Each year the school runs its residential course featuring a special guest teacher and theme.This year we are pleased to have Paul Hampton as our guest teacher and he will run a series of groups on the Neutral Mask. Besides Paul, David Moore, the director of the school, assistant director Jenny Thirtle and a number of other teachers will also be running groups.

This residential course is attended by students studying the Advanced Diploma of Alexander Technique Teaching at the school and is also open to those with some previous experience of the Alexander technique.

Timetable

The residential course runs from noon on 25th and ends at noon on 29th. There is a very full program over those days. The daily schedule below in indicative of the timetable we will follow. Participants will also get a 20 minute private lesson on each day.

About Paul Hampton

Paul Hampton has worked as an actor, theatre director and teacher for many years. He was a member of the Australian Performing Group at the Pram Factory in the 1970's and 80's, subsequently worked as a freelance director and taught acting at the VCA from 1990-1995. He trained as an Alexander Technique teacher with Duncan Woodcock at the Melbourne Alexander Teacher Training School and graduated in 2000. He currently teaches acting in the Performing Arts course at Ballarat University where he works alongside fellow A.T. teacher, Julianne Eveleigh.

He has presented workshops in Neutral Mask at several conferences and finds that exploration with this compelling mask gives A.T. teachers a new experience of grace, amongst other things.

About the neutral mask

The idea of using a neutral mask to train actors was first introduced by Jacques Copeau at The Theatre du Vieux Columbier. Copeau started with hoods, moved to a blank form and then discovered the need for a mask that represented neutrality. His students carried this idea away from his school. It was Jacques Lecoq along with the Italian sculptor Sartori who fully developed the methods and the neutral mask itself for actor training.

The Neutral mask allows those who wear it to get in touch with their core being, their most authentic, intuitive self. The mask encourages a sense of wholeness, of physical, emotional, and intellectual centeredness. In the mask, one lives in the moment, questioning nothing, yet empowered to make changes as needed. It integrates mind and body, clarifies impulse, and allows the wearer to experience the power and increased presence that come from absolute self-acceptance. Energy that formerly would be wasted on self-doubt and critical comments about a given situation is now used on problem solving. Neutral mask allows you to take off all the other masks.

The resonance of this work with Alexander technique training is that in order for it to work the actor has to completely get out of his own way - the essence of the Alexander technique concept of "inhibition".

Two quotes about the work.

A neutral organism expends only the energy required by the task at hand. Personalities expend that amount of energy and something else besides; personalities are distinguished from each other by the nature of what they add...

At the moment of neutral action one does not know what one will do next, because anticipation is a mark of personality; one cannot describe how one feels because introspection intrudes on simplicity; one reacts in a sensory way, because when the mind stops defining experience, the senses still function. Economy demands that both motion and rest be unpremeditated.