info@illocoteatro.com
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Neutral Mask
Our body knows many more things than we are aware of. When we are born, a series of impositions, cultural factors, habits, frustrations, and vices shape our body into something that has not belonged to us since birth. Our breath is calibrated to the rhythms of our lives and our days, and we are not used to recognizing it, let alone listening to it. However, breath is what makes us alive, human beings who speak and act in a space. Breath and the body are the vibrating strings of our main instrument: the body. Understanding how it works can allow us to master it and use it consciously; it allows us to play the sweetest or most strident melodies, just as we would with a guitar or a violin.
The workshop we propose aims to provide guiding tools that the actor must know in order to begin and continue a journey of approaching their own body and its expressive possibilities.
The tool through which this journey will proceed is the mask, understood as an object, the actor's costume, which forces them only to perceive the lines and contours of their own body and of this in space, and then to free it. To be free to express oneself only through one's own body, even before words, it is necessary to feel that there are laws that govern space and movement. Only after experiencing these laws can the body free itself from them and become creative and expressive.
THE JOURNEY
DISCOVERING NEUTRALITY
The workshop will start from the knowledge of one's own neutral state through the experience of the neutral mask. This object, which is placed on the face, must allow the wearer to reach the state of neutrality that precedes action, a state of receptivity regarding what surrounds us, without inner conflicts.
Historically, the neutral mask is mainly a pedagogical tool that emerged from the work of Jacques Copeau, who in France in the 1920s sought in the mask a way to return to the actor's body.
The neutral mask allows what is universal in each of us to emerge and be worked on. It is therefore a work on the human as a body, as a human being who, before being the bearer of a drama, a story, a character, etc., is the bearer of a presence. Pedagogically, the neutral mask allows students to work on their stage presence before any storytelling. It is a work on silence, on state, on presence, and fundamentally, on space.
If we imagine a body as a sheet of paper, the neutral mask allows us to iron the sheet until all the "creases" are "smoothed out." Each of us is a sheet that carries a series of creases, partly linked to our own genetics, our own race, and partly linked to our emotional history, to how the environment has influenced us, just as the wind can act on a tree, so that the same species of tree in different places will have different shapes while always being the same tree.
Ultimately, the neutral mask is a tool for developing stage presence and not the character
info@illocoteatro.com
+39 3336035061