Come and join us for an uplifting day of creative discovery in this series of Saturday workshops!
Playful and welcoming, the Art of Improvisation is open to all and aims to help you discover ease, imagination and presence through improvisation.
You'll be taught exercises from Action Theater™, a physical improvisation training in movement, voice and language. Action Theater™ is a dynamic pathway for opening the body's imagination and is open to anyone who is curious about embodied ways of releasing their creative potential, for example:
actors who wish to develop a vivid presence on stage dancers who want to find new forms of speaking as they move poets who are curious about the images and metaphors they can awaken visual artists who want to reinvigorate their sense of shape and form Simple somatic exercises allow you to connect with body and breath, opening your awareness and refining your quality of attention. Improvising in ensemble, duets and solo, you will learn how to deepen connection to your self, partners, and the space around you. You will have the chance to perform for each other and witness each other work.
Where possible, you are encouraged to join all three workshops in order to deepen your experience of the work. I hope you can join us for the journey!
Saturday 21st October : WORLDS
The fous for the first workshop is to explore ways we might conjure 'worlds' as we improvise:
How might we draw on our imagination, the space, our partners and our sensory experience, to allow worlds to emerge? What surprising possibilities open as we shift between contrasting constellations of movement, voice and language? How might this imaginative venturing saturate our performing body in order to draw our audience in?
Saturday 11th November : WORDS
The focus for the second workshop is surprising ways into language.
How does sound quality and gestures of our physical body impact imagination? How might rhythm support us as we encounter text? How might techniques from fiction enliven our speech? And what of the unsaid? What alights as we enter silence?
Saturday 2nd December : OBJECTS
The focus for the third workshop is improvising with objects.
How might the materiality of objects - their density, texture, colour shape, resonate with or act upon us? How might objects be sensed beyond their immediate function? How might we collaborate with them in performance? What do they say of our internal states?
ABOUT REBECCA Rebecca Mackenzie is a novelist, performer and teacher of Action Theater™ currently residing near Glasgow where she is undertaking a PhD. Her debut novel IN A LAND OF PAPER GODS, was a Red Magazine Book of the Year and was shortlisted for the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize. She teaches improvisation in both the UK and Europe. She has been a visiting tutor on the Royal Holloway Creative Writing MA and The Place Dance BA as well as led innovative trainings for Chisenhale Dance and Independent Dance.
