Fostering Understanding and Interspecies Empathy By Exploring and Dropping Into Different Ways Of Knowing and Being
A New Application for Techniques of the Actor
Originally, method acting-based animal work allows the artist to find inspiration through emerging oneself into the realm of a chosen animal. Whatever may be found in the process, then can serve to colour and inform the character.
The chosen animal is being explored experientially – its physicality, its behavior, its social life, its sensuality, its interconnectivity with the surrounding ecosystem…
This experience, ‚becoming the animal‘, once truly engaged in, can be profoundly revealing and mind-opening, as well as liberating and animating.
Also, it has the potential to provide access to information that may not be accessed by a conventional way of research. It may offer the realization of a viewpoint, that would not have occurred, experiencing the world through an anthropocentric lens.
The acting process itself offers the possibility to learn what it means to be in the moment, what it means to use all of the senses, to use the imagination, to be open, perceptive and courageous.
You learn about empathy, rhythms, impulses, emotional life, mindsets, blocks.
You get to know yourself as instrument.
You get to know how to open up to the creative process.
Until what remains is ‚dance‘ only.
The format is flexible and will be adapted to the respective research environment and demands.
Transdisciplinary curiosity is most welcome!