Internationally renowned company brings new venture to Edinburgh in 2025

Moments on and off stage: the corporeal training of Theatre Re

Theatre Re is one of the UK’s leading visual theatre companies. Our work combines original live music with striking visual performance to create non-verbal productions about universal human challenges and the fragility of life. The company’s approach and physical language is informed by the tradition of Corporeal Mime, and that underpinning links our theatre making practice with our training programme.

Moving first

Moments

Moments

Back in September 2023, we led a two-day workshop in Rijeka (Croatia) with professional performers mainly coming from a dance background. After a day and half of playing and making movements – not random of course, but in response to specific tasks with clear technical tools – we find ourselves coming up to a moment when participants are starting to lose steam and wonder, ‘why?’.

That moment comes up in every workshop, rehearsal, and project we lead. Why do we move? Moving isn’t enough on its own. We don’t believe in the total abstraction of the human body - there comes a moment when a little bit of content or imagination is needed in order to allow the formal exploration to keep progressing.

Back to the workshop in Rijeka - everyone had been working towards the development of a short and precise movement sequence. These sequences had acquired size and rhythm. We then asked each participant to share their work. The first one up was Giulia. She performed her sequence with a clear focus on all the formal choices that she had made. We asked her to do it again but added the body of another student lying down with eyes closed in front of her on the floor. The rule was to only change the sequence if she was forced to. She performed the sequences again - same sequence but somehow different already. The presence of an extra body in her space gave Giulia the ability to make more choices, especially with her focus. She also had to adjust her space. We did it one last time, but this time we told everyone that Giulia was playing a character and that character was called Juliet. This is when the magic happened. The movement sequence was the same and yet completely different in the sense that it now connected with our imagination. The use of space, rhythm, weight and inner-space all contributed towards leading our imagination towards Act 5, sc 3 of Romeo and Juliet. Suddenly, we are not asking why Giulia moves anymore but how she is portraying what Juliet is going through at that moment. All of Giulia’s formal choices were heightened and developed, and started to convey meaning. The form was progressing again and that moment of losing steam had passed - for now.

Moments

Moments

This episode encapsulates so much about the way we work. We start by moving first and it is from the moving that, little by little, we discover why we are moving. It is about making random and unconscious imaginative connections with our actions. In that particular example, the idea of adding an extra body probably came from one of Giulia’s looks towards the floor. The name of the character was probably inspired by the name of the performer herself. Sometimes it is a piece of music that will unlock the imagination, sometimes an item costume, a prop, a word, a name, a ray of light…etc. Who knows, these connections are usually random and unconscious.

However, what is neither random nor unconscious is the way we move and the solid frame that we build to invite the imagination in. We move first, but within a very specific framework. This relationship between form and imagination or craft and spontaneity has been a catalyst in the development of our latest production, Moments. This performance sits at the intersection of our training and making activities, and has become a way for us to reflect on how and why we do what we do - both on stage and off stage.

Part TED Talk, part theatrical performance combining striking imagery and action with original live music, Moments has become a space for us as artists to explore, understand and explain what we do as we do it. It led us to question and re-evaluate our relationship to time, success and happiness. Like with all our work, the formal exploration led to the discovery of a narrative. In this instance, the story that emerged is close to who we are and what we are wrestling with in our lives and in our creative practice. Ultimately, Moments is about attentiveness; attentiveness to magic in the making of new work; attentiveness to poetry in our everyday; attentiveness to moment by moment existence; attentiveness to life as we live it.

Form as an invitation to creativity

In order for our process to work the ‘moving’ cannot just be anything. It needs to be specific, clear, and repeatable. Everything needs to be a choice. This is where training comes into place and this is why participation and training are core elements of our work as a company. All of the company’s work is supported by a strong discipline of Corporeal Mime training and this leads to a way of developing work that is informed by the theatrical legacies of Jacques Copeau and Etienne Decroux, as well as by our numerous collaborators.

Mime is about making the portrait of one thing (an idea, an emotion, a mental attitude) with another thing (your body, an object, voice, the use of space…etc). Within this context, Corporeal Mime is about making the portrait of one thing with the body. It is distinct from other offerings of ‘physical theatre’ because it leaves a set of principles supported by a legacy of Corporeal Teachings, a vocabulary and a repertoire - it is comparable to Ballet in that respect. This formal tradition gives theatre practitioners the opportunity to learn a new physical language that will help them find their voice so that they can later express themselves. Rather than a set of fixed rules, the repertoire and the vocabulary of Corporeal Teachings provide a set of tools that open up modes of storytelling through the body.

Our programme of workshops and seminars is tailored to different contexts and supports participants’ development in both building performance skills and in creating work. During our sessions with professional and semi-professional performers, as well as with secondary schools, colleges and university students, we train participants to become self-sufficient, so they don’t have to rely on a playwright to communicate. We share how we create something out of nothing by working physically with space, movement, weight and rhythm. We introduce the main principles that fall within our ethos through games, improvisational exercises, technique, repertoire and ensemble work.

Like the performances, our workshops are always different depending on the context, and on who is in the room. For professional and semi-professional performers, the workshops are often about nurturing a strong sense of craft with which to support an existing practice. In these instances, the discipline demanded by the formal tools opens up new ways of thinking about performance practice without spoken text that might be utilised in a range of practices. With school or college groups the workshops might be more about showing how the performances are made, or giving students an opportunity to work in a new way. In these instances, the workshops are sometimes about building confidence or demonstrating the power of each individual performer as they learn to make something out of nothing.

Reflections: training and making

Working in this way reveals the importance of specificity and craft in creative practices and how spontaneity and technique can come together. While the workshops and the practice are informed by the discipline of a rigorous tradition, we have found that our teaching sessions create opportunities for playful exploration in which participants gain a real sense of confidence and agency. Like all good improvisatory practice, the invitation to move first and to allow that movement to fuel discoveries in the imagination, requires our participants to stay in the moment, and to avoid self-conscious editing. But we have also found that stripping away spoken language and focusing instead on a specific set of tools prompts students to make dynamic work in a playful and accessible way. Beyond being accessible to all, it showcases the power and potential of non-verbal work and opens up a wide range of possibilities for participants at all levels.

This accessibility, which has become so clear in our training programme, is also a major driver of the theatre we make. In this way our creative work and our training programme fuel, challenge, and enrich each other. Discoveries made while making a piece will inevitably lead to the development of new workshop methodologies and vice versa. The teaching and making practice that we hope this article articulates is one that is rooted in specificity, and constantly responding to who is in the room to develop unique, honest and unexpected theatre.

Moments is coming to Edinburgh at the Capital Theatres Studio in 2025, https://www.capitaltheatres.com/whats-on/all-shows/theatre-re-moments/2412#tickets