TEACHING
Kate teaches classes and workshops at her own private practice and for Arts Ed (MA and BA Courses), National Opera Studio. She also collaborates with, Generation Arts, Synergy Theatre Project. She has taught for DSL, Living Pictures, The Factory, Institute of Performing Arts Paris amongst others and a number of Meisner / 5 Rhythms workshops with Cathy Ryan and Tim Booth.
The key Meisner exercise is called Repetition. It teaches participants to take the attention off themselves and put it on to their partners' behaviour, allowing it to affect them and cause a spontaneous and authentic response. It encourages a moment to moment capacity to listen/observe and respond with an emphasis on staying firmly rooted in the present.
Repetition encourages us to put our acting/daily habits aside . We explore how to challenge our habitual ways of seeing and responding in order to discover what lies behind our armour and open up all that is available to us.
Kate focuses on teaching Repetition at her weekly drop-in classes. She regularly offers workshops on how to apply the Repetition to working with text/scripts.
“Kate Maravan combines humour and insight in her wonderful acting classes in a way that paradoxically makes them fun, deep and sneakily life-changing. ”
“Kate Maravan is an exceptional teacher of Meisner. Working with the repetition exercise, her attention to detail is acute and the space she creates is safe, playful but very focussed and I’ve gained a great deal from Kate’s classes which have revealed some of my deepest and most unconscious habits or ‘defaults’. I highly recommend her work.”
Kate incorporates her own exploration of movement into her classes. Movement is an integral part of her practice. The more embodied the actor, the easier it is to be present. Being embodied enables us to listen fully to ourselves and the other and to enter a state of flow in which spontaneous impulse and responsivity in the moment are unencumbered.
“The movement at the top of a repetition exercise is something that has begun to make enormous sense to me during Kate’s classes. In throwing myself into it completely I have discovered that the connection with my diaphragm, or my centre, through movement means that when it comes to the repetition exercise immediately following the movement, I am more able to access a full range of emotion. The stuck or rigid feeling sometimes experienced whilst performing or working with repetition is virtually non-existent. ”