This will be an exploration of how emotions of different scales operate in different playwrights- Chekov, Ibsen, Shakespeare, Pirandello and Lorca - spanning a spectrum of playwrights from the north to the south of Europe and how to extract from the text the motive of the emotional movement and the cue as it comes from the presence of the other actor. Do emotions have a culture specific resonance and if so what happens in transference between cultures, and whether one can identify universal scales of emotive truths across cultures.
It will be designed as a 1 day workshop where all participants will choose a monologue/scene from a list and then work on them in real time using structured improvisation, feeling the pulse of the moment in various constructed scenarios, zooming in on the words that resonate and then working with the character of materials on the set (chairs, tables, pieces of fruit etc. ) as actors with a presence of their own. The idea would be to find the actors' script within the script and within this script finding your own impulses, treating every thing in the environment as an animate screen partner.
The texts chosen will reflect the massively expansive spectrum of emotions across playwriting from the north to the south and examine how finding your own cues can keep the truth of the text constant no matter what the cultural transference.
Maximum number of participants: 20