Vsevolod Emilevich Meyerhold was a Russian and Soviet theatre director, actor and theatrical producer.  His provocative experiments dealing with physical being and symbolism in an unconventional theatre setting made him one of the seminal forces in modern international theatre.

Biomechanics was a system of actor training developed by Meyerhold to widen the emotional potential of a theatre piece and express thoughts and ideas that could not be easily presented through the naturalistic of the period. This technique was developed during the rehearsals of a series of plays directed by Meyerhold in the 1920s and 1930s when Socialist Realism was at its height in Russia. Biomechanics is a precursor to and influence on much of the 20th century's physical theatre.

Following Konstantin Stanislavsky's lead, he said that the emotional state of an actor was inextricably linked to his physical state (and vice versa), and that one could call up emotions in performance by practicing and assuming poses, gestures, and movements. Meyerhold's acting technique had fundamental principles at odds with the American method actor's conception. While method acting melded the character with the actor's own personal memories to create the character’s internal motivation, Meyerhold connected psychological and physiological processes. He had actors focus on learning gestures and movements as a way of expressing emotion physically.

Meyerhold's acting system relied on motion rather than language or illusion. Opposing the Stanislavsky System, which Meyerhold believed over emphasized the spirit and psychology, biomechanics emphasized elementary laws of reflexes. In addition to the bare scenery facilitating this technique, the costumes were also integral. In constructivist fashion, the costumes were not extravagant, but drastically simplified, which allowed the actors to easily perform using biomechanics and without hiding mistakes.

Creative visualization is the cognitive process of generating mental imagery, with eyes open or closed, simulating or recreating visual perception in order to maintain, inspect, and transform those images and consequently modifying their associated emotions and feelings with intent to experience a subsequent beneficial effect, alleviating anxiety, improving self-esteem and self-confidence, and enhancing the capacity to cope when interacting with others.

For actors, mental rehearsal can make a big impact on performance. Research shows that mentally rehearsing scenes, monologues or auditions in your head is almost as effective as actual rehearsal. The explanation is that the same neural pathways are activated by mental rehearsal as actual rehearsal.

So how should you mentally rehearse? First, relax, find somewhere comfortable and quiet and breathe deeply. In through the nose, then hold and out through the mouth.  Second, imagine in vivid details of sound, movement, feelings and visualisation, whatever you want to practise. Third, imagine it from beginning to end, including a successful conclusion. Fourth, repeat regularly. Mental rehearsal is a technique that athletes, musicians, doctors, soldiers, and even astronauts use to prepare for the worst and perform at their best. 

An Olivier Award-winning actor and writer, Michelle is well-known to the Globe’s stage, having starred as Rosalind in As You Like It (2015), as Titania/Hippolyta in A Midsummer Night's Dream (2013) and as the Princess of France in Love's Labour's Lost (2007). She also directed Richard III, King John and As You Like It for The Complete Walk (2016), a series of short films created as part of the Globe’s celebration of the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death.

Michelle Terry says: ‘The work of Shakespeare is for me timeless, mythic, mysterious, vital, profoundly human and unapologetically theatrical. There are no other theatres more perfectly suited to house these plays than the pure and uniquely democratic spaces of The Globe and the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse. I am so proud and excited that I will be in the privileged position where I can offer artists the opportunity to come together to reclaim and rediscover not only Shakespeare, but the work of his contemporaries, alongside new work from our current writers. For us to then share those stories with an audience that demands an unparalleled honesty, clarity and bravery, is all a dream come true.’

Michelle most recently starred as the eponymous king in Henry V at Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre, and as Grace in Katie Mitchell’s production of Cleansed for the National Theatre. Her other stage credits include Much Ado About Nothing, The Crucible and Love’s Labour’s Lost (Royal Shakespeare Company), All’s Well That Ends Well (National Theatre), Privacy (Donmar Warehouse) and In The Republic of Happiness (Royal Court). She won an Olivier Award for her performance in Tribes at the Royal Court in 2010 and she is an Associate Artist for the Royal Shakespeare Company.

Michelle also wrote and starred in the Sky One series The Café with Ralf Little; with Rob Hastie she created My Mark, the Donmar’s ten-year project to chart the political growth of the next voting generation; most recently she co-wrote and performed Becoming: part one with Rosalie Craig at The Donmar Warehouse. Michelle trained at RADA.

 

Canterbury at dusk, hooded figures rise in the city’s deepening shadows, ghosts of the old creed banished from the kingdom. The hunter and the hunted seek the signs which will unlock the doors hiding the truths of this restless world. What are ‘the strangers’ who share the new creed doing here? Why have they fled? A boy’s fate is sealed as a cold hand of history hauls him down into the darkness.

Guided by hooded avatars, Creed Of Spies fuses promenade play and an immersive experience for the audience to unlock the secrets of some of Canterbury’s most precious artefacts that conspired to shape the life and death of its most celebrated son, Christopher Marlowe.

