The Pleasures Of The Buffonesque – Workshop 8th January – 4th February 2024 |
The Pleasures Of The Buffonesque
08 January – 04 February 2024
Monday-Saturday / 15.00-20.30 ( including daily devising time )
In this 4-week workshop for advanced practitioners with extensive experience in devising, we explore the physical pleasure of distortion – of the body, of social conventions, structures and forms.
Respecting nothing apart from the truth of our essential humanity, we will dive into the provocative and celebratory territories of the bouffon, the social grotesque and ‘cabaret noir’ and interrogate the proposal that the artist’s role is to reveal what is rotten/out of balance in the societies we live in through celebratory, carnivalesque performance and ritual that touch the Sacred as well as the Outrageous.
We’ll investigate how these performance modalities exist in the modern world, playing with the powerful engine of satire, “sacred madness” and touching on drag and queer cabaret. We’ll explore how the chaotic logic of a gang of musical bouffons can be simultaneously bizarre and bitingly provocative, how social grotesques hold a dark mirror up to the truths communities fight to ignore and how the prophets living in the shadowlands of our collective psyche imagine the future of humanity.
This night sea journey into these dark and fertile territories will ask what it means to be a creator, giving permission for the constraints of education and propriety to be shaken off and challenging participants to face the desires they never knew they had with honesty and pleasure.
You are invited to find your own application of these territories, making your own work which will be presented at the end of the workshop in groups and as solos. The workshop will consist of approximately three weeks’ intensive teaching and one week of rehearsal and devising/feedback sessions.
Workshop Facilitators
Rachel Karafistan
Rachel is a British performer, teacher, academic and director with over 25 years of experience of working professionally as a theatre maker. She is the founder of Cosmino Productions (www.cosmino.org) which she runs with her partner and long term Blue Man, Kuba Pierzchalski.
Rachel is currently touring her latest solo performance Dreams Die Hard, which was inspired by the wartime diary of her Grandmother. Rachel trained with Odin Teatret, Philippe Gaulier and Frankie Armstrong and worked as an actor with internationally acclaimed Polish company, Teatr Biuro Podróży. As a director she has created performances with, among others, Greenwich Theatre, Northampton & Leeds Universities and the State Theatre of Salzburg. She is currently an External Examiner at East 15 Acting School in the UK. In 2001 she completed her PhD research into shamanic dimensions within contemporary theatre practice and has offered ‘From the Shaman to the Actor’ workshops often in collaboration with renowned author, Brian Bates. Rachel is relieved that after so many years of making theatre, it is still the greatest thrill imaginable.
Michelle Madsen
Michelle Madsen is an Argentine/Danish artist with a background in poetry, theatre and
investigative journalism.
Michelle holds a degree in English Literature from the University of Oxford and a postgraduate certification in physical and devised theatre at LISPA (Arthaus) in Berlin. Her work investigates the disruption of prevailing mythologies through embodied play, with a focus on female-centred/queer narratives. She is co-director of award-winning theatre company, Bait (Cronivision, Kill The Princess) and is developing her own pedagogy based on integral movement (Axis Syllabus), clown (Pochinko/Clown Through Mask) and poetics. Her journalistic work has been broadcast on the BBC and she is co-host of Bears at a Picnic (Resonance FM). She is a guest lecturer/associate artist at City University and the University of Greenwich and is based in Berlin where she is completing a three-year cycle in Integral Movement and Performance Practice at the Thomas Prattki Centre.
www.baittheatre.com
Thomas Prattki
Thomas is the founder and director of arthaus.berlin, an international creative hub for theatre makers from around the world. He has been the pedagogical director of the Ecole Jacques Lecoq in Paris, before creating in 2003 the London International School of Performing Arts (LISPA) and in 2014 the Thomas Prattki Centre for Integral Movement and Performance Studies as an independent
department of LISPA. In 2015, before Brexit hits the UK, he moves LISPA to Berlin where it becomes arthaus.berlin.
As a performer, Thomas has toured the world extensively with Mummenschanz, a world-renowned company combining movement, mask and the visual arts. He has directed, taught
and lectured for the last three decades in over 30 different countries.
In recent years, he dedicates most of his practical research time to further exploring Integral Embodiment, a process and practice he has developed over the past two decades, linking
practice-based research into altered states of consciousness through the use of contemplative practices, ritual, the expressive arts, and the work with masks, myths and archetypal motifs, to the process of performance making.
