Module I

Everything moves

or the poetic body

„Once the body is ready, comes the word“ (Ariane Mnouchkine)

This workshop furnishes a good base for all the following modules. We merge into the world of creation. The students comprehend the body as the main instrument of a performing artist. We understand how to express everything we feel through our body.The body is the first base, the initial point of all performing.

The workshop consists of the following steps:

1. The Silence

We explore the physical language of every day’s life. We reencounter the chamber of our childhood, the moment of life where all of us were players.
Concrete and without psychology.

2. The Neutral Mask

We learn the elementary rules of wearing a mask. Working with the neutral mask helps us to find the “zero point” of us. Not the “NOTHING” but a receptive “emptiness”, the minimum required physical presence on stage.
The body turns into a “white sheet of paper”. Not empty but open and ready to receive. An important starting point, the minimum necessary, where everything is possible … It is a mask that separates us from every day’s life and where “the gate to theatre” opens.
Daily training with Adriana Salles and the “black mask” developed by her accompany this phase.

3. Identifications

“Seize the world” thorough imitation. Like children who understand the universe that surrounds them by simply playing it.If children understand the world through playing, we can rediscover this ludic state an actor/artist need by playing the world.
We discover the elements, the materials, as well as colours, paintings and poetry.

We study the wildlife as references for the construction of characters.

4. Full Masks

We explore the not so innocent behaviour of the masks from the carnival of Basel in Switzerland, also known as larva masks. A silent „missing link“ between animals and human beings. Like children in their early childhood, naive and curious, not discovering like the neutral mask, but in an active, concrete examination of the objects of every day’s life, relationships between themselves. Together they experience adventures. As a next step, we explore the wide field of human behavior by using “expressive masks”. Still without words.

5. Analysis of Movement

This is a continuous work and goes through all the modules.
They are etudes of 20 distinct sequences of movements. We study them apart like in oriental theatre.
We penetrate by the means of our body, our first medium to seize life (literally) the inner dynamic of the things that surround us. The point is to understand the essence of the basic movements of the daily life (like push and pull for example) No illustrating, no pantomime but an active experience of the engines, motors of things, the invisible but for all perceivable elementary dynamic.
How can we transpose them physically?
Above all, how can we play with them?