Acting Through Play Workshop
Schedule
Sat, 23 Aug, 2025 at 10:00 am
UTC+01:00Location
Brighton, England, UK | Brighton, EN
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“You are more interesting than any character you will ever play” - Philippe Gaulier📣A new workshop for performers led by Rob McCloskey 📣
As actors we take impulses, and transform them into character, meaning, or sometimes just nonsense. We’ll look at how clown can be used as a way to lower the masks we wear in day to day life to allow us to be freer on stage, more sensitive to impulses, and take more risks as actors.
This is an investigative workshop into the principles of Complicity, and Pleasure specifically looking at what we can learn about acting from clown play and physical ensemble work. Exploring how games and play can free us as performers to be more sensitive and risk taking.
The workshop will explore:
- Using complicity and games as a groundwork to find playfulness
- Playing ourselves and neutrality as a way to be receptive to impulses.
- Using Jo-ha-kyu to understand timing and exploring ‘subversions’ to create surprises in a performance.
- Playing with mirroring and choral work to discover new interpretations of character.
- Movement and Ensemble games from ‘Viewpoints’ and Michael Chekhov to find movement qualities and presence.
- Playing with dialogue and lowering the performative mask to speak in our own voice.
🗓️ 23rd August, 10-5pm
💳 £30
📍Brighton
Contact [email protected] to book your space.
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About The Facilitator:
Rob McCloskey is a theatre maker and performer. He has trained internationally in physical and devised theatre at the École Philippe Gaulier, Grotowski Institute, and in workshops with specialist theatre directors such as David Glass, John Wright, Stephen Harper, Paul Hunter, Tanushka Marah, Matej Matejka, Toby Park, Bim Mason, in various disciplines including Clown, Bouffon, Mask, Devising, Movement, and Ensemble Theatre.
He is a regular performer with the Thirdspace Theatre in the Brighton Festival. He has performed with Bim Mason’s Bigheads which regularly garner national attention, performed puppetry at the Kew Gardens with Longnose Puppets, and devised physical comedy work with the clown expert Stephen Harper. As a teacher Robert has taught workshops in devising, mask, clown and performance at Northbrook College on their degree course as well as workshops in Split Hairs, and giving workshops to young people at the Thirdspace Theatre.
Robert directed and performed in the Clown and Bouffon performance of SQUELCH! which debuted in the Brighton Fringe 2023 and received 5 star reviews praised as “wonderful physical comedy… perfectly achieved physical theatre - minimal in construction and immensely evocative”. The show went on to perform at the Greenhouse Theatre, Labyrinth Arts Festival and Theatre Royal Bath.
📸 Photo by Peter Williams
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Where is it happening?
Brighton, England, UK, United KingdomEvent Location & Nearby Stays:
