About Infinite Spark’s Physical Training
Infinite Spark is part of a living lineage of theater trainings, disciplines, practices, and traditions. These traditions come from international origins—Eastern Europe, Western Europe, Asia, and elsewhere—and each one centers the body as the foundational tool of theatrical creation and expression.
We offer a progression of ways to encounter the training process, beginning with:
FOUNDATIONS TRAINING: The Performer’s Playground
Foundations Training is a guided hour of rigorously playful exercises that take place in an ensemble environment. Trainings are designed to engage and sensitize the stage performer’s physical instrument, by directly exercising one’s embodied imagination, expressive agility, and sense of play. Sourced from international theater traditions, each session leaps into action, accumulating diverse experiences and approaching everything through the lens of play.
The Approach to Training is two-fold:
1) It is a long-form practice meant to be encountered regularly, as a practice that builds on itself the more regularly one attends.
2) Yet also, as a flexible “drop-in” practice, Foundations Training is designed for access at any point, whether it's your first session, or hundredth. Each Training session follows a similar format, but is unique in its content and exercises. This makes it endlessly fresh, and flexible enough that new attendees can jump in at any time, and long-time attendees can miss individual sessions (or for stretches of time), without losing a sense of progression, evolution, development.
All bodies and experience levels are welcome, including NO previous movement experience. While Foundations Training is a professional-level training that has been taught in both undergrad and grad programs and in workshops in New York City and internationally, it welcomes (and challenges!) participants of all levels of ability & experience, as a collective / ensemble practice. This breadth of access is possible due to the way that Training centers the participant’s experience of it, over merely “getting it right” technically.
FOUNDATIONS TRAINING: The Performer’s Playground is available to join now!
For details and to register, click HERE!
DEVELOPMENTAL TRAINING: The Performer’s Toolkit
Training in specific forms and disciplines takes the instinctual play and exploration of Foundations Training to the next level, by focusing on the specific traditions and practices from which Foundations Training draws its exercises and inspirations. The format evolves from “open training” to “extended class series”. Over the course of 6-10 sessions, Rachel and Jon introduce class members to particular disciplines, facilitate an active deep dive into the forms and exercises associated with those practices, all of which culminates in a class-member-devised application (i.e., scene, scenario, or composition). The theory and principles undergirding each tradition will be approached experientially first, before eventually integrating intellectual information. The integration process is approached via periodic discussions, and addressing questions as they arise organically from the practice.
DEVELOPMENTAL TRAINING will be forthcoming.
[Some experience with Foundations Training is required, before taking Developmental Training.]
To get started with FOUNDATIONS TRAINING, click HERE!
ADVANCED WORK: Integration and Applications
Advanced Work is where training becomes the work itself. This section culminates the training process with active building, devising, and creation of new work, by incorporating the principles, trainings, and methodologies from all prior levels. Trainees become creators, whether as an individual who wants to apply these approaches to their performance work, or as a creator who wants to make new or original work (either for oneself, or for a company). In all cases, Advanced Work is a community and ensemble centered platform for the performer’s and ensemble’s interests. As a capstone, Infinite Spark produces a periodic showcase for student-created, led, and produced work.
DEVELOPMENTAL AND ADVANCED TRAINING will be forthcoming.
To get started with FOUNDATIONS TRAINING, click HERE!
BASIC PRINCIPLES: OUR APPROACH TO TRAINING
Our trainings exist first and foremost to be experienced directly—by the actor’s body, and in tandem with everyone else in the room—in ensemble.
In theater, in ways distinct from other media, the actor is both the player of the instrument, and the instrument itself. It follows that a well-tuned instrument will benefit an actor in their efforts to embody, characterize, inhabit, and express.
<<The continuous task…to become a form with desires…>> * Therefore the exercises of physical training provide open-ended forms through which the actor may discover, explore, digest, interact with, integrate, and dynamically embody (i.e., play through) one’s inner material: feelings, psychology, and energies—but most of all the imagination. (* Wolcz)
Over time, the actor is sensitized and equipped to organize and express themselves at the level of reflex, for the entire range of concrete, spatial, expressive, and collaborative tasks that will confront them in rehearsal and on stage.
In short, we learn how to play—and to play fully—specifically for the conditions of stage performance. From this playful foundation of direct, experience-based practice, all other elements of the actor’s craft and practice emerge and gain fluency—inside and out.
To get started with FOUNDATIONS TRAINING, click HERE!
