About this Event
A memorable character is much more than a voice and a set of lines.
How do they walk?
Where do they carry tension?
What do they do with their hands?
Do they move quickly or slowly?
Do they have a particular habit, mannerism or physical quirk?
Before a character says a single word, their body can already tell us an enormous amount about who they are.
Creating Characters Through Physicality is a practical, highly participative workshop led by professional actor and trainer, Caspar Jones from IPA Productions.
Through movement, improvisation, and character exercises, you’ll discover how small physical choices can completely transform a performance.
What will we work on?
During the workshop, we’ll experiment with different ways of creating character through the body, including:
- Posture and how a character holds themselves
- Different ways of walking and moving
- Pace, rhythm and energy
- Gesture and use of the hands
- Physical habits and repeated mannerisms
- Age, personality, status and occupation
- Finding the difference between a strong character choice and a distracting gimmick
You’ll explore how changing just one physical element can completely alter the character you create.
How will the workshop work?
This is a practical acting workshop.
You won’t spend the morning sitting down listening to theory.
Caspar will guide you through a series of exercises, improvisations and character challenges designed to help you experiment with your body and discover new possibilities.
You might take one simple character and explore several completely different ways of moving.
You might discover a walk first and allow the personality to emerge from it.
Or you might begin with a tiny physical habit and gradually build an entire character around it.
The emphasis is on experimenting, playing, and discovering what works.
Who is it for?
This workshop is particularly suitable for two groups.
Actors and aspiring actors
If you tend to concentrate on your lines, voice or emotions when developing a role, this workshop will help you explore another powerful part of character creation.
Physical choices can make characters more specific, believable and memorable — and help different characters you play feel genuinely different from one another.
Nursery and primary teachers
Creating characters is also a fantastic classroom skill.
Whether you’re telling a story, reading a book aloud, using puppets, performing a song or introducing a character during an English lesson, physicality can immediately capture children’s attention.
A change in walk, posture, gesture or movement can turn you into a nervous mouse, an exhausted giant, a suspicious detective or a very important king - often before you have said anything at all.
The techniques explored in the workshop can be adapted directly to storytelling, classroom drama, roleplay and work with younger learners.
What will I take away?
By the end of the workshop, you should have:
- A wider range of tools for creating characters
- Greater awareness of how physical choices affect performance
- Techniques for developing characters from movement rather than only from text
- Ideas for creating distinctive walks, gestures and mannerisms
- More confidence experimenting physically
- Practical exercises you can continue using when developing future characters
Teachers will also leave with techniques that can be adapted for storytelling, drama activities and character work in the classroom.
Most importantly, we want you to leave asking:
“What does this character do physically that only this character would do?”
That small question can lead to some very big discoveries.
Your workshop leader
Caspar Jones is a professional actor with IPA Productions, an educational theatre company based in Barcelona.
As a working actor, he regularly has to create clear, distinctive characters that communicate immediately with an audience.
In this workshop, he’ll share practical techniques from the actor’s toolkit and give participants the opportunity to experiment with them for themselves.
About IPA Productions
IPA Productions is an educational theatre company based in Barcelona, established in 1997.
We perform around 1,000 educational theatre productions every year, working extensively with schools and young audiences.
Alongside our performances, we use acting techniques, improvisation, voice work, roleplay and practical theatre exercises to help actors, teachers and professionals develop communication and performance skills.
Our philosophy is simple:
You learn performance skills by performing.
Our workshops are active, supportive and participative, giving people the opportunity to experiment, make discoveries and develop techniques they can actually use.
Event venue & nearby stays
IPA Productions, 28 Carrer d'Otger, Santa Coloma de Gramenet, Spain
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