PROGRAMME

Workshop

"Psychophysical Training
Through Movement Improvisation"

John Britton is currently Senior Lecturer in Performance at the University of Huddersfield. He specialises in psychophysical training and ensemble development. John is the course leader for the University’s MA Ensemble Physical Theatre:
Training and Performance.

Before becoming an academic in 2004, John Britton worked for fifteen years as a director, performer, writer and educator in the UK, Australia and Europe. Now he mainly focuses on the training of individuals and ensembles and on directing Ensemble Physical Theatre.

With his company, Quiddity Theatre, John Britton is involved in an ongoing series of entirely improvised physical performances, known as "Spontaneous Combustion". By the end of 2007, Quiddity Theatre will have performed 29 such performances in the UK, Australia and Germany. In 2008 they will perform "Spontaneous Combustion" in Mexico City.

John’s approaches to psychophysical and ensemble training of performers – which underpin the work he does on the MA Ensemble Physical Theatre – are based on practical research into both European Laboratory Theatre and into Dance/Movement Improvisation techniques that emerged from America in the 1970s. However they have become is own rigorous exploration and development.

In addition to the work at Huddersfield, John Britton runs workshops and gives papers regularly at conferences and in a freelance capacity. Recent presentations have taken place at CPR (2004), Dartington College (2005) ESMAE, Portugal (2004), Melbourne and Sydney, Australia (2006), Central School of Speech and Drama (2007), Ada Studio, Berlin (2007), Royal Welsh School of Speech and Drama (2007).

Workshop Overview

The workshop will introduce some of the foundational attitudes that underpin John’s approaches to psychophysical training – including concentration, task and pleasure. John Britton will suggest ways of structuring an initial training session that allow exercises to function as physical learning and as psychophysical model/metaphor. Participants will work through a combination of improvised and fixed physical training scores to develop awareness both of individual capacity and concentrational structures to allow the channelling of that capacity towards performance.

John is particularly concerned with encouraging dual awareness of the world inside the skin and the world outside. Our internal world, through exploration and discipline, is subject to our control and self-development. That which is outside of us is outside of our control and, if we are to be present in the moment of performance, we must develop the capacity instantly to recognise and respond to the impulses that we receive. We must embrace the unexpected and use it to fuel our internal discipline. It is the interplay between the internal and the external that allows for the development of individual capacity in the context of Ensemble.