Presence • Rhythm • Timing • Complicity • Impulse & Connection with the Audience

A 5-day intensive for performers to develop presence, charm, humour and the pleasure of playing on stage — and to use games as a way of creating theatre.

What makes you want to watch someone on stage? Not because they're doing more or trying harder. It can be much simpler: they're completely there, with a spark of fun in their eyes. They're free, they know how to play with your expectations, how to draw you into a game, how to tease. They have a great complicity with the other actors and the audience. They're clear about what they're playing with, and suddenly you want to follow them.

This workshop is about finding that quality and learning how to use it.

To develop it, you need to understand how to work with focus, rhythm, timing and impulse — and how to use games.

The main tool will be games. Not as warm-ups. The games are the work. They sharpen timing, create problems, successes and failures. They give performers something concrete to respond to. Here, we use them to develop the skills of showing, concealing, teasing, changing and leading — and to learn how to lead where the audience should look, follow and share with the other performers on stage. Who has the focus? Who is leading the game? When is it time to give it away? How do you support someone else when they become the centre of the action, while keeping the audience with you? This kind of generosity and complicity between performers is at the heart of playing together.

The skills developed here are at the heart of clown, ensemble work, masks, bouffons and other forms of theatre.

Something catches.
You run with it.
A game turns into a situation.
The situation throws people together.
Something starts brewing.
The rhythm picks up.
The audience gets hooked.
And a tiny thing can snowball into a whole scene.

Taking this onto the stage and making it work night after night requires skill.

In this workshop, you learn when to show your hand and when to keep your cards close to your chest. When to wind someone up, when to back off, when to change tack, when to keep your nerve and when to throw the whole thing out of the window.

You learn to catch what comes flying at you instead of standing there like a rabbit in the headlights. And you learn to make a meal out of very little.

Because the things performers often try to sweep under the carpet may be the very things worth putting on stage:

your foolishness,
your awkwardness,
your oddness,
your sensitivity,
your obsessions,
your contradictions,
your particular way of seeing things.

Don't polish it all away.

Don't put the cart before the horse by deciding what a scene is supposed to mean before anything has happened.

Start with what's under your nose.
See what you've got.
Get it on its feet.

There's no need to arrive with a finished act, a clever idea or all the answers. What matters is being ready to play, to listen, to take things further and to see where they lead.

How much can you get out of a simple game? And how far can you take it?