Individual and group lessons | Game management | Courses and workshops

Theatre ► Improvisation ► Performance

Live Scene | Method d'free improvisation | Visual: capture d'screenshot "Iconicum" workshop © David Noir | Actress: Any Tingay
Live Scene | Free improvisation method | Visual: screenshot "Iconicum" workshop © David Noir | Actress: Any Tingay

Living Scene | Method

One method, a few techniques, an infinity of interpretations

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

A single objective: to feel truly free to express oneself on stage

Free to improvise, to think up a text, to give birth to its characters.

Many schools and courses claim to cover all the fields and all the techniques of the living arts through a vertiginous multiplication of teaching. Here, it is the diversity of temperaments that influences a single process: Learning to be yourself in front of others

Small note in the form of a parenthesis

Freedom on stage is a disposition that can be learned, a notion that can be tamed, a behaviour that can be revealed. Dozens of methods can be developed to open the way to this ability, but the important thing is to adapt these techniques to one's own personality. Indeed, not all resistance is good to overcome. Some are useful and serve as signals that indicate exactly where a potential can be hidden. There is no point in brutalizing them or blindly martyring the ramparts they build against the demands of making them permeable. Microsurgery must be carried out with the patient's consent.

"| Improvisation on one of the microfilms from "Definitive Creatures" | Microfilms © David Noir
"| Improvisation on one of the microfilms from "Definitive Creatures" | Microfilms © David Noir
End of parenthesis

The Living Scene method is based on the principle of continuous training in the practice of the stage.

The method of these drama and improvisation classes was naturally developed through years of experience on stage and in contact with the students. It continues to be enriched, questioned and refined thanks to this same context, day after day, experience after experience. As long as we take an interest in it, everything that has been experienced in this way can be passed on to others.

 

A simple technique

  • The performer is led to move continuously from text to improvisation and vice versa.
  • The primary goal is to gradually erase any discontinuity between these two ways of playing.
  • The aim is for the student to feel confident and free in all circumstances in front of an audience.

 

A teaching method

The exercises propose an instinctive and simultaneous approach to improvisation, performance and theatre.

The objective being to reveal or develop the scenic potential of each student, the principle of the courses is to take the time to take an interest in his personality, without pressure or unnecessary stress, but with a continuous demand.

Making this requirement understood is an integral part of a pedagogy that aims to make each person autonomous and more enlightened about his or her abilities.

Moving fluidly from a dialogue text to the emotion of an improvised situation can quickly become addictive as soon as self-confidence sets in and develops. It is through this process based on the pleasure of being able to play oneself as an instrument that a whole construction is elaborated and consolidated in the student's psyche

It is therefore a question of putting this "self" to work, without which nothing sincere and valuable can be produced on a stage. Little by little we understand the need to "play true", far from any fabrication, in order to be able to give life to the most baroque and senseless personalities that make up the dramatic repertoire, but of course also our own individualities.

The sessions can be oriented and animated by alternating between working on the text and stimulating the imagination through images and sound.

Living Scene | Benefits

It's alive!

Finding the right formula
My teaching practice

My career as an actor and director as a teacher has been an extremely rich and diverse experience for me, perfectly complementary to my personal preoccupations with stage performance and interpretation.

The offer

Scène Vivante offers courses, training, classes and coaching designed to discover and deepen the practice of the stage in all its forms through techniques of guided or free improvisation.

Contact

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Thinking and living through play can become a way of being and a way of life.

Although the methods used here use a number of techniques acquired through experience or developed ex nihilo, the aim is not to learn anything formal, but to equip oneself with the right tools for each person. The aim is to drill a communication path - a kind of breach in itself - between real life and fictional worlds, by developing a game that leads the person concerned towards his or her own complacency and fantasy.

This "letting go" must be king, once certain rules expressed later in this presentation have been integrated. Simple rules of benevolence towards one's partners, which should be cultivated so that the quintessence of a subtle humour, of a subtle love even, too rare in everyday life, emerges, and which will offer the great children that are the actors, the most trivial as well as the most refined creative latitudes, which precisely make us no longer children.

Dramatic art thus crystallizes in those curious interstices formed by the gaps between the pleasures delivered by our high consciousness and those felt thanks to our deep infantilism.

New standards, new baggage

It is important to be well equipped to move forward on these paths, often abandoned since early childhood and left in the middle of wasteland.

Well conducted, the theatrical game is an acid that cracks the carapace of the social individual and allows human substance, somewhat freed from the codes of civilization, to flow, to ooze towards a new world, a new place of exteriorization; it is the fictional part of oneself, playful in depth, that is constructed, as the resin solidifies outside the incision made in the bark. Arbitrariness and illogicality are then very precious data to be integrated into a scenic elaboration, otherwise we risk falling back into an argumentation. civilized...as long as it's well tied up and held together by the tension of desire. It is by there that one will find the amusement, the true; unsuspected pleasure of "making the andouille" celestically. From this is born the notion of an individualized, mature and intrinsically childlike actor that we will discuss.

