Individual and group lessons | Game management | Courses and workshops

Theatre ► Improvisation ► Performance

Live Scene Classes | Workshops | Visual © David Noir

Live Scene | Workshops

The workshops are entirely devoted to research and experimentation

Formation Scène Vivante | David Noir | Classes, workshops, coaching | Theatre | Improvisation Method | Performance | Public Speaking | Visual © David Noir

Freedom to be

The workshops offer a very thorough but nevertheless very free approach to acting. It is an instrument that each participant can use to confront his or her own desire to perform and to use the environment offered by the other participants as a rich breeding ground for all types of performances.

For many of us, the creative sense of play is not lost, but often "seized up" by daily life. Paradoxically, "playing" requires work, both psychic and physical, commensurate with the pleasure it gives us in ourselves and with others. Access to this playful dynamic is often buried somewhere within us, under the layers of a consciousness that the difficulty of reality and the complexity of confronting the outside world have made suspicious and serious. It is not a question of providing ready-made solutions to the questions we ask ourselves, but of practising how to answer them, just as one familiarises oneself with the practice of a sport.

A protean playground

It is in this particularly open context that many experiments, attempts and discoveries are made.

The aim is to immerse oneself in the group for 3 hours, focusing on improvisation, self-expression and the search for new spaces of expression.

The workshop is an instrument that each participant can use to confront his or her own performance desires and to use the environment offered by the other participants as a rich breeding ground for all types of performances.

All styles are mixed and matched.

The emphasis is on introspection as much as on invention and playful daring

Everything is done to cultivate the absence of competition in favour of overcoming the preconceived notions that are often fed about the supposed risk-taking involved in 'performing'.

These workshops offer two distinct focuses: collective experimentation and training.

The difference lies in the fact that the training, unlike the moments of experimentation, is not guided in any way. Its formula consists of a large bath into which one simply dives directly in order to be confronted with the others by means of free improvisation alone.

Note: Flexible dress is required for workshops such as internships.

You can pay for your workshop here

3-hour improvisation session offered or organised on request (group of 4 participants minimum)

40€ / participant

Workshop
Workshop
3 hours of improvisation
Price: €40.00

All forms of theatre must be children's games for grown-ups

Living Scene | Benefits

It's alive!

Finding the right formula
The substance in the form

Audiences only emerge from a performance with dignity and growth when they are treated as people who are responsible for what they have come for. Playing together is perhaps the only real social peace that is immediately available.

No real show without freedom of spirit

The stage requires the energy of desire and the truth of acts. These are drawn from a humour that knows no depths or boundaries; without the propriety of convention.

Contact

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Genesis

These workshops are the synthesis and natural extension of a source workshop that existed from 2006 to 2013 in Montreuil near Paris and that has developed over the years around a core of committed and curious people who have given it its identity.

Training for the game

The workshops offer a variety of themes, but their formula remains constant. It stems from a large body of work that has already been extensively developed over the years, although this does not mean that novices cannot take it up. The workshops are open to everyone, with or without previous experience of the stage.

Practice

Training for the game | Improvisation | Experimentation | Development of technical, psychic and physical tools | Development of stage behaviour | Situational exercises | Free courses

Objective: To invent one's own forms of stage creation

The main ambition of these sessions is to explore and exploit the infinite number of ways of being that we can represent and figure thanks to the tools of the imagination, the body and the desire to be embodied in a form other than that to which everyday life forces us. Dramatic representation contains as many compositions as there are individuals on stage at a given moment.

Process: Learning to pilot the "puppet of the self

It starts from nothing - or let's say, from everything, from ourselves, from our immediate environment, from our sensitive memory, from a joke heard the day before, from a smell perceived at the moment, from lines taken at random from texts lying around on the floor, from images, from our physical postures, from the feeling of our bodies, from the feeling of the double that exists in us, from the puppet that we have to learn to pilot after some training.

And then it's there, suddenly it's born. It can die instantly, it can go wrong, it can become grandiose, utopian or dark, joyful or delirious. This is improvisation; the real thing, the basic thing; the thing that theatre has often forgotten. A game that starts with a true moment picked out of the myriad possible truths, whether they are ugly, beautiful, exciting, funny or frightening.

The amusement comes from the euphoria of being at the controls of this big car that is an incarnation, a "character", without justification, without any story or pretext other than its existence

To achieve this, far from repressing it, it is necessary to allow its great anything.

Improvising is, above all, about building a bridge between the inconsistencies and truths that make up us.

The recipe: make yourself a great shredder, of all eras, of all influences, of all memories, and listen to what is going on within you - around you - without respite - while playing. It means finding pleasure in enjoying as much as in offering, in gorging oneself and giving back without worrying about the consequences, in unlearning to constantly worry about the supposed gaze of others with the sole political aim of being loved at all costs.

A sense of humour that we all have somewhere, from early childhood, can help us a lot.

This humour, sometimes peculiar to the human race, this intelligent, messy humour - intelligent because it is messy and indecent - buffoonish and generous; it is what saves us.

Let us not wait to be satisfied with life by others. It is up to us to seek, to find and to help ourselves in the flow of our empirical discoveries and our creative capacity to enjoy everything.

What's the point of having fun?

Rediscover from the inside what it means to have fun on stage: to captivate, astonish, violate, distract, amaze, nourish and make others think through one's own relaxation to face all situations with energy. It is therefore necessary to learn or re-learn how to get rid of the adult garments that camouflage nothing less than an appearance of seriousness, gravity, "responsibility" and other prefabricated answers to the question of existence. Creative play is precisely one response to this existence.

Entering the work as an actor is a way of learning to let go of one's judgements as an outside 'spectator'.