Join The Marlowe Youth Theatre for a dramatic journey through the streets, up the walls and into the secret places of Canterbury.This is a promenade performance in a number of venues across Canterbury, starting in The Marlowe Foyer. Professional and amateur actors will welcome you within this fun and cultural theatrical piece.

 

 

The Avignon festival founded in 1947 by Jean Villar is one of the oldest and most famous theatre and performing arts festivals in the world. Festival performances take place throughout three entire weeks in July and feature the best playwrights and actors working in contemporary creations. The director of the festival, author, director and actor Olivier Py designed a Festival for the people, a celebration of the mind, the desire to hear from a new generation of artists.

The Festival d'Avignon is the place where artists with many different aesthetics come together and present, discuss and share their vision. Different origins, different backgrounds and generations, all on stage and behind the scenes during the Festival, where avant-garde and tradition co-exist. Over 40 different plays are performed in more than twenty venues, from small, 150-seat chapels to the 2000-seat legendary Honour Courtyard in the Palace of the Popes, and now the FabricA, a year round Festival venue. 

Hortense Archambault and Vincent Baudriller, appointed Festival directors in 2003, located the Festival offices in Avignon to provide it with deep local roots. Since September 2013, the new director Olivier Py - author, director and actor - continues this approach. Olivier Py seeks a Festival which is both for the people and a celebration of the mind. In addition to the performing arts, the Festival is the place for exchange, discussion and confrontation of ideas, with conferences, interviews, shows, cinema, music and other arts. 

http://www.festival-avignon.com/en/webtv

 

The Cockpit theatre is excited to announce the OPEN CALL for this year's festival. Calling all multilingual troubadours, travelling minstrels, intercultural creatives, linguistic explorers, juggling polyglots, translated artists, cross-nation activists, and European theatre companies!

For its 5th years VOILA! Festival becomes VOILA! Europe and will be bigger and bolder than ever. VOILA! Europe is a non Brexit-fearing festival whose mission is to bust the barriers of language and showcase plays from around Europe & the UK to the multi-national audiences of London. 

From new writing from emerging artists to classics revisited by well-loved companies, VOILA! celebrates diversity in performing arts, multiple languages and fearless creatives. No passport required. Broadening out from being a francophone festival to include more languages spoken on the European continent, and spending from one theatre to other venues in the city, VOILA! will program more work and provide additional platforms for exchange in the arts.

They are looking for shows in multiple languages, or translated/adapted from plays originally in a European language, as well as new writing with cast and creatives from the European continent. They accept all genres of shows (music, theatre, performance art, dance), provided they are less than 60 minutes long. 

VOILA! Europe will take place in London 8-18 November 2017 at the Cockpit, Etcetera Theatre Camden and more venues to be announced. The festival will provide 2 or 3 performance slots in one of the festival venues with production and technical assistance, printed brochures, a professional PR and online marketing in exchange for a 50% box office split and a £70 admin fee.

http://www.thecockpit.org.uk/taxonomy/term/26

 

Performance poetry means reading or declaiming poetry in a way that acknowledges the presence of an audience. This can be anything from eye-contact to fully blown histrionics. Open mics are the bedrock of the poetry scene. They are the testing ground for new material.

Voice is an active, physical thing in oral poetry. It needs a speaker and a listener, a performer and an audience. As poetry is a vocal art, the speaker brings their own experience to it, changing it according to their own sensibilities and intonations. Controlled through pitch and stress, poems are full of invisible italicised contrasts. Reading poetry aloud also makes clear the pause as an element of poetry.

Apples and Snakes is England's leading organisation for performance poetry and spoken words, with a national reputation for producing exciting, engaging and transformative work in performance and participation. Their vision is to lead the poetry revolution, creating artistic and social changes through the power of the spoken word.

They create groundbreaking, diverse work including live performance, artist development, participation and digital content that help to broaden people's understanding of what spoken word is and can be. They facilitate cross-artform collaborations that push performance poetry into new directions and develop work online as well as internationally.

http://applesandsnakes.org 

 

For people who make a living as an impersonator, like Frank Caliendo and Rich Little, capturing the unique identifying characteristics, tics and vocal peculiarities of well-known personalities and casting them in a humorous light is much more important than creating a completely believable character. They are comedians, not actors. Believable isn't the point for them. Recognisable and accurate is.

Anytime you play a real, historical person on stage, particularly people we've seen and heard on video or film, you risk becoming an impersonator rather than an actor. It is easy to be so concerned about being faithful to their external nature that you forget to do the extra work required to find the inner person who manifests those externals.

Playing real people on stage is very challenging, just as talking directly to the audience is. Combine those two things in a one-person show, and you've got your work cut-out for you. Line reading becomes a very strong temptation is those situations. After all it's unnatural to speak to people who never talk back, who don't respond "in character", because they aren't character, they're audience.

There's an on-going debate among actors as to it's better to start with internals and move to externals, or vice-versa. It doesn't really matter where you start as long as you approach the internal aspects in an "organic" way. Whatever triggers that for you is fine, if it works.