Scène Vivante proposes to make these incisions, in a protected environment, and to model with the participants the raw material that will express itself. The aim of this practice is, let's recall it, to first obtain from oneself a specific, identifiable instrument, which we will then learn to play little by little, step by step.

To do so, it is necessary to work on collective and individual exercises of the most varied nature possible. Here is a non-exhaustive list: 

Body space setting, automatic writing, sensitive and textual improvisations, use of singing and shouting, character development from minute details of oneself, discovery of one's vocal palette and the virtual masks that result from it, episodes of relaxation and improvised dance, approach of scenes from the repertoire and all textual and sound materials that can be interpreted by the body and the mind...

Always kept in the background of this permanent practice of the body, a theoretical portrait of what is happening, so that each and everyone can conceptualize the paths he or she manages to open.

The work carried out within the framework of these courses, coaching sessions, workshops or training courses calls upon all the components of our sensitive universe of being human.

Reality and its realities, the inescapable foundations of fiction

Learning the tools of the theatre does not require personal adherence to the intellectual, textual or iconographic content that is part of the exercise. Nevertheless, although being warned, it is not excluded that participants may find themselves confronted with images, concepts, words or situations likely to shock or impress them. It is quite clear that no obligation can be imposed on anyone to perform an act or utter words that he or she considers contrary to himself or herself. It is equally obvious that the sessions are intended to open up avenues for participants to practice, not to provide them with turnkey solutions, nor to encourage them to restrain themselves. It is up to each person to understand for himself or herself the process he or she has come to undertake.

One of the aims of this teaching being to approach the representation of reality through the stage, it is essential to understand that it is aimed at adults, free, consenting and responsible for their actions towards themselves and others. This is why the only limits given to the framework of these courses are the respect for the integrity of physical persons and their property. These are merely the ethical and common sense boundaries imposed by representation in such a context. Having recalled these precepts, it is equally necessary to specify that no academicism or religious morality should preside over the work produced within the framework proposed here.

The incessant adaptations to the variable number and characteristics of the personalities making up the courses and training courses, make the life of this work and suppose to consider this teaching as including many variations around exercises often repeated because adapted to each member. Each situation brought by the stage being unique and different from another neighbouring one, one must expect, as in music, to multiply the combinations of games of the same nature, in order to develop a sense of playfulness that is often "seized" by daily life, which may require an unexpected effort by the person who until then saw the stage as an opportunity to let off steam.

Paradoxically, Play request from workIt is the measure of the pleasure that it allows to unfold in oneself and with others.

True jubilation when it allows us to pierce the layers of rigid protection accumulated to the rhythm of our confrontations with the outside world, we must not forget or deny that theatre and the stage have to do with disillusionment, the finiteness of our lives and the lucid awareness of the moment that passes and will not return.

This double level of contrasting and permanent exchanges in the process of the sincerity of the stage play, makes it an ingeniously childish practice, but intended for "big adults".

Below, fragments of the recording of the public restitution of Thursday, February 14, 2019 at the MPAA Broussais (Paris 14th) of an improvised performance entitled "Imaginary Rituals", made from a canvas of action modules proposed by David Noir to Ariel Py, Mickaël Berdugo, and Muriel Galera during the preparatory workshops of February 9 and 10 organized at the MPAA on the initiative of the Generator, a place of art and performance in Gentilly.

Important note

It is obvious to anyone who has browsed through the pages of this site, that the body and nudity hold an important place in my research and my creations. Nevertheless it is important to know that the heart of these courses remains centered on the techniques of theater and scenic expression. Therefore, they do not imply nor forbid nudity. It is simply not the primary subject.

So let those who would like to follow this teaching not worry unnecessarily about it. While nothing that encourages experimentation is prohibited within the framework proposed here, as far as respect for others is concerned, nothing, for the same reasons, is obviously binding or compulsory either.

For very different reasons, which have more to do with the maturity required to benefit from these courses, they are only open to individuals who have reached the age of majority.

Another important point: Scène Vivante offers continuous training, in other words, intense training in which all the elements come together, but "à la carte" and possibly spread out over time. Such a system is intended to approach, understand and allow the audience to appropriate this singular universe that is the experience of acting on stage under the gaze of an audience. In the context of the courses and workshops, this audience will be made up of the people following this program and myself. It is therefore not part of this pedagogical project to produce a show except in the exceptional context of courses open to the participation of an audience in the form of workshops.

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