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ACTION THEATER is a training system and practice of physical theater improvisation. The practice integrates mind and body and leads toward spontaneous and conscious expression. A body-based discipline, Action Theater is not a technique, it's a map, a way to proceed through the onslaught of phenomena as it surfaces within awareness. All action is perceived and responded to from a embodied awareness.
In Action Theater, the improvisor follows the changing content of their imagination responding with physical, vocal and/or verbal action.The improvisational exercises are simple, playful and challenging. Within their parameters students practice being present. They expand their in-the-moment awareness to include sensation, feeling, thought, memory, imagination, and intuition. Students gain insight into who they are. They increase their ability to hold and express emotion, dance with their own poetry, and recover lost personal material. Students renew their ability to play. Every exercise creates a dialogue between exploration and communication. Some exercises strengthen and expand movement, acting, voice; others, composition, listening and relationship skills. Others isolate and invite exploration of more formal performance elements such as time, space, shape and dynamics. All of these explorations quiet the conceptual mind's limited view of experience and increase awareness of the details of moment- to- moment experience. In a larger sense, the exercises enlighten the connection between intention, awareness and action. In the realm of awareness there is little distinction between the theater and the street. Who we are, how aware we are, and how we process our perceptions and reactions is the same everywhere. In the studio, we improvise within forms that are relevant to movement and theater, but the lessons we learn affect our daily life. Action Theater trainings accommodate the novice, the explorer and the practiced. |
Ruth Zaporah