The Gifts of the Performer's Craft

About the workshop

This workshop offers participants a space to challenge their expressive potential and playfully rediscover the interconnection of body, voice, emotions, and imagination. Through a collective, open-ended exploration, we will engage breathing patterns, balance, rhythmic movement, vocalization, and articulation of words. The workshop provides accessible performer-training tools to participants of any level of experience who are interested in questioning everyday habits and investigating alternative ways of moving, sounding, feeling, and relating. Participants will get a taste of the heightened presence and awareness that performers develop through intensive training, while striving for the expansion of their own expressive capacity. Participants are asked to think of a song that you know by heart and that is meaningful to you, as it will be an important vehicle for our exploration. Please wear comfortable clothes and bring water. Participants can work at their own pace and intensity, but the workshop requires high-energy physical engagement. Breaks are built into the three-hour session, and participants are asked to keep distractions to a minimum (for example, by silencing phones).

About the facilitator

Paolo Gruni

Facilitator

Paolo Gruni is a theatre and performance artist based in Tiohtià:ke/Montreal. His work is grounded in collaborative creation, with a focus on theatre as an intercultural space of encounter and transformation. He has worked as a performer, director, dramaturg, and workshop facilitator across Europe and Canada. Over the past decade, he has developed his artistic practice through intensive research and professional work in diverse cultural and social contexts, including universities, schools, refugee centers, and correctional facilities. His current research-creation PhD at Concordia University explores experimental theatre techniques and interculturalism in dialogue with studies of perception and consciousness. He investigates theatre as a laboratory of the individual and collective self. He is interested in how performance can shift ways of experiencing the world, and how it may open playful spaces of relation and imagination that challenge dominant structures shaped by capitalism, colonial histories, and heteronormativity.