CASTING YOUR SHADOW
This 2-day workshop is designed for actors who want to explore hidden sides of their personality, just out of curiosity or because they feel trapped in a stereotype, such as ”nice guy/bad guy“.
Exploring your shadow or suppressed parts can lead to more fullness and more variety in your acting. You certainly might feel more alive and more spontaneous.
First, we find out through exercises which may be your suppressed parts and then we choose the most dominant ones, namely the most distant part from the self you usually show in your daily life.
In the next steps, we give that suppressed identity all the space it needs to express itself, not by talking about it, but through ”practical acting exercises“ (solo-scenarios and improvised scenes), so you can physicalize it. Explore how it would walk, enter a room, behave in different situations and see which actions would be different from your usual actions. Does it act with more will power? Does it make decisions quicker? Is it less self-doubting or is it carefree? Is it more demanding or more patient?
All this is less about analysing the psyche and much more about having fun. We don’t want to get you trapped in self-examination, but instead we want to widen your range as an actor, to enable you to play with more colours, to create a role which you may use in future projects or which just helps you to be in contact with your full potential and resources.
What’s important in this journey is that I discovered that a lot of actors, even some well-trained actors, have a tendency to always use the same parts of themselves, even when they play someone else. For example, often just by the choices they make, some actors unconsciously end up playing the role of victims or humiliated outlaws. Others have big problems in revealing their shyness and vulnerability, because a part of them thinks it is a weakness. You can see this in the way they act. Sometimes they carry out actions which are not really the ones of the character, because they have resistances. The action “pleading for help“ will still be mixed with coolness or anger, or the action “making sure the other person understands that if she/he ever insults you again, you will kill him/her“ will sound apologetic nevertheless.