The Conscious Body Development Program is the development of a deep bodily awareness as a foundational requirement for any stage work. It aims to identify and understand the various somatic processes within our experience, in order to achieve a profound knowledge of the body and a mastery of attention that opens the doors to a new, surprising, intense, and creative approach to performance.
Our goal is to achieve a quality of work where intensity, truth, and surprise are the hallmarks of our craft. To accomplish this, the first step is to achieve physical readiness: investigating our tensions and identifying our physical, emotional, or technical limitations, while increasing our energy levels until we reach a state of relaxation, silence, concentration, freedom, and presence.
This state of high physicality, connection, and energy will pave the way for an experience of grounding and confidence—both personal and artistic—that will allow us to take the next step: surrendering the control of the mind to the body. It is then that our actions and movements will begin to emerge naturally and creatively, as organic responses to external stimuli or the expressive needs of the body itself.
We will begin to feel deeply alive, both in life and on stage. We will gain access to invaluable spaces of personal and performing truth. We will begin to live, as a matter of habit, in a state of creative flow.
Over the course of a year, we will transition from somatic exploration and understanding of the body toward a more stage-focused practice. Through individual and group proposals, students will investigate themselves as living beings and creative artists, putting the development paradigm presented in the course into practice on stage. The journey is divided into three parts:
When facing a major challenge, the body naturally tenses; the mind races or freezes, fear is triggered, and our attention is partially or fully invaded by beliefs, expectations, and conclusions about ourselves or the challenge ahead. The first part of this program is dedicated to deeply investigating this natural physiological response, which we will call "reaction." Once our most relevant reactions are identified, we will learn to deactivate them—starting by releasing superficial physical tensions. We will then go deeper, exploring the link between these internal tensions and our "concerns" as performers: the fear of failure, the need for approval, doubts about one’s own talent, and expectations regarding a professional career. Investigating and releasing these tensions will allow us to shed the burdens we carry daily in our bodies, reclaim the energy invested in those efforts, and reach a more instinctual level of personal and artistic consciousness.
Identifying and deactivating our reactions will grant us access to a profoundly valuable experience: mental silence. Through this silence, we will begin to experience states of full awareness and perception, allowing us to remain effortlessly in the "here and now." This is how we develop the level of presence that is the core objective of this course. From this state of silence and focus, subtle qualities will become more evident in our perception—such as the flow of energy, emotions, and the current of fear—all of which are essential to delivering sensitive, intense work that moves the audience. In this way, the emotion of the text, the tension of the character, or the truth of the scene will begin to emerge spontaneously, organically, and surprisingly—both for the audience and for ourselves.
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.
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.
1. 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
2. To understand the connection between a relaxed body and a state of flexibility and emotional permeability
3. To achieve a high level of energy and presence that will allow us to offer a clear, comprehensible, intense, and creative kind of work
4. 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
5. 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
6. 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
7. 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"
8. To answer, individually, a question that all artists should ask themselves at some point in their career: why do I need to go onstage?
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..
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..
Course start date (New dates TBD).
Movement classes: Mondays, 9:00 AM – 11:00 AM.
The 60-hour collective creation laboratory will take place between (New dates TBD)
Registration fee: 150€
Full course tuition (TBD).
10% discount for members of AADPC, APdC and Col·lectiu de Companyies Independents de Catalunya.
