[via]Corpora Producing NEWS: Stephen Wangh Teacher's Summit

[via]Corpora is proud to announce that we have successfully helped Stephen Wangh (author of An Acrobat of the Heart) to gather a Teacher's Practicum at NACL in the Catskills July 5 -12, 2008. Bryan Brown will be attending the Practicum and will be reporting back on it later in the summer at the newly registered [via]Corpora What Arises? thoughts from the practice blog : whatarises.blogspot.com

International Clown Sensation brings LA his unique CLOWN LAB!

[via]Corpora is incredibly excited to host Jef Johnson (principal clown in the international touring company of Slava's Snowshow) for a weekend intensive of his

CLOWN LAB

June 21 and 22
1pm - 5pm
Art|Works Theatre
6569 Santa Monica Blvd.
Hollywood 90038

$150
Early Bird Special: $120 (pay before June 8)

register: see payment options in the upper right hand corner of this page


questions or more info:
Contact Bryan@viacorpora.com

The way to have and to be a sharp, powerful instrument is to be
minutely sensitive, and use that sensitivity to see the epiphanies that
have been sitting around you all along.

Stephen Nachmanovitch

Come and experience what the Clown Lab is about.
Unlock your creative impulse.

* Do you remember who you are?

* Forget what you think you know.

* Get back in tune with your heart.

* Re-discover the magic in the minute,
the simplistic, the absurd.

* Feel the joy of being stupid.

The feeling I have experienced is that you can't escape that
'just right' place. It becomes a sacred space, if you allow it.
Jef Johnson and his teachings brilliantly place the person in
just the right space for this to occur.
Julie Josephson, trombone artist

Suddenly there I was, standing blindfolded,
trying to count in two directions while walking
sideways and I had the most beautiful feeling
of stupidity...When the control was gone I felt
the greatest potential--the greatest freedom--
as if the control was actually big steel chains
holding me down.
Thomas McGinn, Actor/Director

Jef Johnson is a principal clown in the international touring company of Slava's Snowshow. As Clown, he has also toured with Cirque du Soleil. Jef has more than 20 years of experience working in a wide range of physical styles.His approach is rooted in subjective expression, physical expression of condition through impulse and reflex. He has studied corporeal expression from disciples of Grotowski, Suzuki, Marceau, Decroux, Lecoq, Meyerhold, M. Chekhov, Vakhtangov.

He has been commissioned for Master Classes, Lectures and Workshops in Acting, Theory, Character, Mask, Creative Play, Improvisation, and Clown for numerous theatre companies and universities, including Cirque du Soleil, New York Clown Theatre Festival, Camp Broadway, Slava's Snowshow, University of Houston, University of Pennsylvania, Columbia University, University of Minnesota, Empire State College and NYU.

For more on Jef and his Clown Lab: www.nyclown.com

Los Angeles Contact Bryan@viacorpora.com

6 week Acting Intensive

YOU ARE YOU
Laboratory Theater Work for the foundations of the actor’s practice and the devising of performance
Based on Eastern European and Russian Traditions

Monday Evenings
May 19 – June 23
7 - 10pm
$240
limited scholarships available

This Workshop will approach the necessities of creating a foundational actor's practice and its application to monolog and scene work through the systematic isolation, coordination and development of the psychic, physical and vocal aspects of the performer’s body thus allowing deeper expression and revelation of the self in performance.

[via]Corpora Studio
6575 Santa Monica Blvd Hollywood, CA 90038
Contact: bryan@viacorpora.com
213.249.1690

Necessities:
Clothes to move in
Text (chosen by participant and instructor)

You may want:
An extra shirt
A long sleeve shirt/sweatshirt (during breaks)
A notebook and pen (time for hunkering)
Water/snack

BRYAN BROWN has studied physical theater extensively in New York City, Europe, and Los Angeles. He has recently been invited to South Korea as Artist-in-Residence at Hooyang Performing Arts Centre. Previously, his last 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 the 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 culminating in the work with Artel.

Actor's Practice Evening

YOU ARE YOU
An intensive of Freedom Bound: foundational actor's practice

Monday March 24
7 - 10pm
$40

This Workshop will approach the necessities of creating a foundational actor's practice by combining work taught in longer weekend intensives and ongoing weekly worksessions in order to isolate, coordinate and develop the psychic, physical and vocal aspects of our instruments for deeper expression and revelation of the self in performance.

