WHAT IS ACTION THEATER™
Action Theater is an improvisational physical theatre training and performance method created by Ruth Zaporah.
The practice of Action Theater incorporates the disciplined exploration of embodied exercises that lead to increased skills of strong, clear, spontaneous, and artful communication.
Action Theater addresses and expands the vocabularies of expression including: movement, vocalization, and speech. Action Theater is a tool to examine one's perceptive and responsive process, bringing awareness to and thereby disempowering distracting thoughts of self obsessions, fears, judgments and analysis.
The exercises of Action Theater isolate the components of action - time, space, shape and energy - so they can be examined, experienced, and altered in order to expand the expressive palette. Students increase their ability to hold and express emotion, dance with their own poetry and recover lost personal material. Composition, listening and relationship are deconstructed to be reassembled with greater awareness. Acting from a sense of play, students are encouraged to venture into transpersonal realms, accessing intelligence more encompassing and boundless than their personal experience.
Awareness and play are fundamental to the practice, as both are portals to spontaneous imagination. Within this orientation, the student is no longer bound by the conventional interpretations of reality. They are free to roam throughout the grand spectrum of possibilities, discovering who they are in the moment. Every exercise acts as a mirror, reflecting back to the student their patterns and flights of freedom.
Action Theater is also a performance method, although many of the practitioners come from other performance forms or walks of life. Fundamental to the practice of Action Theater is an embodied presence in performance, where the experiencing of the body informs the content of the moment, moment by moment. For example: how the hand, experiencing the hand, reaching for the glass is as important as reaching for the glass in order to drink from it. Intention is created simultaneously with action in the moment of performance. This awareness in action invites the possibilities of freshness intrinsic to improvisational performance. The Action Theater method offers a map, a way to proceed.
The trainings are appropriate for the beginner, the explorer and the professional.
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