IntraCultural Drop-In with Kristine Landon-Smith
March-May 2018
Sundays March 11th/April 22nd/May13th /May 27th
Time: 2pm-5pm
Alive to Play: IntraCultural Practice
Join Kristine Landon-Smith and associates for 3 hours of dedicated actors play. Kristine will lead the group through a varied host of exercises, improvisations and clowning work to help you fine tune your actors instinct of play and complicité. Sessions limited to 15 participants in order to for each actor to have quality time on floor.
This class is perfect for newbies and experienced actors alike. Acting is like any art; it needs to be practiced in order for the artistry to excel. These exercises, improvisations and clowning work are honed to allow the actor to be alive in the moment, to work with and develop an actor’s instinct and to find the pleasure to play with their fellow cast mates.
Kristine co-founded and was co-artistic director of Tamasha Theatre Company for over 20 years. She taught at Philippe Gauiler's École, in drama schools across the UK and led the acting programme at NIDA Sydney, Australia. Now a freelance director and acting coach Kristine specialises in Intracultural practice- a practice that embraces the cultural context of the actor as an individual to create highly nuanced and authentically truthful performance.
Student Reflection 1
Observing Kristine’s process of producing work has allowed me to discover a whole new perspective on approaching text, staging and the craft of acting itself. As an emerging director, I have tried in the past to independently research the work of complicité and the craft of play. However, Kristine’s process has allowed me to understand how it can be delicately applied throughout a rehearsal process. On one production, the actors found the text challenging to perform, but Kristine’s techniques freed the actors from any creative blockages when approaching the material. They all noted a feeling of freedom in the space, self-control and agency, once given the tools of play. These tools of play were provided through simple yet powerful games focusing on listening, physical freeness and openness. The craft of play was nurtured amongst the group and thus, at the end of the process, was executed in a beautiful way by all cast members. Kristine has the fantastic ability to allow complicité to be available to all levels of experience. In the intracultural drop in sessions, the craft of play is opened up, revealing its essence to both beginners and advanced participants to explore time and time again. As a participant in the sessions, I was able to see the breadth in which such practice can become effective even with the simplest exploration of complicité. Kristine has shown me the importance of understanding complicité as a muscle, it must be trained and developed over time. This is why the drop in sessions are a fantastic opportunity to expose oneself to play. They are freeing, energising and provide the artists with their own agency to explore further in other sessions or one’s own.
Observer/Director