Haus Creative presents
A.R.E.A Acting Program: Theatre Fundamentals Short Course
with
ALEX SCOTT FAIRLEY
Where:
RANT Arts, 45-47 Stewart Street, Devonport
When:
7pm-8.30pm: Thursday, March 20
7pm-8.30pm: Thursday, March 27
7pm-8.30pm: Thursday, April 3
7pm-8.30pm: Thursday, April 10
Originally from Scotland, Alex holds a first-class MA in English literature from Oxford University. After postgraduate training in London, Alex has gone on to work professionally for over 25 years as an actor in theatre in the UK and Europe, as well as touring Asia and North America. His work encompasses musicals in London’s West End and on national tours, from Blood Brothers, Chicago and The Shakespeare Revue, to major regional productions of plays by Tom Stoppard, Neil Simon, Oscar Wilde, Alan Bennett, and Mojisola Adebayo, amongst others. He has also performed Shakespeare extensively, both in the original English and in German-language productions in Vienna, and is an experienced puppeteer and children’s theatre practitioner, having been one of the original devisers for the stage production of Room on the Broom, and touring internationally with The Gruffalo. He now lives in Tasmania, but returned to the UK last year to work as a performer/puppeteer on a national tour of The Chronicles of Atom and Luna, as well as devising a new show for international touring, working with the Beyond Shakespeare podcast and putting in a regular, villainous Christmas pantomime appearance. This year, he will be seen in the forthcoming movie Ancestry Road, filmed here in Tasmania, as well as publishing some of the stories he has been writing and telling, thanks to his collaboration with Creature Tales, and Spirit of Tasmania.
www.alexscottfairley.com
About Theatre Fundamentals, as told by Alex...
As you can tell from the shameless self-promotion in the biography that accompanies this, I’ve done a bit of everything during my career in professional theatre in Europe. I think the joy of theatre is that you never stop playing and discovering, and that you never find yourself knowing everything there is to know about anything. That said, there are some tricks I’ve picked up along the way that have been hugely useful and rewarding to me as a working professional, whether in Shakespearean tragedy, bedroom farce, or children’s musicals. This short, four-week course is an introduction to some of those, which I hope might help you too.
My focus will be on understanding genre and finding a character’s physical and vocal language, using Peter Brook’s idea of rough theatre. This is something that I found especially helpful during the pandemic in the UK, when the theatres were closed (something that hadn’t happened since the plague and the Puritans got to them in the 1600s), and we were forced to make theatre work in different, immediate, fast and spontaneous ways.
I’ll be inviting you to look at the fundamental building blocks of character, archetypes and tropes as theatrical shorthand. Ultimately, I’m going to take you back to early theatre styles, which root into the fundamentals of theatre itself, because all theatre is play, and storytelling at heart. And the rougher the theatre, the clearer the storytelling must be. I’ll be drawing from a wide palette of rough theatre forms, from ancient Greek theatre, to commedia dell’arte, pantomime, melodrama, and comedy of humours, and seeing how these might fuse with text-based theatre, from Shakespeare to J.B. Priestley.
I’d also like to tailor what I’m offering to you, the players, as we go, whilst also challenging you a little with some texts and genres you may not have encountered, so this is a journey we’ll go on together, exploring and adapting as a company as we go. I’d love you to join me and see what we can discover together.
For more details please contact Kate Von Rock at Haus Creative on 0437 474 570 or message our FB page.