The second and third workshops of the Advanced Training School in Social Community Theatre have recently concluded.
The first workshop, lead by Giulia Innocenti Malini of the Catholic University of Milan, focused on the the direct experimentation of conducting theatre interventions and helped the participants to undestand the main criteria of leading theatre excercises through the re-reading of the work process and the feedback from the group. The second workshop proposed, instead, a sequence of theatre exercises oriented to the staging of the group starting from improvisation, to refine the stage presence and to manage the relationship with the public. The two trainers, Maurizio Bertolini and Alberto Pagliarino of SCT Centre, asked the participants to bring some objects: a suitcase, an umbrella, an amulet, a dress that they would choose to prepare for the great moment of the overseas landing.
Using excerpts of the Franz Kafka “America” novel, the participants experienced the group’s creative work – from tableaux vivants to improvisations with costumes – and they trained the conductor’s gaze on the staging and the interaction with the other comrades and the group.
The third workshop, lead by Alessandra Rossi Ghiglione of SCT Centre and Christian Castellano of the Sudatestorie Teatro Ricerca Company, was dedicated to drama in the social theater. During the workshop we tried to answer these questions: what is the dramaturgical gaze and how to train it? What does it mean to work with a group starting from a text? How do you analyze a text from a dramatic point of view? The participants engaged in a work on the characters: starting from the description of one of the characters that could be found in two chapters of the novel, how to recreate his most complete identikit and build effective characters on the scene?
“Training the dramaturgical gaze has been complex: becoming aware of the cultural lenses with which to look at the text, trying to understand the shapes without interpreting them, leaving them as open as possible to the imagination …”