitioners come from other performance forms or walks of life. Fundamental to the practice is an embodied presence in performance. Students engage in exercises that build stage-craft skills – the nuts and bolts of understanding oneself as a physical being in a visual art. The body informs the content of the moment. For example, how the hand, experiencing the hand, reaching for the glass is as important as reaching for the glass in order to drink from it. Intention is created simultaneously with action in the moment of performance. This awareness invites the possibilities of freshness intrinsic to improvisational performance. The Action Theater method offers a map, a way to proceed. The trainings are appropriate for the novice, the explorer, and the professional.

The Clown Within

The clown’s nose, the smallest mask in the world, is the mask that unmasks. Through the clown we can rediscover inner qualities of openness, spontaneity and play. The clown allows our imagination to soar, whilst keeping our feet firmly on the ground. Working with warm-ups, games and on the empty stage, we will find our inner clowns through improvisation, play and welcoming everything that emerges.

 

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