Improvisation, at the origin of the creative process, develops from dramaturgical tools that allow actors to establish structures, networks and scales that guide the intentionality and inventiveness of a work.
Often used to relying on a previous, extrinsic stimulus (usually a written dramatic text), the actor feels helpless, lacking in confidence and ‘out of ideas’ when processes require improvisation to take part in research or even to be embodied in the performance itself.
Can the actor have a ‘new brain’, take on improvisation as a labor that flexibly repeats itself, evolves and is transmitted in an intentional, consistent way, capable of provoking a living encounter? Can this art of unfolding simply face the empty space and the unknown inherent in discovery from a more conscious, structured and free perspective?
Throughout the workshop, three historical moments will always be in the background, evoking, in a very intimate and obvious way, the paradigm of Total Theatre: (1) the practice of epic orality by the bards, poets and storytellers of those centuries immediately preceding the technological advent of writing, (2) the virtuoso and highly inventive work of the Renaissance/Baroque actor of the Commedia dell’Arte and (3) the movement of dramatic renovators, at the turn of the 20th century, with the initial impulses of symbolism that projected creators who seeked, paradoxically, a theater without actors (shadows and statues) or, at least, attenuating their presence, dematerialising the ‘flesh’ with human puppets, masks and everything else that would distance them from the material contingency of the body and naturalistic aesthetics.
At a time when we expel the Other, the formal see-do interdependence is destroyed, when even the public space sphere is dramatically wounded, the Actor-Creator workshop also seeks to make objective contributions so that the actor depends on himself, so that he learns to re-establish the link with the person who observes him, complements him and makes him constitute himself: the spectator.