Category: Workshops
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Laurel and Hardy dance to David Bowie
Monday 11th January 2016. I woke to the news that David Bowie had died. To avoid being overwhelmed with sadness and mainly to try to console my lover, who is a great fan of both Bowie and Laurel and Hardy, I made a mash-up tribute video – and posted a link on Facebook, thinking that […]
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Marcel Marceau and me
Seeing Marcel Marceau close up, teaching at his school in Paris, was one of the most inspiring experiences of my life. Marceau was an iconic figure, who can be credited with single-handedly reviving and elevating the art of mime to a new level of popular recognition in the twentieth century through his extensive international touring, […]
One exercise I sometimes include in my workshops involves one student reading a speech, while another finds gestures to go with it. It’s a slightly artificial exercise, as the sheer amount of gesticulating which results is way more than even I would use in performance, but it does help illustrate and exercise the connection between […]
“Look at me! Look at me! Look at me! Look at me!”
Dustin Hoffman reveals the truth about the famous Olivier ‘try acting’ quote and movingly describes their last meeting.
Let’s see if I can write this without crying… I was teaching an afternoon class in a language school last month and I heard, floating up from the street below, maybe from a shop or from a portable soundbox from a street act in Pavilion Gardens, a very familiar tune which stopped me mid sentence. […]
This has been on my Workshop Music playlist right from the beginning although I don’t have a particular exercise associated with it – I sometimes play it for a bit of dramatic atmosphere as the students are coming in. There’s not a lot more to say other than it is a haunting theme tune from […]
During my workshops I occasionally give a demonstration performance of an extract from Berkoff’s story ‘Big Fish’ from ‘Graft – Tales of an Actor‘. This is the soundtrack I use as backing for the beginning of that story: I was nine when tv news reports of Mishima’s death (by ritual suicide) made a deep impression […]
Here’s another track I frequently use in my workshops (usually during the ‘Beehive’ exercise). I was introduced to this by the artist Roger Dean – best known for his fantasy landscapes on album covers of prog rockers Yes. In the mid 1990s Roger was asked to design the landscapes for a viking-based computer game being […]
In my workshops I usually direct an exercise which is a slow motion banquet (after Berkoff’s Salome). Sometimes that exercise goes to a third take and the students are required to improvise a spoken story while listening to music, and I usually use this haunting track by Harold Budd. After Berkoff saw me performing his […]
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Wim Mertens – ‘La Fosse’
This is a live version of the music I use for The Banquet exercise – since I am so often asked after my workshops what it is. The track is called La Fosse and it’s by the prolific Belgian minimalist composer Wim Mertens. Here it is performed by the Wim Mertens Ensemble live at de […]
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