This workshop is addressed to:

1. Performers from all artistic fields, professionals or students, interested in developing their craft and devising original work, in a working process that integrates voice and movement, and encourages a deep, nourishing connection to the artist's unique creative potential and personal resources.

2. People with no professional experience in the arts, who are interested in becoming acquainted with the tools of the actor’s craft in a working process that integrates voice and movement, and encourages a deep, nourishing connection to each person's unique creative potential and personal resources.

How can the performer develop the capacity to devise original work that emerges from and connects oneself to a unique lifeworld, imagination, embodied experience, playfulness, desire, and creativity?

How might this work be informed by a deep, familiar, and yet surprising integration of voice and movement?

How might these elements of work lead the performer to the possibility of repeating a scene over and over again, in such a way as to preserve the force and subtlety of life and to retain its meaningfulness for the performer?

In this intensive workshop, during two days, with eight hours of intensive work daily, participants will have the opportunity to explore the integration of voice, body, and movement in the process of performance creation and presentation. They will experience and experiment with the complexity of stage behavior and with the dynamics through which each person's unique imagination and creativity can be accessed and articulated in a scene.
The work will be guided by Graziele Sena, an Afro-Brazilian actress, singer, director, dramaturge, community organizer, and acting instructor, who has honed her unique performance practice, as well as her approach to practice-based research and teaching, through a decade of rigorous training, research, and practice as a key member of the Open Program of the Workcenter of Jerzy Grotowski and Thomas Richards, an international performance research center based in Italy and founded by the renowned Polish director Jerzy Grotowski.

The workshop will feature three interconnected strands of work on the actor's craft:
Graziele will guide participants through the process of devising a short "original work” based on both original and "found" material, including a text and/or a song of their choice. Drawing upon their unique personal creative resources and imagination, participants will develop a score that is based on precise and repeatable elements, to compose a short piece with a clear dramatic structure with a beginning, middle, and end. Working together in this process, instructor and participant will also explore the exciting, dynamic process of collaborative creation.
Workshop participants will also be guided through work on songs of the African Diaspora and will have the opportunity to explore the many possibilities presented in singing, through the processes of the vibration of the voice, the dynamic integration of voice and movement, and the performative and personal effects of these integrated process in contact with oneself and with others in a stage context.
The participants will also work on a form of physical training that consists of an uninterrupted sequence of dynamic steps and games. This practice offers participants the possibility of expanding physical abilities and resources, including the performer's agility, strength, endurance, and balance. However, the main objective of this work is to discover, through playing, individually or in group, a flow of the body's imagination, its associative world and its emerging impulses, expressed and discovered through small contacts and a flux of intentions and reactions, all of which are essential elements of the work of the performer.

Dates: 17th and 18th August 2022 Time: 10am to 6pm
Length:16 hours
Maximum number of participants: 12
Vegetarian lunch is included.

Want to participate in both workshops by Gabriele? Pay € 300 instead of € 350 for a whole week of inspiring, creative work.

Want to stay over? We can arrange that. Contact us on Whatsapp via +32 476 21 92 86.

The workshop will be held in English with translation if required.

please transfer the participation fee to the following account number with message "The Performer (your name)"
BE51 0013 1600 5262

For Graziele Sena, theater – and more specifically the craft of the performer – is a place of convergence of one's most intimate personal imagination, desires, thoughts, intentions, emotions, and potentialities. It is a field where the human being can investigate another quality of attention and listening, other (non-ordinary) forms of human interaction, other ways of relating to oneself and to the world. For the past
decade, in her work at the Workcenter of Jerzy Grotowski and Thomas Richards and after it, Graziele has been conducting an investigation of the personal and performative potential of work with traditional chants, exploring the rhythmed and creative roots and potentialities in the convergence of spontaneity and structure that is organic behavior. She has developed a systematic training that works with impulses, reactions, intentions, and physical actions, as an expression of the scenic presence of the performer. In her work, the song of tradition is a way to establish a dialogue between a possible body-memory, recorded almost photographically in an ancient song, and its manifestations in the body-life of the present. In this sense, the song is approached as a vital potency, which carries ancestral knowledge and can act on the one who sings, expanding her sensitivity and the contact with a human being's innermost potentiality for creation.