Brave Theatre
A safe place of transformation for Performers, children and others who love to play.
In my recent appearance as Cliff in Cabaret in Seattle I rode the waves of love and heartbreak with my co-star in the way I have worked with Amanda in sessions. Audiences were ecstatic"
Seattle Actor (May 2024)
"Every great artist has a conscious or subconscious desire for transformation"
(Michael Chekhov)
Trauma has the power to rob our lives of vitality and destroy it. However, we can also use it for powerful self-renewal and transformation. Trauma, resolved, is a blessing from a greater power.”
(Peter Levine - Waking the Tiger).
To step into depth as an actor, you must first build a vessel strong enough to hold it.
This work is about expanding your capacity to meet the full force of your emotional world—and to transform the overwhelming energies of trauma into something vital, creative, and alive.
We begin in the body, where so much of this life force has been held, shaped, or stilled. Through careful, attuned work, that energy is released and made available again.
As it returns, something changes.
Depth is no longer something you reach for it becomes something you live from. You are not borrowing emotion for a role, but drawing from a well that is your own. This cannot be forced. Force tightens, restricts, and diminishes the very capacities an actor depends on, resilience, imagination, aliveness.
Instead, you learn to turn toward what is there.
To lean in, without overwhelm.
To allow intensity to move and not brace against it.
To let what has been guarded begin, slowly, to speak.
The work opens.
You remain connected to yourself, while the character begins to take breath. Then something new emerges, finds its own voice, its own rhythm, its own life. You learn the ancient skill of standing in two worlds at once, one foot in yourself, one foot in the role.
This is where your freedom lives.
Here, you can enter fully into the joys and sorrows of the character, and your own life, without becoming lost, overwhelmed, or frozen. You are no longer at the mercy of what you feel. You are in relationship with it.
And from that place, your work carries truth.
What happens in a personal session?
There are two ways in. The first is a more traditional S.E sesame, approach where we work with the complexities of performance and your pathway in, your insecurities, your feelings, your core learning edges. We may work with the text or a myth or self-created story, poem or a dream, playfully enacting various lines or aspects of it.
The second and the one I have been building for 15 years since I trainied in sensorimotor psychotherapy character stratagies and subsequently worked with Queensland Shakespeare Ensemble exploring roles and text in the rehearsal room using Linklater and other applied theatre techniques; and in therapy processing my somatic and emotional responses to these enactments, with Canadian psychotherapist and children's counsellor Linda Stelte who is senior faculty in Somatic Experiencing.
Since then I have been developing this practice has grown into a more direct approach to the text.
Using the text in session?
When you’re working with a role or a piece of text that matters, often Shakespeare, but also contemporary work, myth, or devised material, I invite you to bring it into the room exactly as it is.
We use the text itself as the stimulus for the nervous system. The language, images, rhythm, and action of the piece become the organising structure through which sensation, impulse, and emotional truth are activated and worked with. In this work we don't force our way through a block; the gentle work we do of tracking, experiencing and pendulation, opens your body to greater capacity not only for the big emotions like anger and grief but also to joy.
When I am working with you I will pause the work as needed and intervene with precision, inviting attention to what happens in the body as these words are spoken or as this moment is entered. Drawing on drama therapy and somatic practice, I may use simple embodied cues or playful embodied check-ins to support regulation, body awareness and presence while the text stays alive in the space.
This approach supports actors to work through emotional trauma and developmental injury blocks, access depth, and find greater freedom inside the role, without over-intellectualising or collapsing into autobiography. The work remains grounded, contained, and rigorous, allowing performance choices to emerge from embodied clarity without effort or strain.
What happens in a group session?
In group work I listen for the themes emerging across the group and choose a myth that can hold and organise the group, Within that frame each actor/participant follows what draws them, choosing the images, moments or characters that resonate with them,
This transformational process has been evolving for over a decade and it is now
quietly stepping into the light.
Come, share and grow your work with me toward creating better creative practice,
a better life and world.
Message me or email me to set up a session or form your own group and we can work online or in person.
[email protected]
WhatsApp +61 (0) 422654722
