August 3, 2019: Demidov Organic Actng Technique workshop – 11am to 6pm – Chisenhale Dance Space, London

August 24, 2019: Demidov Organic Acting Technique workshop – 11am to 3pm – Chisenhale Dance Space, London

September 21, 2019: Combined Workshop for Actors: Demidov Organic Acting Technique and Steiner Creative Speech

11am to 6pm, The Trap studio, Exchange Theatre, 46 Oxford Drive, Magdalen Street, London SE12FB.  Five minutes from London Bridge tube.

Cost: £60

The schedule:

11am – 2pm: Demidov Technique with Andrei Biziorek

2pm – 3pm: Lunch break

3pm – 5pm: Creative Speech with Sarah Kane

5pm – 6pm: Combined work with Andrei and Sarah

This combined workshop brings together two highly effective, complementary techniques aimed at engaging the actor’s intuition and freedom and organic expression.

Bookings essential. Contact me here to book for for more info.

The Demidov Organic Acting Technique

The Demidov Technique puts actors in touch with their own creative individuality by teaching them to recognize and follow their artistic instincts.  Improvisational text etudes, at the heart of the technique, stimulate spontaneity and emotional richness in actors, instigating the free flow of subconscious creativity. The Demidov technique is aimed at developing independent actor-creators, capable of generating their own work, and serving as an equal collaborator to the director.

Nikolai Demidov, a close associate of Stanislavsky who disagreed with his approach, discovered the means to remove the obstacles standing in the way of the actor’s subconscious creativity, thus clearing the path for the Creative Nature itself. He designed unique exercises – the Demidov etudes and scales. These exercises give the artist the capacity to cultivate specific qualities, and pave the way for the actor’s sustainable creative state. Moreover, Demidov pioneered organic acting technique that enables actors to access and facilitate their intuitive process. The workshop will introduce the participants to the basic principles of the Demidov technique, and to some of its chief cultures, such as freedom, emptiness and creative calm.

Rudolf Steiner’s Creative Speech

The workshop for professional actors in Creative Speech will provide a complement to the work done with the Demidov technique: it will introduce participants to the essential elements in the approach of speaking and working with text and include first explorations into breathing and gesture, into sound and movement. As a background: words not only bear meaning, within each one – often hidden – there is colour, gesture and movement, and whenever we speak, we are participating in a process of creation, in the life of the Logos, the primal, cosmic word that underlies all existence. Working with Creative Speech invites us to allow the images, gestures, colours and music inherent in sounds and words to inspire our speaking.

Sarah Kane trained in Steiner’s Creative Speech in Germany, Switzerland and the UK, graduating from the London School of Speech Formation in 1989. She has been teaching the technique to professional actors and teachers in Europe and the USA ever since. Sarah has recently begun to contribute Creative Speech to the Demidov Training School in Moscow. Sarah directs and teaches for Michael Chekhov UK, the Michael Chekhov Studio London, the Michael Tschechow-Studio, Berlin, the International Michael Chekhov Academy, Berlin and the Freie Hochschule Stuttgart. She has taught in universities and theatre training programs in the UK (RCSSD, etc) and the USA (CUA, FSU, etc).  She co-founded the Michael Chekhov Centre UK in 1995 with Martin Sharp, and the Michael Chekhov Association (MICHA) in NYC with Joanna Merlin in 1999.

October 5, 2019: Demidov Organic Acting Technique workshop – 1pm to 6pm – Chisenhale Dance Space, London