WORKSHOP BY PETER SERGE BUTKO.

Special acting and movement exercises are aimed to improve actors skills in relation to his solo stage, presence, stage space, inanimate objects, puppets, stage lighting. All with the emphasis on keeping the audience’s attention.

The exercises unfold, repeat and alternate in an order that enables the participants to go through several stages of a creative process in detail and with precision. The pace of these exercises is initially deliberately slow, thus allowing the participants to examine carefully certain principles of the play.

All of this is during the workshop is applicated on work with puppet. Exercises are therefore a transformation of human movement, combined with the study of puppetry techniques. An important part of the workshop is the teaching of playing with a puppet techniques. Then, in the next phase, after understanding how the human body works on stage, participants learn their own, original way how to work with the puppet.

The main emphasis of this workshop is placed on the aesthetic execution of individual exercises whereby students explore the emotive charge of the relationship between actor and puppet. These methods are practically inspired by the study of history of ritual theatre and its abundant use of puppets and sculptures.

At this workshop participants create, and perform their individual pieces which are thereafter jointly discussed and analysed. Thanks to this, a small theatre performance can arise as a result of the workshop.

         The workshop is led by theatre director and teacher Peter Serge Butko, whose artistic reach is wide. Among others, in the 90´s he learned techniques of working with puppets from old professionals in few theaters of former Czechoslovakia. Then he mastered the techniques of puppet guiding which he later developed and elaborated. He also studied classical styles, movement, its evolution and internal life in the work of an actors and dancers.