BioArt "Keystone Training for Actors" -- a special 6-hour workshop

"You can find your personal path to magnetic acting and magnetic stage presence through this workshop." Madeleine Barchevska

Compelling acting and magnetic stage presence are the products of a highly active "back brain" in the actor. Until the 1970's, it was generally believed that the powerful actor was an accident of nature. Now we know that vocational actors can cultivate this deep magnetism by using a piece of the training puzzle that was missing before.

Jerzy Grotowski worked to reach this point via the physical body, by taking his actors through a series of intensive and often brutal physical exercises. Clyde M. Vinson, Madeleine Barchevska's direct mentor, opened the psycho-physiological door significantly to develop a deep and refined training of the actor who works with openness, " not in a state, but in a state of being." The development of a mature and skillful will was a key facet of his approach.

Barchevska has continued to build on Vinson's work, drawing from and incorporating all the major actor training schools and techniques: Stanislavski, Artaud, Brecht, Grotowski, Sonia Moore, Schechner, Blau, Bainbridge-Cohen, Feldenkreis, Alexander, Linklatter, Pradier, Barba, Bloch, Meisner, Adler, as well as her own direct experience as an actor and director.

Another of Barchevska's influential teachers at NYU was Jean-Marie Pradier, who taught Performance and Biology. From his research in life sciences and anthropology, Pradier concluded that the biological role of the actor is the "fertilization" of the nervous system of the observers. Naturally, the more conscious the actor is of this role and the more adept in "switching" his/her own nervous system to this function, the more powerful is the effect upon the audience. The switching process is the result of a meta-consciousness guided by a mature will. It is, simultaneously, both conscious and subconscious. (For recent science in this field, see video segment on mirror neurons, www.pbs.org/wgbh/#23E9EF )

Through fifteen years of intercultural research and application, Barchevska has developed what she calls the "Keystone" training module for actors. She devised the basis of this training in 1991, testing it multi-culturally in Western and Eastern Europe as well as in the U.S.

Barchevska's teaching marks an evolution in actor training. It is a highly concentrated module for actors aimed at giving them the "missing piece" of foundational training, transforming the merely social actor into a living transmitter of deep and profound human recognition, a "fertilizer" of important cultural memory, regardless of the style, media, text or script employed.

The BioArt Theatre "Keystone" training brings you to the "state of being" required to fulfill the actor's biological role. Once initiated, you can revisit and develop this skill at will, both on stage and in daily life. It can help you make stage fright and burn out a thing of the past. You will discover your true anthropological and biological role and easily find your way to maximizing your impact.

The "Keystone" workshop requires 6 hours, three hours one evening and three hours the following morning, and is suitable for a maximum of ten actors.

"I met Madeleine at a very special and important moment of my life. I had been working with several very interesting teachers, after many years of having worked professionally as a singer and actress with no formal training. I had a taken a break and had been away from the stage, because I was looking for a deepening in my work, and a means of reconnecting all the different aspects of creativity with the most profound, I don't know how to put it, emotions, feelings and thoughts. I found, with Madeleine, not only new insight but the possibility of reorganizing everything I'd learnt before into one creating machine, getting rid of the boundaries between what you are and what you do."
--- Elli Medeiros, Actress, Writer, Singer