Stage Presence
The Conscious Body Artistic and Creative Development Program
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The Conscious Body is a program that aims at developing a profound bodily awareness before committing to any scenic work. It proposes to identify and understand the different somatic processes that take place in our experience in order to achieve a practical, comprehensive knowledge of our body and good control over our attention that will open the doors to a performance that is new, intense, uncanny, and creative each time.
To achieve this, the first step will be to get the body in shape: to explore our tensions, identify our physical, emotional, or technical limitations, as well as to increase our level of energy in order to achieve a state of relaxation, silence, concentration, and presence. This state of high physicality and energy will lead us into an experience of solidity and confidence —both personal and artistic— that will allow us to take the next step: release mind control. It will be then that our actions and movements onstage will emerge spontaneously, creatively, as organic responses to the external stimuli or to the body's expressive needs. We will start feeling very alive on stage. We will be walking a path into a truthful and highly embodied performance. We will be engaging, probably unknowingly, a state of creative flow.​
Contents
Along the year, we will transition from a more somatic and explorative training towards a work that will be more scenic and artistic. This latter work will include individual and group stage proposals that will allow us to explore ourselves as human beings as well as creative artists, putting into real practice the somatic paradigm explored at the beginning of the course. The journey is divided into three main blocks:
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1. Tension / Noise... Reaction
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In front of any challenge, the body, naturally, contracts; the mind speeds up or gets blocked; fear arouses and our attention is partially or totally flooded with beliefs, expectations, and conclusions we have around ourselves or the challenge itself. The first part of this program will be focused on exploring this natural bodily response that we will call reaction. Once we have identified our most relevant reactions, we will learn how to deactivate them, firstly, letting go of the most superficial tensions in the body. Then, we will go deeper, understanding the connections between these deeper tensions and our "worries" as performers: the fear to fail, the craving to be liked, hesitations around our personal talent, expectations over a professional career, etc. Exploring and deactivating these deep tensions will allow us to release these efforts that we carry day after day in our bodies, increase our level of energy, and achieve a new state of personal and artistic awareness and freedom.
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2. Relaxation / Silence... Perception
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Learning and deactivating our reactions will allow us to access a precious and rare experience: mental silence. This silence will be key to achieving new levels of attention and perception that will enable us to inhabit the here and now like we have never before. We will start developing the level of presence the course aims for. After this silence and attention, subtle qualities will become clearly perceptible in our bodies, such as the flow of energy, the flow of emotions, or the flow of fear, all of them essential if we want to achieve a sensitive and intense kind of work. It will be then that the emotion in the script, the character's tension, or the scenic truth will start emerging spontaneously, organically, effortlessly, surprisingly both for us performers and for our audience.
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3. Conscious Body / Creative Flow
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A body that is free and full of energy becomes naturally spontaneous, present, creative... as long as the mind allows that to happen. In this last stage, we will learn and experience what means working from the body: how to release all mental control and allow things to happen. We will feel how letting go helps many physical, personal o technical difficulties vanish. We will experience, day after day, how our body gets back its full original potential and develops a new intuition —intelligence, awareness— beyond anything we have experienced before. We will be freeing areas of our personal and artistic potential that were, perhaps, unbeknown to us. We will be gaining access to new areas of personal truth and artistic meaning. We will be engaging a state of creative flow: a quality of work that will transform us into bold and bright performers, full of energy, very alive, able to face artistic challenges with confidence and creativity.
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These will be 24 weeks of intense work, addressing artistic and personal aspects that will allow us to rediscover, free, and empower the most complex, mysterious, and surprising machine ever discovered: our body.
Objectives
“We are supposed to create on inspiration,
but only the subconscious can do that,
and we can’t control it.”
Konstantin Stanislavsky
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To identify and explore deep tensions and physical, mental, or technical limitations, as well as to learn how to overcome these in order to access our full artistic and personal potential
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To understand the connection between a relaxed body and a state of flexibility and emotional permeability
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To achieve a high level of energy and presence that will allow us to offer a clear, comprehensible, intense, and creative kind of work
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To develop a level of mind control that will allow us to fix our attention where it is needed, without the interference of irrelevant or harmful issues that usually inhabit our mind
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To release our mind control and let the body take the lead in order to become freer, perceptive, sensitive, flexible, and creative... conscious of its own existence, as well as of its own environment​
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To learn how to design our own personal training in order to address the specific needs and challenges that we may find in our artistic career
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To understand, in a physical and pragmatic way, common concepts of our theatrical lexicon such as "scenic truth", "to be alive onstage", to have "scenic personality", o to be "creative"
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To answer, individually, a question that all artists should ask themselves at some point in their career: why do I need to go onstage?
Structure
This course develops through 48 encounters, in which we will engage a sensitive and profound exploration of our somatic and creative body through theory, attention and meditation exercises, movement classes, as well as scenic exercises, and stage presentations.
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At the end of the course, all participants will be invited to take part in a laboratory of collective creation that will have the purpose of continuing our exploration and training, as well as synthesizing a show after all the seeds, discoveries, issues, and remaining questions that will have emerged throughout the course, articulated around the main axis of our learning process: the flow of fear.
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The course begins on the 4th of October 2021
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The course ends on the 9th of May 2022
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Regular classes will take place on Mondays, from 9 to 1 pm, at Dau al Sec, Arts Escèniques, Barcelona
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Movement classes will take place on Wednesdays, from 9 to 11 am.
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The laboratory of collective creation will take place between the months of May and June, with the venue and times yet to be confirmed.
Costs
Registration fee: 150€
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Full course: 900€ (monthly or quarterly payments)
Laboratory of collective creation: 250€ (for course students), 500€ (for non-course students)
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10% discount for AADPC, APdC, and Col·lectiu de Companyies Independents members when registering before the 15th of September.