Columbia College Chicago Theatre Department Teachers Lead Mask Workshop at 2016 Physical Festival June 4

Columbia College Chicago Theatre Department Teachers Lead Mask Workshop at 2016 Physical Festival June 4

Posted by Albert Williams

Columbia College Chicago Theatre Department, Marc Frost, Michael Brown European Devised Performance Practice, Physical Theatre, Theatre, Uncategorized Comments are off

Columbia College Chicago Theatre Department faculty members Michael Brown and Marc Frost will lead a workshop on “Masks: Presence, Potential and Play” on Saturday, June 4, as part of the Third Annual Physical Festival Chicago, which runs June 3-11 at Stage 773, 1225 W. Belmont, in Chicago’s Lakeview neighborhood.

Michael Brown

Marc Frost

Frost, the festival’s co-founder and co-artistic director, and Brown both teach movement and physical theatre at the Columbia College Chicago Theatre Department, where Brown is an assistant professor and Frost is an adjunct faculty member. Both Brown and Frost are alumni of the London International School of Performing Arts (LISPA).

Physical Festival is an annual festival of contemporary visual and physical theatre that strives to bring to Chicago new forms of theatre that are being performed around the world. The festival presents work that pursues storytelling through primarily physical means, whose aim is to create original stories which start and end with the body as the foundational textual source. This year’s Physical Festival features ensembles and solo artists from Brazil, Poland, and Spain as well as from New York and Chicago. For a full schedule of performances and workshops at the 2016 Physical Festival, click here.

Brown and Frost’s “Masks: Presence, Potential and Play” workshop on Saturday, June 4, 10 AM-1 PM, will kick off the festival’s workshop component by exploring a very physical approach to theatre creation: theatrical masks. The different types of theatrical masks to be explored are the Neutral Mask and the Expressive Mask (Full-Mask and Half-Mask). The workshop will allow professionals and newcomers to play together in a collaborative environment. From the Neutral Mask, the participants will seek to gain a greater sense of stage presence. With the Expressive Mask, they will begin to discover a playful approach to being present onstage with and without dialogue. By the end of the end workshop, each participant will have had the chance to play with each mask and create an original, short scene with one of the Expressive Masks. “Playing with Masks” also serves as the beginning of a progressive series of physical theatre workshops presented by Brown and Frost in Chicago beginning this fall.

For information on purchasing individual tickets and festival passes, call 773-327-5252 or click here.