Online: 2-4 hours / 4 x 1 hour In person: Half / Full Day

Would you like to gain confidence in teaching physical theatre and comedy?

We can help you develop a tool kit of techniques to take into the classroom to ensure you anchor your students, inspire their devising work and enable them to access texts from a performance perspective.

Commedia dell’Arte is taught in most drama schools as a movement foundation for all styles of acting. It is a brilliant, inclusive style that will stretch and challenge every student. This practical workshop explores the origins and physicality of the Commedia dell’Arte stock characters, a range of comic techniques and practical staging considerations. We also look at how the Commedia archetypes can be found in classic texts.

Learning Commedia dell’Arte helps to:

• Awaken the physical performer inside you, gaining confidence to model physical theatre in class

• Develop a range of transferable techniques for teaching any type of comedy

• Equip you with historical knowledge to feed into your teaching

• Inspire you with new ideas for teaching classic texts, such as, Shakespeare

Benefits for your students:

• They will gain confidence to be physically and vocally expressive, aiding any form of public performance

• They will learn to practise and refine their expressive capacity to communicate ideas and dramatic action

• Improved ability to work collaboratively, using effective communication and improvisation, to generate, develop and communicate ideas; devising narrative structures and developing storytelling skills

• Discover a way to access classical texts through the study of archetypes

• Learn transferable skills that will increase their physical awareness of stage dynamics and how to control their presence with it

• Understand the theatrical conventions that emerged during the Renaissance and in turn, understand aspects of the social, cultural and historical context in which Shakespeare and his contemporaries were writing

• Make artistic choices, considering the impact on an audience, through a process of peer- and self-evaluation

What we will cover:

• The historical context of Commedia dell’Arte; the origins and theatrical relevance of each character; the influence of this Renaissance style

• Specific exaggerated movement repertoire, voice and mannerisms for the characters, using the breath, grammelot (gibberish language that mimics dialects), masks and props

• The key principles of mask work, staging considerations and the actor-audience relationship

• The relationships between the characters, exploring classic lazzi (comic gags) or meccanismi (rehearsed comic sequences between two or more characters) as ways into improvisation and devising