The actor must know that whatever movement he executes, it can either remain an empty shell or he can consciously fill it with true significance.

                                   -Peter Brook, There Are No Secrets

BaP – Beckett Laboratory 2011-2012

These workshops in English will be devoted to the exploration of the expressive potential of gestures and speech in Samuel Beckett’s later work. Rough for Theatre II (1950/1976), Play (1962-1963), Ohio Impromptu (1981/1982), or Catastrophe (1982/1984), are all sketches where Beckett seems to have pushed actors’ expressive abilities to their extreme limit. These sketches as well as a few poems will serve as foundation for a group research on the impact of rhythm, intensity and the precision of gestures and speech in the theatre.

The workshops are an occasion to unfold together a corpus of texts commonly viewed as abstract or enigmatic in order to work out their comic, incongruous or expressive potential. The workshops will lead to a show in the second semester.