[via]Corpora Studio
6575 Santa Monica Blvd
Hollywood, CA 90038
Contact: bryan@viacorpora.com or 213.249.1690

Necessities:
Clothes to move in
Text

You might want:
A long sleeve shirt/sweatshirt (during breaks)
A notebook and pen (time for hunkering)
Water/snack

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 culminating in the work with Artel.

Developing your Actor's Practice

The Will is in your Actions
Laboratory Theater Work for the foundations of performance training
Based on Eastern European and Russian Traditions

March 22 and 23
11am
4 - 6 hours depending on will of participants that day.

Both days:
$150
$100 (students)
One day:
$90
$60 (students)
Limited scholarships available

[via]Corpora Studio
6575 Santa Monica Blvd
Hollywood, CA 90038
Contact: bryan@viacorpora.com or 213.249.1690


Workshop Description:

Aim -

This workshop aims to provide applicable experiential knowledge for the actor's practice, the incentive to develop the will to practice, and the connection between the will, body and voice that is the heart of the actor's craft through the coordination of intense physicality, rhythm, text and song work.

For those actors with an established practice, exposure to new approaches will deepen and challenge your practice and aim to strengthen your will through active extension of that will into the world.


Practicalities of workshop –

The design of the work is to meet each participant's edge. Through discovery of joy and ease within rigorous discipline as well as the continuous switching of the plugs in our brains (experiencing text as movement, song as text, movement as song, so on), a meeting of new physical, vocal, emotional and spiritual doors is approached. Encountering these doors we experience the opportunity to undomesticate ourselves by entering through them. Whether we choose to or not remains a matter of our will, but repeated experiences begin opening ourselves to deep listening and recognition of our will as both the carrier and dependant of the wills of others, thereby allowing mutuality and musicality to ignite our will towards greater expression, connectivity and presence.


What we hope Participants walk away with –

A desire to never give up on themselves
A new experience of their will and its relation to body, voice and performance
A connection of text with movement/action
The will as the vehicle for expression through Text, song or movement
A sense that one's practice or a new depth in that practice has begun
Potential future collaborators
Exercises for Ensemble Regimen

Necessities:
Clothes to move in
Text (something you are emotionally connected to. Poems or classical text recommended.)

You might want:
A long sleeve shirt/sweatshirt (during breaks)
A few shirts (you will be sweating a lot)
A notebook and pen (time for hunkering)
Water/snack


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 culminating in the work with Artel.

Ongoing Weekly Classes

FREEDOM BOUND:
Foundational Worksessions towards your own physical approach to the performance craft
with Bryan Brown

Now twice a week!

Mondays and Thursdays
mornings
$20 / limited scholarships available
limit of 10 students
private sessions also available
bryan@viacorpora.com or 213-249-1690

The Raft: from Practice to Performance

with Bryan Brown

This weekly session aims to deepen your craft as a performer, to strengthen your foundation while steadily building towards a solid product. To investigate and create the personal process of taking the internal, expansive experiences discovered in practice and organically allowing them to grow into a rich and nuanced performance.

This worksession is on need basis working with particular participants demands and schedules. Normally in the studio, occasionally we work outside, in parks, on trails, or at the beach. bryan@viacorpora.com or 213-249-1690.


AIKIDO
"The Way of Harmony"
A martial art dedicated to peaceful conflict-resolution
with Andrew Reichart Sensei
presented in association with Theatre Dojo

Thursdays
7pm-8:30pm
$20 per class

or 5 class block for $75
beginners always welcome
questions? call Andrew Reichart Sensei at 510.388.4483

What is a Theater Laboratory?

Grotowski wanted his theater to be like the lab of Niels Bohr that his older brother Kazimierz once worked in, a place for continuous exploration.

History of a theater laboratory

Claims for laboratory status in the theatre really began in the early decades of the twentieth century. Before that, there were clearly pockets of actor training in the West which were both investigative and systematic — Ian Watson traces the genesis of actor training back to the early 1700s in Britain and in France to 1786, with the birth of the Royal Dramatic school in Paris. But it was the late nineteenth century’s love affair with science and technology which spawned a new scientific rhetoric in the theatre, a development begun by Delsarte’s proto-behaviorist study of actors’ emotions. Delsarte’s work may have been criticised for its mechanistic approach but it heralded a new interdisciplinary language for actor training, a language which drew on the common associations of the scientific method: rigour, objectivity, systematic interrogation.