Fees and application
Tuition Fees
980,00 Euro
Where
Eden***** Studios, Breite Str. 43, 13187 BERLIN
Application
Please contact the school for details of how to apply :
The Pleasures of the Buffonesque
08 January – 04 February 2024
Workshop Details
08 January – 04 February 2024
Monday-Saturday / 15.00-20.30 ( including daily devising time )
In this 4-week workshop for advanced practitioners with extensive experience in devising, we explore the physical pleasure of distortion – of the body, of social conventions, structures and forms.
Respecting nothing apart from the truth of our essential humanity, we will dive into the provocative and celebratory territories of the bouffon, the social grotesque and ‘cabaret noir’ and interrogate the proposal that the artist’s role is to reveal what is rotten/out of balance in the societies we live in through celebratory, carnivalesque performance and ritual that touch the Sacred as well as the Outrageous.
We’ll investigate how these performance modalities exist in the modern world, playing with the powerful engine of satire, “sacred madness” and touching on drag and queer cabaret. We’ll explore how the chaotic logic of a gang of musical bouffons can be simultaneously bizarre and bitingly provocative, how social grotesques hold a dark mirror up to the truths communities fight to ignore and how the prophets living in the shadowlands of our collective psyche imagine the future of humanity.
This night sea journey into these dark and fertile territories will ask what it means to be a creator, giving permission for the constraints of education and propriety to be shaken off and challenging participants to face the desires they never knew they had with honesty and pleasure.
You are invited to find your own application of these territories, making your own work which will be presented at the end of the workshop in groups and as solos. The workshop will consist of approximately three weeks’ intensive teaching and one week of rehearsal and devising/feedback sessions.
Workshop Facilitators
Rachel Karafistan
Rachel is a British performer, teacher, academic and director with over 25 years of experience of working professionally as a theatre maker. She is the founder of Cosmino Productions (www.cosmino.org) which she runs with her partner and long term Blue Man, Kuba Pierzchalski.
Rachel is currently touring her latest solo performance Dreams Die Hard, which was inspired by the wartime diary of her Grandmother. Rachel trained with Odin Teatret, Philippe Gaulier and Frankie Armstrong and worked as an actor with internationally acclaimed Polish company, Teatr Biuro Podróży. As a director she has created performances with, among others, Greenwich Theatre, Northampton & Leeds Universities and the State Theatre of Salzburg. She is currently an External Examiner at East 15 Acting School in the UK. In 2001 she completed her PhD research into shamanic dimensions within contemporary theatre practice and has offered ‘From the Shaman to the Actor’ workshops often in collaboration with renowned author, Brian Bates. Rachel is relieved that after so many years of making theatre, it is still the greatest thrill imaginable.
Michelle Madsen
Michelle Madsen is an Argentine/Danish artist with a background in poetry, theatre and
investigative journalism.
Michelle holds a degree in English Literature from the University of Oxford and a postgraduate certification in physical and devised theatre at LISPA (Arthaus) in Berlin. Her work investigates the disruption of prevailing mythologies through embodied play, with a focus on female-centred/queer narratives. She is co-director of award-winning theatre company, Bait (Cronivision, Kill The Princess) and is developing her own pedagogy based on integral movement (Axis Syllabus), clown (Pochinko/Clown Through Mask) and poetics. Her journalistic work has been broadcast on the BBC and she is co-host of Bears at a Picnic (Resonance FM). She is a guest lecturer/associate artist at City University and the University of Greenwich and is based in Berlin where she is completing a three-year cycle in Integral Movement and Performance Practice at the Thomas Prattki Centre.
www.baittheatre.com
Thomas Prattki
Thomas is the founder and director of arthaus.berlin, an international creative hub for theatre makers from around the world. He has been the pedagogical director of the Ecole Jacques Lecoq in Paris, before creating in 2003 the London International School of Performing Arts (LISPA) and in 2014 the Thomas Prattki Centre for Integral Movement and Performance Studies as an independent
department of LISPA. In 2015, before Brexit hits the UK, he moves LISPA to Berlin where it becomes arthaus.berlin.
As a performer, Thomas has toured the world extensively with Mummenschanz, a world-renowned company combining movement, mask and the visual arts. He has directed, taught
and lectured for the last three decades in over 30 different countries.
In recent years, he dedicates most of his practical research time to further exploring Integral Embodiment, a process and practice he has developed over the past two decades, linking
practice-based research into altered states of consciousness through the use of contemplative practices, ritual, the expressive arts, and the work with masks, myths and archetypal motifs, to the process of performance making.
Fees and Application
Tuition Fees
980,00 Euro
Where
Eden***** Studios, Breite Str. 43, 13187 BERLIN
Application
Please contact the school for details of how to apply :