Theatre is poetry, derived from the books, and then humanised.
It speaks and shouts, it weeps and is in despair.
Theatre needs persons who walk the stage in clothes of poetry.
While viewing, we must be able to see their bones and blood.
Federico García Lorca > Images from a
video by Gitta Gsell [Augen Blicken]
The Aesthetics of Vulnerability <
Persons in
Clothes of Poetry
Persons in Clothes of Poetry is a Workshop about using text on
stage and about thinking, speaking and moving as an actor.
Acting is mainly thinking. To be a good actor you need passion, emotions and intuition.
You need a trained voice and a healthy body. You need an open mind and a lot of imagination and the ability to reproduce
events that you have experienced in your own life. You have to make
the things you read, hear or see, become alive before an
audience.
Certain things about being on stage you can't learn. You happen
to be an actor with charisma or you're not. A lot of other
things you can actually learn. By training, by doing exercises and especially by watching great actors in their
work. We also work on story-telling, a very important part of
acting: making up stories or telling stories that really
happened and while doing this, showing the others your emotions,
the different expressions of your voice, face and body.
This is how and why I like to work with (young) persons: to teach them the basic principles of acting and by doing
this give them some Clothes of Poetry.
Together with
Eurudike de Beul
[the wonderful singer in Le Salon]
and some other people, Simon is teaching again a Summer-Workshop
in Belgium [St. Niklaas].
Workshops in 2004
In 2003, together with his friend ands colleagues Franck
Chartier and Gabriela Carrizo [Peeping Tom], Simon Versnel gave
his first Workshop in Corsica. This was followed by a Workshop
in Zurich, in January 2004 and for the Summer of this same year
he was asked to teach in Vienna, during the Impulstanz-festival.
The workshop in Vienna in July was a very nice experience. There
were 13 students, 12 women and 1 man, all from different
countries. They were working very hard and serious and were very
talented. They opened-up for each other and showed a lot of
their personal emotions and because of that a nice and safe atmosphere was created, which everybody liked a lot. I sincerely
hope that all these people continue to dance and act and that I
can see them on stage once more.
