Space, Time & Response-Ability
When you improvise you are engaged with space and passage of time in each unfolding moment. You cannot control the changes around you but you can control your response to them. Your unconscious body reactions to changes in your environment, the room and your partners, often reduces your response-ability. What your partners’ actions activate inside of you may actual be the best material possible in that moment, perhaps even better than what you can think up or choose. In this workshop, you will focus on bringing your unconscious reactions into focus and engaging with them on a conscious level. You will shift your reactions into responses, reclaim their resources. Instead of paralysis, you jumpstart your response-ability, track & engage the moving/voicing body/mind, and experience the enlivening act of performing. You will work with embodied presence and explore the agility of the imagination through exercises that are simple, playful, and challenging. Building one’s awareness is an essential part of this “response-ability’. Becoming more aware of the body experience helps you become more aware of your performance vocabulary. The constellation of sensations, feeling states/moods and ideas that may arise are all part of this process.
Our focus is the inescapable musicality of each moment-to-moment experience, the space and time inside solo/ensemble/duet work, and body generated sound and language. We will be using the body as the source material for spontaneous expression, physically, vocally and verbally. The goal is to develop performers who possess the vitality, response-ability, and daring instincts of great improvisers, and who can to translate those qualities into any creative work they undertake.
Action Theater™ is a physical theater improvisation training which expands individual expressive range, builds ensemble awareness, and offers performers a clear, structured form in which to play with abandon. By integrating the kinesthetic intelligence of dance with the emotive nature of acting, Action Theater™ helps students access imaginative impulses. The training builds vocal, verbal, and physical performance skills, hones awareness and increases expressive range.