CHARACTER TRANSFORMATION
with Tom Bentley-Fisher and Elisabet Ràfols

For advanced students of acting or professional actors with a strong desire to grow in the understanding of their own work. This workshop involves challenging the actor to develop the inner resources that lead to the richest possible performance. The work is physical in nature and involves releasing the resistances that stand in the way of physical, mental, intuitive and emotional transformation. The approach to the work makes the assumption that everything is movement, and that much of the actors’ development is finding the means to untie the knots that impede that movement. Thought is movement. Emotion, our intuitions and sensuality are movement. The energy between our self and our partner’s is movement. Movement between the impulse and the action, our inner and outer lives. Voice, gesture, decision making – all is movement. The true actor develops the openness and tools that allow the purity and accidents of movement to be revealed through the most honest means possible. The workshop includes exercises and improvisations that bring the internal and external truths of the character to the stage. The technique also involves the writing and performing of scenarios that will challenge each actor to investigate inner resources they usually mask or ignor in their work. As well as living truthfully within the imaginary circumstances, it is Mr. Bentley-Fisher’s belief that we need to awaken all our inner resources, to experience the world in ways we never knew possible. The workshop is designed for both English and Catalan speaking students. Everyday there will be 4 hour group sessions, preparation work and individual time for students with Tom Bentley-Fisher and Elisabet Ràfols.

TRANSFORMATION THROUGH INNER AND OUTER MOVEMENT
THEMES OF THE WORKHOP

• The inner and outer life. The difference and interplay between them both.
• The movement of Inner Action and its relationship to Outer Action in character.
• Action and Release in Performance.
• The movement qualities of weight, space, time and flow, both transmitting and receiving, and how they take us toward character transformation.
• Acting as an active/doing process. Solving the problem. Playing the objective.
• Going through the process rather than ‘indicating’ the process.
• Discovering the ‘shadow move’ of character – living within the accident.
• Creating the unknown characteristics without losing the moment-by-moment truth in performance.