Learning
Regular Classes
SUMMER 2012: TERM DATES: Monday 7 May - Friday 6 July
(Half-term w/c 4 June)
CLASS 1: The Utility Room
For professional and semi-professional performers
From Monday 7 Mayfor 8 weeks (not inc Mon 4 June), 6 – 8pm, places £65
Led by Amy Rose
An 8-week series of practical classes that provide emerging and established performers with facilitated space and time to maintain and refine their craft through relevant body-based improvisations, games and exercises.
The Utility Room is to performers what a life drawing class is to visual artists. With a focus on maintaining a relevant core practice, this series will use physical and vocal improvisations, exercises and games to keep participants performance-ready and creatively engaged. This practice covers presence, play, attention and energy in relation to objects, space, other performers and the audience. The sessions are friendly and professional and appropriate for actors, dancers, live artists, puppeteers and other emerging and established performance practitioners.
CLASS 2: The Meisner Technique
For professional and semi-professional performers
From Weds 9 Mayfor 8 weeks (not inc Weds 6 June), 6 – 8pm, places £65
Led by screenwriter and film director Jack Price
This 8-week series of practical classes takes you step by step through Meisner’s famous acting technique. Developed when Meisner became disenchanted with pure ‘method’ acting, the technique emphasizes moment-to-moment spontaneity through communication with other actors in order to generate behavior that is truthful within imagined, fictional circumstances. You can expect to develop the skills to ‘act before you think’, learning Meisner’s core exercises and text analysis and building on your understanding of the technique from week to week.
Sandford Meisner was one of the original members of the Group Theatre, along with Lee Strasberg, Stella Adler, and Harold Clurman. Amongst Meisner’s students were Robert Duvall, Arthur Miller, David Mamet, Jon Voight, Diane Keaton, Gregory Peck, Grace Kelly, Sydney Pollack and Steve McQueen. Jack Price is an award-winning screenwriter and film director, who studied Meisner with Scott Williams at the Impulse Company in London. Jack also teaches Meisner at the Actors’ Centre in London.
CLASS 3: Butoh for Beginners
For professional and semi-professional performers
From Fri 11 Mayfor 8 weeks (not inc Fri 8 June), 6 – 8pm, places £65
Led by Thomas John Bacon
Butoh is an evolving practice of expressionistic dance and physical theatre that is characterised by slow and precise movement and incorporates both violent action and stillness. It was founded in Japan in the 1950s by the practitioners Tatsumi Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno and has its origins in the underground Angura art movement.
Butoh allows the sense of freedom to explore an emotive inner core of Being physically through stylized and controlled movement, manner, expression. It is designed to work with the body you provide, seeking to challenge and allow for moments of self discovery, strengthening and meditation. Over these classes, participants will work to develop a strong sense of internal connection, stillness and an atonement of the core, using metaphorical stimulus to explore and develop impulses, as well as unconscious and spontaneous movement patterns. You will develop an internal landscape that you will learn to share externally as you develop the skills and techniques towards enhancing the performative body.