Synopsis:
If you've ever wanted to perform with more clarity and precision onstage, to be able to listen more closely to your body so you can set it free to improvise - this Mask and Butoh multidisciplinary workshop will gently introduce two ways of doing so. Learn to prepare a neutral body, empty body so that it is ready to be fully expressive.
Influenced by pedagogies of Jacques Lecoq and Philippe Gaulier, Yazid will bring your awareness to the Neutral Self via Neutral Masks in this taster towards essential preparatory work for performers. Workshop participants will then be introduced to other forms of masks that expands on this training.
Drawing from Butoh and somatic movement, Sonia will share about how we can begin to cultivate presence, openness and listening through preparing an empty body. Sonia will also draw attention to how improvisation features in Butoh practice - with our bodies. Participants will then be briefly led to explore how we can layer on expressiveness from the empty body.
Through the framework of mask work and Butoh, begin to understand the importance of the neutral body / empty body, as the first step in communicating a story.
Important information:
All levels welcome
No experience with mask or Butoh required
Please wear comfortable clothing you can move in
About the teachers - Yazid Jalil (Singapore) and Sonia Kwek (Singapore)
Yazid Jalil
Yazid works in theatre as an actor, director, writer, and devising collaborator. He has credits in over 60 professional theatrical productions in the last 18 years. He was nominated for Best Supporting Actor at the 11th Life! Theatre Awards for his role in Charged (Teater Ekamatra, 2011). And shares 2 Best Ensemble Nominations: Pretty Things (The Substation & Patricia Toh, 2012) and It Won’t Be Too Long: The Cemetery (Drama Box & SIFA, 2015).
Heavily influenced by his training at the Intercultural Theatre Institute and the École Philippe Gaulier, he believes in cross-disciplinary collaborations through encountering the unknown, with the pleasure of discovery.
When not performing, Yazid enjoys sharing his knowledge and experiences with students. He is currently an adjunct lecturer at Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts and Lasalle College of the Arts.
As a teaching artist, Yazid values sincerity, sharing of joy, and embracing differences, above all else. He hopes to empower more youths with agency and critical thinking through arts education.
He has recently completed a Masters in Arts Pedagogy and Practice (Distinction).
Sonia Kwek
Sonia Kwek (she/her) is an artist from Singapore working with performance, movement and the body. She performs, facilitates, directs, choreographs, dramaturges, writes and produces for projects across varying mediums and spaces, including theatre productions, museum activations, site-specific responses, durational happenings, short films, mocap-animated music videos, immersive installations, nightlife gigs and participatory art.
Informed by theatrical worldbuilding, Butoh dance and somatic techniques, her work explores corporeal sensualities, layers within archetypes and the latent unseen to deal with questions about embodiment, gender, perception and representation. Often involving collaboration and transdisciplinary experimentation, Sonia seeks to shape time-space to centre the expression and experience of the personal, visceral and erotic.
Sonia graduated from Intercultural Theatre Institute, where she trained in contemporary acting and traditional Asian forms, and holds a Bachelor of Creative Industries (Distinction) from Queensland University of Technology. Currently, she is an associate artist with dance performance company P7:1SMA, and an active member and facilitator of the Singapore Butoh Collective. Sonia also started the Singapore chapter of Club Chrome, a pole dance and creative collective based in Australia platforming queer, BIPOC and/or SW artists.