Superdrama™ Superdrama RESIDENTIAL WORKSHOPIN VALLE D’AOSTA AUGUST 28 – SEPTEMBER 7, 2025 in collaboration with Accademia dello Spettacolo An acting training project aimed at young emerging and/or established artists who are looking for opportunities for professional development and learning. Read More Dancing Cypress Acting Workshop Retreat 2025 17 – 25 AGOSTO 2025 Dancing Cypress is a new acting workshop program that welcomes actors from diverse backgrounds, experience levels, and training methods to retreat together from the chaotic hustle of daily life, and rediscover their creative potential with fellow performers and industry professionals from around the world… enveloped by the Tuscan countryside! Read More Superdrama …a theatre of enormous intimacy “It is not the object of art to make life comfortable for the fat bourgeois so that [they] may nod [their] head: “Yes, yes, that’s the way it is! And now let’s go for a bite!” Art, insofar as it seeks to educate, to improve [humankind], or to be in any way effective, must slay workaday [people]; it must frighten [them] as The Mask frightens a child, as Euripides frightened the Athenians who staggered from the theatre. Art exists to change [people] back into the child [they were]…we want theatre. We seek the most fantastic truth. We search for the superdrama.” (Yvan Goll,1922) Our Manifesto SUPERDRAMA™ in title, is adapted from a proposal by the Alsatian surrealist and expressionist poet-playwright, Yvan Goll, who postulated the term “the superdrama” to define and provoke an artistic call to arms. The theatre he speaks of, “the superdrama”, is an enormous larger than life theatre. It is particularly expressionistic, disruptive, explosive, confrontational, and demands “a fantastic truth”. In practice, the multi-faceted technique of Superdrama™ is a performative pedagogy, a theatrical language and synthesis of training, to create and build character, and to devise performance. Superdrama™ evolves from and exploits the characters, canovacci, improvisation, and lazzi, of Commedia dell’Arte, the sensational, exaggerated, and surreal characteristics of German Expressionism, elements and exercises from Stanislavski, and the Viewpoints and Composition work ’[from Anne Bogart and Tina Landau]—to organize rhythm, time and space and to supplement the devising process. As a corollary, the actor learns to recognize and apply the universal rhythm principle of JO-HA-KYU (assimilated from NŌGAKU/THEATRE NŌ) to generate resistance, acceleration, and crescendo. In effect, the comprehensive design of the training prepares the actors mental, physical and emotional body for the essential components of Superdrama™, the primal emotional states; Joy, Fear, Anger, and Despair. The exaggerated expressionistic nature of the training serves to activate the actor’s ability to discover and encounter the equivilance of the internal life and conflict of a character, initiating a rapid catharsis. The technique most often serves to develop and activate a major transformation for the actor. For the devising process, we most often generate a performance from an adapted established or original text or concept, by creating a volatile world for the characters to inhabit, engage, and collide. The ensemble having achieved a basic fluency with the primal emotional states, and continuing to embody the characters, will focus on activating the improvisation and devising process to establish the lazzi (comic and dramatic beats), and the relationships and social hierarchy of the characters. In addition to the improvised material, we will apply a devising component of ‘composition work’ to clarify the themes, enhance the lazzi, and help shape the events that will determine the canovaccio, story, or play.