Giovanni Fusetti
| Your life will be good and secure when aliveness will mean more to you than security; love more than money; your freedom more than party line or public opinion...Wilhelm Reich (1897-1957) |
THE NEUTRAL MASK
19 June, 2017 → 24 June, 2017 - Celebration Barn Theater, MAINE
THE NEUTRAL MASK
The silence of the Poetic Body
A workshop organized by
THE CELEBRATION BARN THEATRE
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The Neutral Mask is a fundamental step in the journey of Movement Based Theatre. It is a mask that doesn’t have any dramatic expression, so it exists before all other theatre masks.
The Neutral Mask has no past and no future, no memory and no projects. It reveals the state of calm that exists before the drama of the character, and it manifests the expressive potential of the Poetic Body in space.
As the color white in the words of Kandinsky, it is "the silence before the beginning".
The Neutral Mask is a powerful pedagogic instrument. It’s the basis for all theatre masks and it inspires a fascinating learning process, profoundly intimate and profoundly poetic, bringing the actor to discover the difference between movement and drama, between body and character.
What is my body saying while
I am trying to not say anything?
This is a crucial question for any poet of gestures.
No-body is neutral. Each person is "moved" by a variety of physical events: postures, attitudes, emotional patterns impressed in physical dynamics, rhythms, characters, archetypes... Within each person's movement and presence in space, there is a web of "non-neutral attitudes", that resonates like physical and emotional "background noises". If observed through the reference of the Neutral State, this web appears like paintings/markings on a white sheet. They are “dramatic” in the etymological sense. They contain a drama: an action.
With the help of its complementary mask, the Red Nose, these individual patterns can be amplified into the idiosyncratic personal comedy of the Clown State. Thanks to this enhanced and paradoxical physical awareness, the actor-player can let go of her physical persona in order to touch the Neutral State: a state of embodied presence, available to the here and now of theatrical space, aware of the infinite possibilities of creating physical characters, based on variations from neutrality.
Once the actor has discovered the neutral space, he becomes like “a white page, ready to be written on in the future dramas“ (Jacques Lecoq).
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This workshops addresses anyone interested in movement based theatre, curious to get in touch with her/his Poetic Body and the fundamental principles of movement and mask theatre.
During this training participants will use Neutral Masks by Donato Sartori, Centro Maschere e Strutture Gestuali, Abano Terme, Italy.
PRACTICALITIES
For all information about admission, enrolment and accommodation,
please refer to THE CELEBRATION BARN THEATRE website
by clicking directly to the link below
www.celebrationbarn.com
A Practical Note
Bring comfortable clothes, for a work based on movement. The work is based in movement analysis. Therefore, it is best to work with neutral clothes, without shiny or bright colors, and with no drawings, images or logos on them. The ideal color for this movement work is black.
For further information about the content of the workshop please contact
(3)
PHOTO CREDITS
Pictures, n.1: Giovanni Fusetti, Kiklos School, 2000
Picture n.2: Giovanni Fusetti, Helikos School, 2013
Picture n.3: Giovanni Fusetti, Helikos School, 2013