Advanced Acting Workshop taught in Spanish took place 02/10/11 to 07/10/11 For more check Sala Beckett here. For details of this one
Will Keen, Declan Donnellan’s flagship actor in Cheek by Jowl and the protagonist, among others, of the acclaimed The Changeling by Thomas Middleton which we saw in 2006 at the Grec and of Macbeth, currently on a worldwide tour, returns to Barcelona to instruct a course for professional actors.
The aim of the course (and one of the main pillars of acting in general) will be to develop listening-communication. And that fact is that, in the end, the act of talking is the act of “achieving”: one does not talk to describe or to exhibit, but to “obtain” and / or to “modify”. During this workshop we will emphasise the need to be with “the other”, to look and see, to listen and to hear. We will work texts in verse and, applying this absolute functionality of the language, we will understand the use of verse as a premeditated choice by the character due to the impossibility he feels of expressing such great, deep and heartfelt concepts through colloquial language. In this way, Shakespeare (and any other classical author) will stop being “archaeology” to become truth here and now, and his characters, in this attempt to liberate their expressive resources, will stop “saying” “poetry in general” in order to talk with guts and with heart. Finally, we will work the monologue considering at all times the audience as another character in the work (ie, with an own dramatic function that generates action in itself). The idea is to get the actor (based on the principle explained above) to convert the spectator into another character to whom he imperiously wishes to communicate “his reason”, always to obtain something from him, to modify him. The main aim of all this is to shake off the dust of the years, of the bows and of the clichés, and return to the great authors of the past their voice, a modern and imperishable voice, of the universal… To put it shortly, making meat of the classical texts.