It is real work and work on the real, which is only efficient in a complete denial, including of one's preconceptions and fears. Being there to discover and not to lock oneself into what one thinks is the fruit of one's voluntary immersion in the play space.

Stage potential

There is no good way to hide or show oneself on stage, because it is a device made to obtain the opposite, that is to say the exhibition of oneself in spite of oneself and the unashamed enjoyment that one finds there. These are freedoms to be granted and a certain amount of control to be lost over what is a mixture of fears, ignorance, preconceived ideas, various blockages; all banal, everyday and very understandable things, but which a stage business should help to question.

In short, a long, exciting, tiring journey with no comfortable stopover, but in the end, quite fun.

I have never forced the performers I train or work with to perform acts that they did not want to perform. On the other hand, I don't mind putting them in these situations because it's my job to get them past as many obstacles as possible.

To free oneself from what one thinks one knows about oneself in order to lend oneself to other skins, other ways of thinking, is to approach an author, a style, a production, a role. It is to become 'impersonal' with satisfaction; a virgin and malleable material that reacts all the more energetically when the time comes to unleash the lions in front of others. Modest sincerity is not enough. The rehearsal space is there to face up to its demands for freedom. To express oneself with impunity in front of others is to give pleasure to a spectator beyond convention and beyond what he or she might have expected when coming. This is what dynamic acting is all about, and it has nothing to do with the status of apprentices, amateurs or professionals. Procrastination, refusal of obstacles and procrastination are of course part of the work and should be expected as natural obstacles encountered on the way. What may be perceived as a failure or a renunciation is also a step in the formation of the performer's self.

The theatre is all about flesh, death and thought, all of which are either bitterly or joyfully mixed together, without pretence.

On stage, we are meat to play with and nothing else. It is this discovery that gives us a chance to love the human being for what he is, an animal inhabited by brutal impulses, but nonetheless endowed with consciousness and which copes with this apparent paradox.

Note on stage materials and working contexts

The work carried out in these workshops can call upon all the components of our universe as human beings: psyche, feelings, actions, relationships, sexuality...

The texts, influences and pretexts for the scenes that are developed and shaped are also drawn from the globality of the artistic, literary, philosophical, scientific, political, social and iconographic worlds that surround us, without any concern for adherence to their content. It is up to each of us to draw from them what makes up our own path. Like the genie in the lamp, the theatrical form only brings out what is asked of it. The only thing that counts is the scenic reactivity of these materials, the aim of these workshops being to approach the representation of reality by means of the stage, considering that it is aimed at adults, who are free, consenting and responsible for their actions with respect to themselves and others. None of this experimentation can take place without kindness, natural respect and an intelligence willing to open up. The constant adaptations to the varying number and characteristics of the personalities in the workshops are the lifeblood of this work.

Sessions may be filmed or photographed for educational purposes and to illustrate the pages of this site. Participation in the workshops implies acceptance of these conditions.

Variant

Under the heading workshop sometimes used on the site, it means either a performance developed in the form of a public workshop, or the outcome of a training course which has led to the creation of a continuous or one-off performative form during a day of research.

Flash" workshops

Description

A flash workshop is like a surprise package.

You sign up, you come, you start. The collective improvisation is free. A few supports are thrown in from time to time, images, snippets of texts, sounds and suggested situations... It is a question of seizing them to instinctively develop one's performance and one's state within the scrum. The themes used are discovered at the last moment.

As mentioned above, these workshops have a history. They are originally the fruit of a small group of performance enthusiasts who agreed to follow me in my research and gave this form of practice and training its identity.

The watchwords that naturally emerged were listening, observation, openness, imagination, investment, a taste for trying without fear of judgement. We have always tried to keep "judgement" to a minimum so as to allow the smallest qualities to find their way to the freest expression.

"Free" was and still is obviously a key word, because even if we will never be able to completely escape the psychological and behavioural shackles acquired by imposition during childhood, it is the quest for this utopia that gives us the energy to assume our image and our thoughts as we understand them, once we become adults.

The work produced in the workshop sometimes gives rise to videos made within this educational framework around a particular theme.

Below is the trailer for Freaks on the run, A modest remake of Tod Browning's famous 1932 film Freaks (The Monstrous Parade). The particularity of this film is that it was shot in a day and a half, following the workshop's pedagogical project, which aimed for the participants to render the scenes with the means at hand, after a single viewing of the film in the morning.

Actors from the Scène Vivante workshop | "Freaks à l'arrache" | Photo © David Noir
Play Video

Unlike the 'Swedish' films, I wanted to offer the performers the principle of film à l'arrache as being, not based on parody or derision, but on the idea of an immediate and inventive operation using the means at its disposal at the time the shot is taken. It is therefore not a question of dwelling on a search for quality through labour, but of filming each sequence as efficiently and quickly as possible with the sole aim of obtaining its essence. A feature film should therefore be shot in a day, two days maximum, without being soulless.
For this first experience, the dancers working in the workshop with me agreed to play the game by tackling an express remake of the magnificent " Freaks " by Tod Browning.
To do this we followed the cut of the film published by L'Avant-Scène and watched the original once or twice depending on the sequence. After that, the actors took what they had at hand and brought, on the spot, for the occasion and it was off for about twenty hours of shooting spread over a day and a half.
I, for one, am very proud of what we have achieved. Because the aim of the operation was not only to produce more than a hundred shots in two dozen hours, but to obtain a new product, as different from the original in its style as it is faithful to it in its narration.

With
Any Tingay, Ariane Zarmanti, Aurélien Rotterdam, Cyrille Benhamou, Didier Julien, Fanny Tournaire, *James, Mélanie Derouetteau
Director | Editor : David Noir
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