THEATER CREATION WORKSHOP: The masked ball
With Albert Tola and Rodrigo García Olza in collaboration with Dau al Sec
The Espai Philae Theatre Creation Workshop is pioneering in its original format, and its formula has inspired other initiatives currently taking place in Barcelona. However, this is the only workshop in the city that explores a chosen theme to delve into our inner landscape through writing and performance, culminating in a professional performance.
THEME FOR THE 2025-26 COURSE: The Masked Ball
Who am I? Who am I not? Am I closer to knowing who I am by trying to decipher who I am not? Which masks are most confessable to me, and which are the most difficult to share? Do I have hidden truths? What is the truth of masks? What is the dance of my masks? To what music do they spin? Am I closer to my vocation by being aware of my identity?
While theatre never answers the questions we carry with us on stage, it often offers the possibility of bringing the roots of those questions to the forefront: perhaps by catching a glimpse into why we ask ourselves those questions, we are closer to the answer than by trying to answer the questions themselves.
Likewise, perhaps theater offers us the opportunity to experience this inner search not as something tragic, but rather as a suspenseful investigation. The masquerade, the thriller, the detective piece, may be, during our workshop The Masked Ball, a joyful way to reflect on our identity. Plays such as Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, Agatha Christie’s Ten Little Indians, Frank Wedekind’s Lulu, or Harold Pinter’s The Lover will accompany this journey through mystery, in which nothing is what it seems.
Its coordinators, with over twenty years of experience in the theater and founders of the Nigredo Company, have been leading the Espai Philae creative workshop for six years, with Anna Sabaté as the stage coach. After several years of selling out, this workshop will be held for four performances at the Dau al Sec Theater at the end of the course.
Objectives
- Create from non-judgment to be able to apply judgment later.
- Work creatively as a team: learn to see, hear and listen from the here and now to integrate instructions while moving towards a common objective: the task.
- Unlock creativity and, therefore, inspiration, without tending to one’s own judgments that restrict one’s own expression.
- Receive criticism in a constructive way.
- Develop curiosity about the human being, that is, from the archetypes of the feminine and the masculine to the particular characteristics of each participant, passing through the entire intermediate spectrum.
- Develop ways of relating and looking at you.
- Access, through the collective imagination, recesses of the unconscious that speak and relate our human experience.
- Perform a staging: a final theatrical performance through the entire process of dramaturgical and interpretive experimentation based on one’s own internal voice.
Contents
- Conducted writing exercises, alternating with readings of other people’s and own texts.
- Acting improvisation.
- Body and movement work.
- Interpretation and acting training.
- Character creation.
- Creation of a unique structure from dramaturgy.
- Progression and rhythm in the theatrical show
- Exploration of the choir as a contemporary formal reflection of the global problems of our global society.
- Qualities of movement as a binder of one’s own universe.
Video
Schedule
Targeted
Especially aimed at graduates in Theater and Consciousness Sabaté® Method.
This workshop can also be accessed by theater students from other schools, actors/actresses, professional playwrights and other accomplices of the scene.
Date
From September 2025 to May 2026
Schedule
Saturdays, from 5 p.m. to 8 p.m.
2 Saturdays a month, from September to May, + 1 intensive weekend before the premiere.
Extra sessions of memorization of the texts are contemplated outside of class hours. To determinate.
Discounts
20% discount to all post-graduates of the Institut del Teatre.
