Abstract:
Fear plays a crucial role in the performing arts. Fear is the dominant component of a performer’s stage fright, inhibiting creative potential, but it can also overshadow an actor-director collaboration already in rehearsals.
An idiosyncratic Zero Zone praxis (ZZ) method fuses performer training and directing craft with perceptual techniques, self-cultivation principles and Executive Coaching personal potential opening facilitating methods. This perceptual training enhances an actor-director dyad creativity, helping to tackle ego-based conflicts, avoid stage fright manifestations in rehearsals, restore the performing flow, train increasingly immersive focus and prepare to perform in a state of higher consciousness.
The Zero Zone Praxis has three stages:
Stage One: The Stairs
This preparation level provides an embodied understanding of psychophysical insight: what are the tools for improving self-confidence and connection with a partner, and how do they work.
Stage Two: The Entrance
The techniques at this level are turning external focus inward, tuning one to be more intimate, peaceful and thereby more concentrated, precise, present and aware of the inner processes of distinction and perception sharpening.
Stage Three: Zero Zone Dynamics
The third level frames everything: the reasons, the destination, the path and the result. The practitioner understands the importance of establishing a solid focus and leaving it flexible, the quality of cultivating directing, and how crucial ensemble-building is.
The ZZ praxis enhances innovation, creativity, passion and instincts. It trains to alleviate performing anxiety, prevent conflicts in the ensemble and internally with self and also develops your individual quality of the de-rolling process–if needed.
BIO:
Tamur Tohver PhD candidate, Manchester Metropolitan University, UK Trained as a director and an actor. His academic- artistic research focuses on actor-director collaboration, self-developmental actor training, cultivating directing, consciousness and immediate transmission in theatre. More about ZZ in Tohver, 2023, Director’s fear and self-cultivation: 10.1080/19443927.2023.2243185 and Tohver, 2022, Zero Zone Praxis as Conscious Creative Cultivation: 10.5325/ecumenica.15.2.0167 and MFA thesis https://stars.library.ucf.edu/etd2020/1592/ Homepage https://polygonteater.org/zero-zone-praxis/