The performance workshop and rasaboxes
About the work:
RASABOXES is a unique methodology that emerged in the 1990s, in the context of The Performance Workshop, an approach to performer training developed by Richard Schechner from the 1960s to the 1990s.
Since then, it has been applied in a range of contexts, from drama therapy to television acting, to K-12 education, to visual art. Based in the classical Indian theory of "rasa," which in Sanskrit means taste or flavor, and corresponds to the shared experience of specific emotional states in performance. Rasaboxes offers a playful and rigorous way of engaging emotion, and can be used in any style or genre for text and scene work, character development, refining audition material, improvisation, devised performance, and more.
Rasaboxes develops energetic, emotional, and physical specificity, agility and flexibility, enhances emotional awareness, and expands one's rehearsal and compositional toolbox. It is also a powerful way of exploring the affects as they shape and inform social and political life. In the Vital Matters context, rasa and Rasaboxes help us to explore our relationship to the natural world, to the landscape of the climate crisis, and our inner landscape as we engage our current realities through embodied, imaginative methods, and as we engaged audiences, who also need their full palette of emotional resources available to them.
Michele Minnick is a teacher and trainer of teachers of this work, and uses aspects of it in artistic projects, educational programming and community-building as well as practices within The Vital Body.
Go to www.rasaboxes.com for more information.
learn more! see our book about the work
Inside the Performance Workshop: A Sourcebook for Rasaboxes and Other Exercises
By Rachel Bowditch, Paula Murray Cole, and Michele Minnick
Order anywhere books are sold. Please use your local bookseller!
Inside the Performance Workshop: A Sourcebook for Rasaboxes and Other Exercises is the first full-length volume dedicated to the history, theory, practice, and application of a suite of performer training exercises developed by Richard Schechner and elaborated on by the editors and contributors of this book. This work began in the 1960s with The Performance Group and has continued to evolve.
Rasaboxes--a featured set of exercises--is an interdisciplinary approach for training emotional expressivity through the use of breath, body, voice, movement, and sensation. It brings together:
- the concept of rasa from classical Indian performance theory and practice
- research on emotion from neuroscience and psychology
- experimental and experiential performance practices
- theories of ritual, play, and performance
This book combines both practical "how-to" guidance and applications from diverse contexts, including undergraduate and graduate actor training, television acting, K-12 education, devising, and drama therapy. The book serves as an introduction to the work as well as an essential resource for experienced practitioners.
