Saturday 3/1 - 2:30-5:30pm
Sunday 3/2 - 10:30am-1:30pm
$300 intensive fee
Please note: This intensive is 2 days and you must be able to attend both days of the intensive.
Shakina Nayfack will be teaching her Body Ritual Acting intensive at The Artist’s Space! A protege of Diego Piñón, founder of Body Ritual Movement, and with an MFA in Experimental Choreography and a PhD in Critical Dance Studies (both from the University of California, Riverside), Shakina has pioneered her own Body Ritual Acting method, which she teaches internationally.
About the workshop:
In this Body Ritual Acting intensive, you will be invited to re-encounter two pieces of text you feel connected with: a song and a monologue (you don’t need to be a singer!). We will be investigating both pieces in writing and movement, and using guided improvisation to craft expressive portrayals of the material before distilling them back into performance-ready presentations. Get ready to explore and explode some material you thought you already knew inside and out! Participants will leave this intensive with a new set of interpretive and analytical tools fit to apply to any script, and a fresh approach to embodying their favorite go-to material.
Body Ritual Acting is a practice of conscious energetic exchange cultivated through physical training, guided improvisation, partner work, and embodied text analysis. Built on principles of emotional athletics, playable action, and the sacred teachings of transcultural esoteric philosophy, Body Ritual Acting envisions the art and craft of performance as a tool for personal and collective evolution by way of multidimensional world-building. Through Body Ritual training, the actor integrates and transforms essential, archetypal qualities of being and doing, passing through subjective and objective ways of knowing to arrive at the body’s unique innate wisdom, the expression of which is an alchemical process undertaken on behalf of the community and offered as a catalyst for creative liberation.
About Shakina:
Shakina is a performer, writer, director, and producer working in television, film, and theatre. She received a Critics Choice Award for her writing and directing on NBC’s Quantum Leap. She is also the first transgender actor to be cast as a series regular on a network sitcom in NBC’s Connecting... She can be seen in Amazon’s GLAAD Award-Winning Transparent Musicale Finale, which she helped write and produce, and Hulu’s Difficult People as the iconic trans truther, Lola. She is the Founding Artistic Director (emeritus) of Musical Theatre Factory, where she helped to develop hundreds of new musicals including the Tony and Pulitzer Prize-winning A Strange Loop and her own autobiographical glam rock odyssey, Manifest Pussy. A protege of Diego Piñón, founder of Body Ritual Movement, and with an MFA in Experimental Choreography and a PhD in Critical Dance Studies (both from the University of California, Riverside), Shakina has pioneered her own Body Ritual Acting method, which she teaches internationally. Recognitions include The Lilly Award for Working Miracles, Theatre Resources Unlimited Humanitarian Award, The Kilroys List, Logo 30, Hollywood Creative Alliance Award nominee, two-time Drama League fellow and two-time OUT 100 honoree.