Workshop on Character Building for Actors in the 21st Century
Taller de caracterización moral para intérpretes del siglo XXI
By Aurora Cano, Arizona’s Actress
Tuesday 14 June, from 10:00 to 13:00 > Past Event
King´s College London – King’s Building K2.40
Workshop in Spanish with English interpreter.
Throughout history, attempts have been made to systematise the teaching of acting, and as a result, schools and methods of interpretation have emerged which have provided students with various technical tools to help them build a character. These schools have sought to perfect not only the vocal and physical demands of performance, but also complicated methods of generating emotions and projecting physicality.
Towards the end of the nineteenth century, following the emergence of psychoanalysis in Europe, the work of the Moscow Art Theatre stands out, through the innovative educational thinking of Konstantin Stanislavsky and later, the work of teachers at the Actors Studio, including Lee Strasberg, Stella Adler and Sandford Meisner. However, over the course of the twentieth century, in direct opposition to these realist-naturalist schools, several dramatic movements emerged, including the emotional distancing performance technique proposed by Bertold Brecht, Antonin Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty, and the Theatre of the Absurd, to which a wide variety of playwrights subscribed, including Beckett, Ionesco and Genet. Cutting short our overview of this stylistic melting pot, we must also celebrate emblematic twentieth-century directors such as Grotowski and Brook, and mention new schools of interpretation and companies focussing on the physical theatre, such as those of Jacque Lecoq and Ariane Mnouchkine. But, what were the ideologies in which all these forms of dramatic thought were rooted? What use is this vast and sophisticated teaching legacy in these apparently hollow times?
In this new century, the contemporary world challenges us to delve into the theatre, and consequently the characters which inhabit it, using the teachings of the past but also searching for real empathy with the ideological, moral and political themes of our time. What are today’s dilemmas? What possible role could theatre have if not to fully and creatively explore these dilemmas? This is the context in which we propose a workshop on character building for actors interested in exploring deep into the new forms of logic, which originate in the moral and philosophical positioning of the characters, presenting them as dialectic tools, in the face of the mistrustful indifference of contemporary society.
Free admission but you need to book your place at: www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/workshop-on-character-building-for-actors-in-the-21st-century-taller-de-caracterizacion-moral-para-tickets-24509600876