WORKSHOPS OFFERED
MASK AND MAYHEM: Mask performance with an emphasis on playfulness, improvisation, devising, clown, gesture. Our goal is to give the actor permission to grow to a theatrical size with honesty and the joy of playing with momentum!
THE ESSENTIAL ACTOR: Neutral mask, impulse training, gesture work, and study of the body as a mask. Our goal is to create responsiveness and free the actor from persona, artifice, and tendencies that clutter one's authentic essence onstage.
DEVELOPING CHARACTER: Finding shape, rhythm, context and content, and learning to make choices that both allow us to construct and inhabit an “other”. This work relies on devising with a partner or an ensemble. (Individual coaching is also available.)
COMEDY AND VAUDEVILLE: This workshop ideally lasts at least 2 sessions of 3 hours each, and a minimum of 4 players. Includes: study of Clown, Commedia dell'Arte, Devising, Mime, Gesture, Buffoon, song and dance. Our goal is to release the play of the actor by trying on traditional comedic power structures, exploding personal hungers, satirizing the mundane, and forging a visible complicity with both fellow performers and the audience through play.
MASK PLAY: Neutral mask work, Commedia dell'Arte, Larval masks and Character masks researched through exercises and devising projects. Masks are transformational tools that have many secrets. We research techniques that release the mask and its secret desires and revelations, explore the mask/audience relationship, discover how the body is itself a mask, find rhythms in the body that support the mask, and explore the countermask.
PERFORMING COMMEDIA DELL'ARTE: Commedia stock characters, the origins of clown, Clowning, Expansive Gesture, voracious hungers. This workshop or residency covers an introduction to the history and practices of traditional Commedia dell'Arte, and traces the archetypes and techniques of this performance style into modern day entertainment. Students will learn the stock characters of Commedia, devise works in this form, and ferocity of Commedia.
LARVAL MASKS: The larval mask is a study in listening, self imaging, internal rhythm and shape. The simple geometric mask of the larval allows innocence and discovery to emerge out of darkness. All larval workshops include the one hour training, “Shapes and Rhythm in Space”. For more about Tara's work with Larval masks, click HERE.
MASK MAKING: All workshops in mask making are developed with regard to the time available for the process; class can meet as few as twice in two days or as often as 6 sessions over the course of weeks. Training includes designing shape for character mask, sculpting a mask to fit your face, paper mache or neoprene, finishing a mask, and to complete the course, a welcoming introduction to this new being. Training can also include a one hour research workshop, “Shapes and Rhythms in Space” which is relevant to all mask study, and character movement research.
ENSEMBLE DEVISING: This workshop enables any group to create a series of devised works together, facilitates playwriting, and aims to support the generation of a poetic new piece of theatre.
COMEDY AND LARGER THAN LIFE CHARACTERS
DEVISING A PLAY FROM SCRATCH
MY SHAPE IN SPACE
INTRODUCTION TO MASK AND MOVEMENT
STORY AND PLAY FOR K THROUGH 2