Movement Direction with Vanessa Ewan | Creating Character | National Theatre

Vanessa Ewan leads this movement direction masterclass, guiding an actor playing Nora from A Doll's House using techniques to explore physicality and enhance character transformation.

PLEASE NOTE: Not all movement exercises are suitable for everyone and this or any other movement exercise may result in injury. To reduce the risk of injury, never force or strain, use the exercises only as intended and demonstrated, and follow all instructions carefully.

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[OlgaKuznetsova]

It's so cool to see how an exercise later is reflected in a performance (the flicking exercise)! Thank you so much for such a helpful video!!

[jazzyspazzrawr]

This is a brilliantly produced and presented exploration of some movement-based ways into character. I appreciate the way the techniques are clearly introduced and implemented. This helps illuminate some of the ideas from Ewan's book on Actor Movement.

[inMuro]

As a visual artist, these videos are super interesting. We do similar exercises, but then the image-making version of them. Sheets of random mark making, drawing blindly, or drawing from random prompts - they all help you to find an image.

[LewisFernandezFilm]

At the end when she's wearing the costume she looks in no way like somebody in a fancy dress costume. She looks really at home in it. Which is great because I think the exercises, particularly the one with the portrait, helped with that very much.

[britishiconicperson]

Anyone here in lockdown and sent this by their drama teacher?

[bellafina]

honestly, I deeply fell in love on theatre and act cause this video.

[hurleybrown]

Vanessa, this work is so valuable and has excited my students so much in a character study experiment we are doing in Voice and speech class.  It's the first layer in terms of manifesting the voice as it's inspired by movement.  Thank you for your brilliant video and care with this work.

[johnkulm]

Wonderful to witness them working together.

[jasmineberman]

This kind of work is fascinating to me! I used to dance a lot but got injured a couple years ago and I've been finding my creative outlet in acting, voice, and directing. I'm currently studying movement for actors, and I've been finding Laban movements so helpful for building a character, especially in an audition setting when I don't have a physical scene partner to play off of. I also love animal studies because it can lead to new and interesting choices in physicality.

[drees]

I feel so lucky to have had Vanessa as my teacher, she was so inspirational.

[mariannegiosa]

This is one of most comprehensive and mindblowing work. I really want to dive into this more and would like to know the cross pollination between this and being a "movement director" as I can not really see how one is divorced from the other. Perhaps a movement director is also overseeing the entire inner and outer movement of a work whereby building character focuses on individual characters.

[TeodoroJansen]

Thanks for sharing this beautiful piece of knowledge

[sanjaytanwar]

Informative, and practically shown how movement helps and develop the character. I really loved this Video, and hope to see more such videos. Thanks for sharing this.

[jacobralphsantiago]

Thanks for sharing this video and for all the information on how to build the character of the actor using the characteristics of an animal and how to handle and move the character physicality better.

Sincerely,

Jacob Santiago

[gabrielledarby]

Great ideas and I really liked the activities y’all did my favorite is the one use if portraits.

[danoninnaazulyoro]

wow it´s amazing
it would be awesome if you can shared with us more videos about Vanessa Ewan with the actors.

[pocketfairy]

This is amazingly helpful and insightful. Thank you!

[hannanirezel]

fantastic. loved it so much and taught me a lot.

[Lafemme]

This sounds like music from Little Bear. Loved that music!

[Matthew]

This content is out of this world. A related book I read was life-affirming. "The Art of Meaningful Relationships in the 21st Century" by Leo Flint