The Raft

The RAFT: from practice to performance
with Bryan Brown

How do you continue to deepen your craft as a performer, to strengthen your foundation while steadily building towards a solid product?

How do you take the internal, expansive experiences discovered in practice and organically allow them to grow into a rich and nuanced performance?

This weekly session aims to create a space for intensifying one's developmental practice. By seeking again the primal experience of craft with an outward eye that allows further layers of the craft to take shape, we discover a circular process through which the organic molding of performance material begins its realization.

While the focus of the session is towards the development of originally devised live performance material, participants are encouraged to bring the material that speaks directly to them at the moment. Some possible suggestions are songs, poems, histories, scene studies, monologues, audition and film material. The opportunity is also here for filming of the "developmental performance" material, in other words, if you are interested in how physical approaches to performance translate to better film/TV acting, we have the equipment to explore with camera work.

This worksession is on need basis working with particular participants demands and schedules. Normally we work in the studio but occasionally we work outside, in parks, on trails, or at the beach. If you are interested please contact Bryan for more info.
bryan@viacorpora.com, or call 213-249-1690.

BRYAN BROWN has studied physical theater extensively in New York City, Europe, and Los Angeles. His latest reconnaissance was 6 weeks in Wroclaw, Poland working with instructors gathered by the Grotowski Institute as well as a profound worksession with Song of Goat (teatr Piesn Kozla). For almost a decade, Bryan has researched with various physical theater investigators including Stephen Wangh and Raina von Waldenburg, Shinichi Iova-Koga, Mary Overlie and other Viewpoints practitioners, the members of Odin Teatret, Commedia dell'Arte instructors, Contact Dance originators, as well as the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. The deepest application has been the process of creating, leading and learning with various experimental ensembles, most importantly with ARTEL.

Freedom Bound : Foundational Worksession

What is Presence?

Do you look at children and wonder where that freedom went?

Do you sometimes forget to breathe?

Do you sense a fuller response wanting expression onstage but your body doesn’t seem to quite know what to do?

Is your voice connected to your body?

Are your thoughts connected to both?

Perhaps a more physical based approach to the craft of performance would be the necessary foundation for you to collect, hone and release your experiences, perceptions and imagination into the artistic dynamo you know is percolating inside you.

With clear and practical application of the later investigations of Stanislavsky’s Method of Physical Actions alongside the current adaptations of Jerzy Grotowski’s research, these foundational worksessions offer actors, dancers and performing artists to investigate the technique of coordinating breath, body and voice with the freedom of being alive in the moment of performance.

“Spontaneity and discipline, far from weakening each other, mutually reinforce themselves…to become the real source of acting that glows. This lesson was neither understood by Stanislavsky, who let natural impulses dominate, nor by Brecht, who gave too much emphasis to the construction of a role.” – Grotowski

FREEDOM BOUND:

foundational worksessions towards your own physical approach to the performance craft

contact for exact times
[via]Corpora
6575 Santa Monica Blvd.

$20

bryan@viacorpora.com, or call 213-249-1690.

BRYAN BROWN has studied physical theater extensively in New York City, Europe, and Los Angeles. His latest reconnaissance was 6 weeks in Wroclaw, Poland intensely working with instructors gathered by the Grotowski Institute as well as a profound worksession with Song of Goat (teatr Piesn Kozla). For almost a decade, Bryan has researched with various physical theater investigators including Stephen Wangh and Raina von Waldenburg, Shinichi Iova-Koga, Mary Overlie and other Viewpoints practitioners, the members of Odin Teatret, Commedia dell'Arte instructors, Contact Dance originators, as well as the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. The deepest application has been the process of creating, leading and learning with various experimental ensembles.

ABOUT [via]Corpora

[via]Corpora, an extension of not-for-profit Los Angeles based theater collective ARTEL, is a center designed for performers and non-performers alike who desire to deepen their experience of the world and their expressive abilities. Through classes and workshops participants explore individually as well as collectively the connections between breath, rhythm, alignment, coordination, voice, intellect, emotion and spirit. Our goal is to build a community of participants based on Joy and Play in which all can discover and share their insights into body-mind perception and expression.

Performance Research and Development Center, is the heart of [via]Corpora. While extending our research into non-performance related applications, the bulk of worksessions offered at the center are designed to provide training to the Los Angeles community of actors and performers based on physical approaches to the craft.

Our long-term goal is to create a format for a deeper investigation, a series of ongoing weekly workshops, based on the participants' needs and interests. Possibilities include: Advanced Physical Explorations, Application of Physical Approaches to Scenes or Monologues, From the Feet Up: approaches to character, BodyVoices, Toning and Tuning, Presence: Generating Gravitas, Composition to Performance, etc. If you are unable to attend our worksessions but wish to participate in the future, please contact us at 213-249-1690.