Workshops

The Workshops project arose from the desire to learn other ways of doing things and to question our own way of doing them in a shared experience with other professional theater artists.

Theaters of movement and gesture: Techniques and Creation

Directed by Sofia Cabrita in 2024 at Rumo do Fumo (Espaço da Penha)


Workshop based on training in the languages of a theater based on physicality, with different genres and subgenres: mime, pantomime, mime-drama, body mime, among others. As an heir of poetics and pedagogies, corporeal grammars front the classical theater but also from dance, sport and puppetry, the so-called theater of gesture actually corresponds to a series of intersections between movement analysis and theatrical creation. How can we use these body techniques so they do not end in themselves? How can they serve composition and dramaturgy? In this workshop we will explore some of the techniques of these theaters of gesture, starting from their more traditional concepts and conventions and building bridges with the different possibilities of updating and creation.



livro

Writing Workshop - In the Theatre for the Theatre

Directed by Miguel Castro Caldas in 2023 at the Companhia Olga Roriz studio


We often say ‘stage writing’ to avoid saying ‘writing for theater’. Perhaps because saying ‘writing for theater’ seems to imply that the writer is outside the theater writing what should happen on stage. Saying ‘stage writing’ seems to imply that the writer is on stage writing the scene. This idea, as we know, has been widely criticized, dismantled and replaced by other ways of saying what one does when writing for theater: writing for actors, writing based on rehearsals, writing literary textual substrates, writing powerpoints, etc. But if we look at it from another perspective, we can also say that you write for the audience. Hence, for now, I’m proposing two points of view, two places from which you can write in the theater for the theater.

1. I am seated in an audience looking at the stage – Am I seeing what I write? Am i writing what I see? Am i describing? Am I rewriting? Am I reacting? Am I whispering things to the person sitting next to me?

2. I am up on stage – Am I speaking because I have something to tell these people? Am I playing a game and these people are watching me play? Am i wanting to see how they react to what I do? Am I telling a crowd to keep their distance? Am I building the place from where I want to be looked at?

There are, surely, other ways to write for theater, but these are the ones that I want to reflect on, for a few hours, together with a group of people. And experiment, to see where it goes.



livro

The Actor - Creator

Directed by Nuno Pino Custódio in 2023 at Teatro da Luz


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.



livro

The Actor and Neutrality

Directed by Nuno Pino Custódio in 2022 at Boutique da Cultura


‘The Actor and Neutrality’ is a workshop created in 2012 by Nuno Pino Custódio that synthesizes the principles and practices of pedagogical work with the Neutral Mask and the principles, concepts and practices that have emerged from his work as a director and trainer over the last three decades. ‘The actor and neutrality’ can thus be considered a structuring approach for defining an “idea of theater”, an epistemological contribution aimed at the actor, especially those who are looking for meaning and purpose in their activity today.

Why do we make theater at the dawn of a 21st century that confronts this art and manifestation with issues as current and complex as the diminishing power of attention and the permeability of concentration, the culture of hyper-consumerism, hyperactivity and information overload syndrome, the dismemberment of public space or even the disappearance of the spectator’s preferred gaze? Why make theater in an age when the Other is expelled? This workshop works as an actor’s mask, a methodological tool that develops and consolidates what we can call the actor’s consciousness, and prepares them for the most diverse situations, styles, genres and techniques. It’s a training program that seeks to mitigate and deprogram impulses and automatisms that come from each person’s everyday reference, cultural manifestations, invisible but common, so that the possibility of theater can resonate in a full, lively and lasting way.

It will be from a ‘neutral point’, from immobility and silence made of energy, that an otherness will really be born (evoked) and, more than that, a whole interdependence between ‘showing in order to be seen’ and ‘seeing in order to be shown’ will be clarified. In ‘The actor and neutrality’, Nuno Pino Custódio directs an entire structuring discipline towards three spheres of theater performance: the actor, the chorus and, finally, the character.



livro