Date: 6 November
Time: 4.15pm
Venue: Birmingham Rep Theatre
Cost: Free
A great opportunity to meet other Drama teachers and arts and cultural people, to share issues, have some quality CPD tips and a practical workshop on Stanislavski and naturalism. This will be delivered by Stephanie Taylor from Birmingham City University who has helpfully explained her approach:
“The workshop will cover a range of approaches to practically applying the work of Konstantin Stanislavski to text-based performance practice. There will be a focus on finding flexibility within his teachings to help offer you a variety of routes into the work, treating his ideas as practical solutions to performance problems, rather than a fixed ‘system’ to be followed meticulously. We will consider the historical context that inspired Stanislavski’s work and how this methodology has been adapted by contemporary practitioners to suit twenty-first century performance.
I find that historically, a lot of Stanislavskian teaching has been overly focussed on text and rules while I prefer to teach it according to the newer literature and practice that focuses on psychophysical techniques. After a brief opening discussion I’ll be able to gauge your interest and then work from there. If I need to cover alternate approaches to Stanislavski 101 (Bits, Objectives, Given Circumstances, Fundamental Questions) then I can do that via discussion or practical experimentation. I am assuming that most of you will be familiar with these and the historical approach so within this session I would ideally put the major focus on other approaches to some of the more physical Stanislavskian exercises such as Circles of Attention, Method of Physical Actions and Tempo-Rhythm. For these I’ll likely use a short, open twenty-first century text and practical exercises to explore these different Stanislavskian techniques. I’ll create a resource list and an outline these exercises for further exploration in the participants’ teaching setting.
Responding particularly to the idea as Stanislavski as a practical solution to performance problems, I might, if there is any time, do a sort of trouble shooting exercise, i.e. I’ll create hypothetical scenarios or common problems and then invite participants to talk through/direct different using techniques to address those issues.”
Please book here.
