Classes and Workshop Offerings
Carlo has lectured and taught classes and workshop in various settings including Universities, Theatre Companies, Community Centers, and independently at Alchemical Studios in New York City and worldwide. You can view his resumé here for a full list of his teaching experience.
Acting Class
Meyerhold's Biomechanics
Meyerhold's biomechanical movement studies, Stringing The Bow and other basic biomechanical études are built as a series of hieroglyphic gestic poses and transitions, mulch like yoga asanas. They are the first steps in developing a keener sense of kinesthesia, balance, rhythm, and physical presence on the stage.
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In this class the students will learn Meyerhold's études and once mastered will invent their own dynamic hieroglyphic studies based on specific actors tasks of character expression and story development, with text and music. Biomechanics develops a clear and exact sense of gesture and kinestheic presence. Once understood and practiced ot establishes for the actor a physical sensibility that becomes second nature, carried at all times.
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An actor's method is ,after all, unique to themselves, whether drawn from naturalistic techniques such as Stanislavsky, M. Chekhov, Meisner, and Adler, or stylized poetic approaches like Grotowski, Artaud or Brecht; Biomechanics lays a sold foundation of a kinesthetic sensibility, a sixth sense, that informs presence and one's personal approach to acting.
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Moreover, Meyerhold, widely understood as Stanislvasky's protegé, developed biomech in a special workshop at the Moscow Art Theatre, and his work is often understood as "the phyiscal Stanislavsky" invoking the inner life of the character through immediate physical means.
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Carlo can offer this instruction as an ongoing class, or as an introductory workshop.
Acting Class
Jazz Acting/ The Virtuoso Actor
Juditth Malina, co–founder and director of The Living Theatre, in an interview speaking about directing their groundbreaking 1959 production of Jack Gelber's The Connection, in which Freddie Redd's jazz quartet was always onstage, ostensibly also as characters who were waiting for the connection to arrive:
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"We learned a lot at that time about acting, and true performing, from the jazz musicians, and from the jazz music, which has no fiction."
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Jazz Acting is a technique that Carlo developed in an effort to establish the Actor as independent Artist. In Jazz Acting, rather than interpreting a playwright's character, the actor becomes the primary creator. As Carlo puts it:
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"Actors are like Jazz Musicians in the complexity and subtlety of their art, and in the extraordinary interplay of subjectivity, objectivity and intimacy required to create a role on the stage."
Jazz Acting begins with a basic understanding of biomechanics. Then to extend that practice into a creative process, with a velocity that engages the unconscious over the conscious mind. Rather than starting with a text, the basic jazz acting performance employs the rigor and strictness of biomech cycles of sound and action to draw out the content of the unconscious mind. It is rigorous and daring in its execution.
Again we have the theme of the relation between the Apollonian and the Dionysian. Just as a jazz musician improvises along the liminal edge between mathematical rigor of music theory, and the full freedom of improvisation drawn from the unconscious mind letting it flow out into the present moment.
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LIVING THEATRE CLASSES
Lecture /Demonstration
The Living Theatre – History
Carlo is one of the very few people left in the world who worked with The Living Theatre in the years when Julian Beck and Judith Malina where still around and directing the company. He performed in all the plays of The Legacy of Cain project (1973 – 1980) and was the company composer for all the plays of that time. His credits include roles in all the major pieces of that time including The Dismantling of the Money Tower, Six Public Acts, Seven Meditations of Political Sado–Masochism, and Prometheus, as well as performing in revivals of Antigone and Mysteries and Smaller Pieces, to name a few.
He is an expert also on Meyehold's Biomehanics which he worked on reconstructing during his tenure with the company. He worked closely with Beck and Malina on the entire period of The Legacy of Cain project.
His lectures on The LT's work is authoritative and dynamic. His lecture is accompanied by a slide show of intimate photos of their work and a collection of relevant books to examine.
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PLEASE NOTE: Carlo can offer a lecture demonstration, showing and engaging students in some of the techniques and forms of the LT, or he can show Signals Through the Flames (the best documentary on the LT for which he helped edit, and wrote the musuc.) with a Q & A following the screening or BOTH in an extended workshop.
Acting Class
Living Theatre Acting Techniques
This class presents the plays and scenes from various Living Theatre plays including Mysteries and Smaller Pieces, Paradise Now, Seven Meditations on Political Sado-Masochism, The Money Tower, Six Public Acts, The Strike Support Oratorium, and other plays.
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The Living Theatre's acting technique can be understood primarily as a relationship between the Dionysian and the Apollonian. For example, the poetics of Artaud can be understood as expressive of the Dionysian employing techniques to free the unconscious and improvisational aspects of performance, while Biomechanics, Brecht's Verfremdingseffekt, or stylized character work requires an Apollonian sensibility of balance, clarity and beauty. Both are rigorous disciplines. And the hallmark of Living Theatre acting involves an understanding of the difference as well as a balancing of the two in dialogue.
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Moreover, actors in The Living Theatre also adhere to Joseph Chaikin's observation, when he explained in the foreword of his book The Presence of the Actor:
"There is the situation being played out on the stage(the play), and there is the situation of actually being in the theatre–– the relationship between the actors and the audience. It is this living situation that is unique to the theatre, and the impulses of a new and more open theatre want to manifest it."
Before starting his own company The Open Theatre, Joe was a member of The Living Theatre, plahing such leading roles as Galy Gay in Man ist Man, by Brecht.
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I believe that this sensibility of living presence, of a creative acknowledgement of the actors awareness of the audience in a sublime surrender to public scrutiny, as well as being guided onstage by that relationship, is the heart of Living Theatre acting technique. However, while the Living Theatre actor is overt in that respect, I believe that this sensibility and practice can ignite even the most naturalistic performances onstage.
Collective Creation
Direct Action Theatre Workshop
The objective of DAW (Direct Action Workshop) is primarily to give the participants an experience of Collective Creation in creating a piece together in one week, as it was practiced in much of the work of The Living Theatre and The Alchemical Theatre, and to perform it as a piece of free street theatre.
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And moreover, to experience the unique circumstances of performing on the street for free to an audience who happens to just come upon the event by chance. Carlo would often say that you learn about acting in one performance what you can't gain through 1000 rehearsals. When Carlo formed The Alchemical Theatre company in 1981 he first called together a street theatre company called Momo. Creating and performing for a street audience is an invaluable lesson which prepares a company to meet the audience in the theatre proper in the spirit of creative public assembly which is natural to street performance.
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The whole process takes 7 days with a performance on the 7th Day.
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If you are interested in bringing this workshop to your school or theatre company, please contact us and Carlo will send you a thorough outline explaining each day's work. Carlo has directed over 50 Direct Action Workshops and every one resulted in a street performance piece with the group.