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Writer's pictureNicoletta Cappello

WTF IS PHYSICAL THEATRE?


Despite its great influence in most disciplines of contemporary creation, in the field of the arts it is still a little known genre in its peculiarities, although it has the most potential to revolutionize education today.


PHYSICAL THEATRE

What is physical theater?

Physical theater expresses concepts, ideas, and feelings through non-verbal action. The word and the voice are included, being approached in their most emotional and visceral communicative aspects, going beyond their logical meaning. The actress is not only an interpreter, but the author of hers, her own pieces, which are born from her own body as an artistic subject.

The aesthetics of each artist derives from the peculiar characteristics of her own body that determine the uniqueness of her mode of movement and her artistic language. In this context, physical differences and non-normative bodies are seen as a source of creative, aesthetic and ethical richness. It is not a case that was born in the 1960s, artistically collecting the concerns of social movements, feminists, environmentalists and pacifists.


Developing independently of a text, physical theater adopts a variety of scenic languages ​​-clown, mask, objects, video-art, lights, performance, puppets, sound / word- that interact at the same time and are combined according to the needs expressive of each artist, founding the character of their individual aesthetics. Freed from the dramatic repertoire, physical theater adopts collective creation as a methodology for creating new texts based on a topic of common interest. In collective creation, the functions of the theater are horizontally and flexibly distributed, and artistic decisions are negotiated between all members of the group, thus producing a negotiation of a plurality of points of view that often leads to a feature of complexity in the presentation of the staging and its substantive thesis. Independent from the literary Canon, collective creation brings to theater issues that concern us at the community level in the present, even reading the repertoire in light of them.

By putting physical perception at the center of the creative process, theater enhances the body as an autonomous creative subject, capable of expressing its own stories and imaginaries. Representing an oppressed subjectivity, the body is the appropriate place to generate discourses of decolonization, generating situated reflections, rooted in a territory and a point of view. In the educational field, physical theater has the potential to reverse the fundamental colonizing principle that establishes the hierarchical superiority of the mind over the body, promoting the creative union between thought and physical action and putting into play the felt experience as a way of thinking.

Open applications at Folkwang Universität der Künste till 15 November 2021! If you want to move your brain&booty you cant miss it!

It's the best study experience everrrr!


Link here:




Other Physical Theater Schools / Referents in Europe:

Folkwang University of Arts Essen

Jacques Lecoq Paris School

LISPA London

Philip Gaulier School

Familie Flöz

Resad Madrid _Teatro del Gesto

Institut del Teatre_ Barcelona

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