What : Michael Chekhov workshop hosted by Sinead Rushe
Where: Sherman Cymru
When:  Saturday 25th 10 - 5.
Number : 10
Cost : £20

Contact : livingpictures@btopenworld.com
 
Sinead is an accomplished teacher of this highly physical practice and is the director of Diary of a madman opening next week at Sherman Cymru. We will be exploring the method using Hamlet as text (Arden version). Please fi...nd below some information about Michael Chekhov. If you want to join us please send an email to livingpictures@btopenworld.com to reserve a place. The course is part funded by the Arts Council of Wales.

Michael Chekhov: An outstanding Russian actor, director and teacher of acting lived and worked in Russia, in different European countries, and in the USA. Nephew of the famous writer and dramatist Anton Chekhov, an ideal pupil of Constantine Stanislavsky and considered by Stanislavsky to be his most brilliant actor. Marked by the Soviets for arrest, he escaped to the West bringing us his invaluable methods and techniques;

Chekhov's technique is a completely imaginative approach to experiencing the truth of the moment. According to Chekhov the work of the actor is to create an inner event which is an actual experience occurring in real time within the actor. This inner event as it is being experienced by the actor is witnessed by the audience as an outward expression related to the contextual moment of the play. This event and the ability to create it belong to what Michael Chekhov calls the Creative Individuality of the actor, and is not directly tied to his personality. This Creative Individuality allows the artist actor to use parts of himself that are not just the smaller meaner more banal elements that make up his daily life, but rather parts of his unconscious, where dwell more universal and archetypal images. In Chekhov's own words:

  "All you experience in the course of your life, all you observe and think, all that makes you happy or unhappy, all your regrets or satisfactions, all your love or hate, all you long for or avoid, all your achievements and failures, all you brought with you into this life at birth -your temperament, abilities, inclinations etc., all are part of the region of your so called subconscious depths. There being forgotten by you, or never known to you they undergo the process of being purified of all egotism. They become feelings per se. Thus purged and transformed, they become part of the material from which your Individuality creates the psychology, the illusory "soul" of the character."

  (To The Actor by Michael Chekhov)