The laboratory in Russia

This language was never more embedded than in the Russian tradition of actor training; in Stanislavsky’s system (and in the ‘sub-systems’ of Meyerhold, Michael Chekhov and Richard Boleslavsky). From his first experimental Studio in 1905, to his final project, the Opera-Dramatic Studio, Stanislavsky’s preference was to develop a research culture outside of his main institution, the MAT. These satellite activities allowed Stanislavski a creative space to work with young actors and were designed to share what he called "the results of ... research into stage techniques". Increasingly, the research agenda was uppermost in his thoughts, and that agenda was couched in scientific terms.

The Opera-Dramatic Studio, Stanislavski's final project was to be the laboratory he called for in his essay, October and the Revolution ... He made it quite clear to the young actors and directors he gathered around him that there could be no question of gearing their work to performance; it would be done for its own sake, as research.

In Meyerhold's work, the appropriation of scientific terminology was both explicit and calculated. Indeed, of all Stanislavski’s pupils, his is the most emphatic use of an interdisciplinary language, fusing theatrical 'laws' with scientific laws — Huntley Carter called Meyerhold's actor training system, biomechanics, "the science of motion in acting". Meyerhold was founder of GITIS, the State Institute for Theatrical Art, an umbrella organisation which was responsible for the training of some of the key practitioners of the twentieth century, including Grotowski.

From Meyerhold's perspective, GITIS grew out of his attempts to realise an "exemplary model" of revolutionary theatre. Meyerhold's vision was of a mutually supportive, interactive organisation incorporating a stage, a workshop and a training school in which: "the discoveries in the workshop would affect the training in the school as well as what was exposed on the stage" in a three-fold symbiosis.


Everyone learned — students and teachers alike. It was a laboratory for working through the foundations of a new aesthetic.


GITIS was to be: A place unique in the planet, where the science of theatre is studied and drama is built. Exactly: 'science' and not 'art' — 'built' and not 'created.' Clearly for Meyerhold, the laboratory walls extended much further than the building in which he was working — the Zon theatre — for the experimental attitude he was adopting at a local level was reflected on a much grander scale — the huge social experiment of the October revolution itself. Central to this commitment to science was the emphasis on outcomes — the impact science had on the people. Such an emphasis may in part explain the popularity of the machine as a ‘symbol of the new age of mechanical and scientific industrialism’, as Carter puts it. The machine stood for productivity, for the benefits technology can bring a new society. Thus, the work of the laboratory was not seen in isolation. The laboratories of the Russian revolution fed the technological advancement of the society, the electrification of the country, for example. From a theatrical perspective, Meyerhold's work at GITIS established the same principle. The experimental findings in his workshop informed the presentations on the stage — the 'product' of a theatre industry.

The Threefold Model

Firstly, Meyerhold’s ‘exemplary model’, devised in the early 1920s, to be contrasted with Stanislavsky’s secluded investigations in the Opera Dramatic studio which set the stage for later instances of process-dominated practice such as Grotowski’s and Anatoly Vasiliev’s. With such work, there is no imperative to disseminate the research findings beyond the walls of the laboratory, no measurable outcome.

Secondly, Meyerhold’s model sees research as part of a wider picture. His laboratory shared with some of us that old fashioned notion that teaching is an integral part of research. It then extended that idea to incorporate research and teaching into the making of an original creative act — a performance.

Thirdly, is the related issue of outcomes. It is interesting to note that some ninety years ago in the new Soviet Union the research agenda was still pre-occupied with outcomes! The context is clearly a mechanistic one, related, as I have said, to the necessity to produce. But for Meyerhold it nevertheless promoted a dynamic symbiosis of original workshop research, pedagogy and performance.

The engine room of this triangular research model was the experimental workshop, described by Maria Valenti in recognisably research-oriented terms:

The students were not required to present preconceived conclusions, but were expected to find new paths, along with Meyerhold and his colleagues, to create new concepts of theatre.

What I believe is striking about this model is that, as a self-sustaining form, all areas of this symbiotic triangle feed into Meyerhold’s agenda of innovation, not because they are in themselves research but because the environment in which the activity is taking place, the wider picture, is essentially research-centered. And by that I mean:

· it stimulates originality and creativity
· it is underpinned by a set of theoretical principles
· it is designed to test the validity of those theoretical principles and to feed those findings back into the loop
· it utilises an organic system of dissemination.

In this holistic framework it is not necessarily the ‘instance of practice’ which is under scrutiny but the surrounding research environment. Research, like nature, abhors a vacuum.



The above excerpt is from a speech given by Jonathan Pitches, author of Science and the Stanislavsky Tradition of Acting
The opening line is from The Grotowski Sourcebook, eds. Schechner and Wolford