FOUR SEMINARS

An hybrid between, a lecture, a performance, a movement class and a collective improvisation, a SEMINAR is a playful epistemological banquet.
An extended Q&A: Questions & Answers & Further Questions.
In a Seminar the focus is on the Theory that stands behind a practice. It is a space of reflection and intellectual elaboration:  it creates a field of discussion, analysis, examples, questions and synthesis. Experiential exercises are integrated by moments of discussion and intellectual and emotional integration. A seminar gives food for the mind, references, history of ideas, articulation of principles, awareness of awareness. And inspires further research, practice and action.

There is crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.
(Leonard Cohen)

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Each seminar will include different ingredients:



• Lectures on theatre practice and theatre pedagogy
• Collective Exercises

• Improvisations

• Discussion on the questions from the participants
• Poetic revelations

THE CALENDAR

Sunday December 15th
THE HEALER AND THE FOOL
Playing at the edge between Theatre Art and Therapy

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The Psyche as a community of Masks: identity, roles and the theatre of psychological types.
Settings and rules of engagement with The Wound.
Therapy as Art and Art as Therapy.
Playing with the wound: the excitation of the hurt.
The healing power of the aesthetic acts.
States of consciousness and states of awareness: play as a non-ordinary state.
Embodiment, Play, Amplification and Transformation.
Awareness and Awareness of Awareness.
Comic archetypes and the healing power of laughter.
The Hero and the Clown: the fight and the letting go.
The crazy wisdom of the Fool.
The Wound as a Trickster and an ally: the Fool and the Therapist working together. 

Tuesday December 17th
THE DANCE OF THE DEVISERS
Roles, rules of engagement and conflicts in the devising process

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The devising process is not only a creative process of artists getting together in order to create new theatrical materials: characters, scenes, narratives, shows…
It is also an intense interpersonal event in which a variety of individual and collective roles will appear and interact with each others. Some roles are highly conducive of the creative process, some are quite the opposite.
Sometimes these interactions are conscious but often they are not, and this can lead to successful processes that cannot be reproduced or to catastrophic processes that keep reproducing themselves.
This seminar will highlight the devising principles and processes common in the physical theatre practice and will explore them with tools coming from the world of Gestalt, Psychodrama and Process Work.
Working with classical settings from the life and career of a theatre company, as well as with case studies from the experience of the participants, the group will develop a tool-kit for devisers and a check-list of hot-spots and red alerts that is strongly recommended to pay attention to, in order to avoid artistic misery and group breakdowns.
Previous experiences in theatre devising are required.

Wednesday December 18th
THE CHORUS AND THE COMMUNITY
The collective nature of the Poetic Body

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The Chorus is the origin of western theatre and it is a poetic evolution of collective rituals of our ancestors. Drawing from elements of theatre history and theatre anthropology as well as from the contemporary practice of chorus in physical theatre, this seminar will explore the collective nature of the theatre process.
The Chorus is a transposition of a crowd: a poetical figures that manifest the process of the community witnessing crucial events impacting the collective.
In a time of enhanced individualism we are drawn to forget that many fundamental roles in the human experience are collective and only a community can fully hold the playful joy of theatre.
The return to a choral dimension of the arts can bring us back to the collective nature of the human experience and to the collective nature of Theatre, thus leading us forward into a future that is promising many collective challenges and opportunities, both as artists and as citizens.

Thursday December 19th
THE GROTESQUE MIRROR
Bouffons, Satire and the Politics of Mocking

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From the Satyrs of ancient Greece to the Jesters of the Middle Age, from the Tricksters of many indigenous culture to the contemporary Bouffons, from the Grotesque Devils of the Mystery Tales to the TV satirical imitators, the art of Mocking is a fundamental process of any human community. Its function is to mirror the society in its most controversial and ambivalent aspects, representing roles, characters and events in an amplified, distorted or exaggerated way, provoking laughter, outrage and awareness.
The Mocking Fools play with  ferocious ecstasy and jubilation with the big collective dynamics of the community: politics, religion, economy, power, money and finances, morality, war and the military, science,  gender and race, ecology, family, education and school, cultural institutions… We need their wild ruthless eyes to see what we are doing to each others and be exposed in our collective madness.
We need them to reveal the shadows of our humanity, what is hidden, what lies underneath, on the other side, the grotesque of human society (grotesque comes from the Greek word cryptos =  hidden). 
Mocking is mirroring, mocking is knowledge, mocking is empathy without compassion, mocking is provocation, mocking is exposing paradoxes and shadows.
AND mocking is fun!
Its very function is to bring hidden processes to the surface and to unmask the collective games lying behind events and social norms and conventions.

PRACTICALITIES

SCHEDULE
From 10:00 am to 1:00 pm and from 2:30 to 5:30pm

LOCATION

Seminar 1: VCA, Victoria College of the Arts

Seminars 2, 3 & 4:
Coburg Uniting Church
19 Victoria St, Coburg VIC 3058, Australia


TUITION FOR EACH SEMINAR
AUD 100.00 – unwaged
AUD 150.00 – concession
AUD 200.00 – full price

To confirm the enrollment, a deposit of AUD 50 is due.
Please note that the deposit is non-refundable.
Spots will be given in the order the application was received.

Each seminar will be confirmed as soon it reaches 10 participants.

The totality of the sum generated by the seminars will fund the Helikos School and the setting up of its new program.

REGISTRATION
There is no application form.
To apply to the workshop please email a brief letter of motivation sharing the essence of what leads you to the seminar (s) and a question that you would like to be addressed during the day. Please indicate which of the seminars you wish to attend.

For any question regarding the pedagogical content of the seminars and if you are interested in attending, please send your application to

For enrollment and practical enquiries please contact

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