Plastiques

Jerzy Grotowski was a Polish theatre director, his method to acting had a new fresh approach to other practitioners, he believed that the actor was 'holy' and that when they were on stage their body was publically offered for the audience. His work was expressive and created new dimensions in theatre.

His training methods were some of the ones we began to use in lessons to push our bodies physically, his exercises had influences from yoga and pilates and aimed to get control over every part of the body, iscolating every limb so the actor never forgot how to use certain parts of their body, the exercises were extremely acrobatic and challenging.

"When we're small children, our voice and body express together. When babies laugh, they laugh with their whole bodies. But as we get older, language becomes, as Wangh says, a substitute for physical expression. By the time we're adults, we've totally divorced our words from our bodies. We also shy away from variations in pitch and volume. We do this because it's the acceptable thing to do." ( jill place 2005)

but as actors we have to be able to tap back into that and begin to use our whole bodies again, in order to connect with our emotions our whole body needs to feel it, our voice needs to go to new extremes of projection.

Some of his relaxation techniques were influenced by practitioners like Stanislavski who we had previously looked at before, both of the practioners wanted the actors to be 100 percent engaged focused and commited in what they do and in order to do this their mental and physical exercises were to get us in the right frame of mind.