THEATRE TRAINING
During my actor training Rachel was the first tutor who made me feel recognised and worthy. I think she made every student feel like this. She was able to tap into the young talent and cultivate it. She transformed the course and created a cohort of makers, experimenters and artists. You learn just by being with Rachel, but when she teaches, she gives so much. It is absorbed and radiates out of everyone she trains. If you are interested in developing, exploring and growing as a theatre maker, devisor or artist take her course.
Rebekah Caputo â Puppet Maker, Actor & Director of Theatre Animisme
Rachel is an exceptional theatre educator and truly the best at what she does. She has changed my life in ways I never expected. Her passion is inspiring, and she always reminded me that my voice mattered. Her professionalism, kindness, bravery, and creativity mean more to me that words could ever express. Because of her, theatre became a safe place where I could truly express myself. I am forever grateful for this journey. It was a once-in-a-lifetime experience.⨠Afsoon – Theatre Student
Not only are Rachel’s courses engaging and inspirational, but her way of teaching through sound and movement is truly unique and long-lasting. I keep discovering more and more about my artistry long after the course has ended.
Jonne Putkonen â Musician & Performer
The workshop was a deeply inspiring experience and offered a rare sense of openness and safety for artistic exploration. Rachelâs strong personal investment, warmth, and dedication created a working environment where trust, curiosity, and artistic risk-taking could genuinely unfold. Through her engaged and generous approach, Rachel continuously encouraged us to find and trust our own voices and creative power as theatre makers and performers. Her ability to hold space for both individual needs and the collective process was central to the groupâs development, and it had a meaningful impact on my own artistic growth. It provided me with valuable tools and perspectives that I will carry forward in my ongoing practice.
Camilla Steine – Director & Theatre Maker
OBJECT & PERFORMER
7 & 8 November 2026
with Ewa Kaczmarek & Rachel Karafistan
Transform the way you tell stories. Join us for a weekend of playful exploration into the creative potential of objects in performance. At the heart of Rachel and Ewaâs award-winning solo shows, objects become characters, storytellers, and worlds in themselves. Through hands-on exercises and creative experimentation, youâll discover how to integrate objects into your own theatre-making practice and unlock new possibilities for performance.
Event Details:
⢠Dates: 7 & 8 November 2026
⢠Time: 10:00 â 17:00 (CEST Europe time)
⢠Location: Republika Sztuki TĹusta Langusta, PoznaĹ, PL
Tickets & Pricing:
⢠Cost: 95⏠/ 65⏠for residents of PoznaĹ
EWA KACZMAREK (she/ her)
Actress, playwright, and theatre director. Laureate of the 2024 City of PoznaĹ Artistic Award (as a long-time member of the experimental ensemble Teatr Usta Usta Republika). She has received numerous distinctions, including awards in the National Competition for the Staging of Contemporary Polish Drama, the Modjeska Calling Shakespeare Monologue Competition, and the Prosperoâs Book Award at the GdaĹsk Shakespeare Festival.
Kaczmarek is a three-time scholarship holder of the Polish Minister of Culture and National Heritage (including the prestigious âYoung Polandâ scholarship) and a scholarship recipient of the Marshal of the Greater Poland Voivodeship. For over two decades, she has co-created Teatr Usta Usta Republika, while since 2013 she has been developing her own artistic projects under the pseudonym Laura Leish, focusing on documentary theatre and womenâs narratives. Her works are marked by an experimental stage language, emotional depth, and courage to address difficult topics â such as memory, war, female identity, and forgotten histories. Drawing on authentic archival sources â letters, postcards, testimonies â she creates performances that are both deeply personal and socially engaged: intense, conscious, and artistically uncompromising.
DEFINING YOUR PRACTICE AS A THEATRE MAKER
Online Course – 4 weeks
January 2027
with Rachel Karafistan
plus a 60 min online session to be arranged with each individual participant
MAKE THE WORK THAT MATTERS is a four-week online workshop for theatre makers who want to deepen, redefine, and energise their creative practice. Led by award winning theatre maker Rachel Karafistan with over 35 years of professional experience, the course offers a focused space to reflect on your work, connect with fellow artists, and explore what truly drives your making. Through carefully designed exercises in writing, meditation, movement, and song, participants are supported to extend their professional practice and create work with purpose and impact. The course also includes a one-to-one online session, offering personalised guidance to help you clarify your artistic direction and fulfil your creative potential.
Event Details:
⢠Dates: Sundays 10, 17, 24, 31 January 2027
⢠Time: 11:00 â 13:00 (CEST Europe time)
⢠Location: Online via Zoom
⢠Level: theatre makers at any stage in their career looking to shake up their practice
Tickets & Pricing:
⢠Cost: 150EUR (4 group online sessions plus one individual 60 min sessions)
The time we spent with Rachel felt like a gift to artists who are still searching for their voice, their path, and their words, and to those who have already found that voice but are still learning to trust it. There are questions that never stop following us, and struggles we refuse to leave behind. This workshop was the most generous and welcoming space to think, read, and move together as we searched for ways to bring our questions onto the stage.
Gamze GĂźzel, Actor & Theatre Director
The course happened at the very best time for me and it was exactly what I needed. It is a great opportunity to connect with fellow artists from around the world and get to know their practice. Rachel is a great facilitator, giving equal space for learning, sharing and one to one chats.
Mahshid Alavi, Performance Artist & Filmmaker
FROM FRAGMENTS INTO FORM:
As part of ALTERNATIVE SCHOOL OF THEATRE – TEATR ĂSMEGO DNIA
what theatre do you want to make?
with Rachel Karafistan
FROM FRAGMENTS INTO FORM is an intensive for those who wish to unearth the stories that live beneath the surface, through the body, through voice and through the shared pulse of creativity. Guided by exercises that awaken both the physical and the poetic self, weâll trace imagined journeys, inhabit forgotten spaces, and give form to the fragments that call for expression. Together, weâll ask: What makes a beginning sing? What truth waits at the end? What lives and breathes in the middle ground between them?
Under the guidance of Rachel Karafistan, an award-winning director, performer and teacher with over 35 years of professional experience in creating original theatre for the stage, this workshop invites you to make, to fail, to find and to celebrate each moment of discovery. From raw impulse to crafted scene, from private vision to shared performance, weâll explore how ideas become theatre. How does a piece speak to its audience or community? How do we listen, as performer, as director, for what the work itself wants to become?
Through improvisation, play, and reflection, weâll uncover new ways of shaping material, reimagining stories, and working with others with curiosity and care.
RECLAIMING VOICE:
Voice, Song and Embodied Expression
With Patrick Campbell & Rachel Karafistan
As part of ALTERNATIVE SCHOOL OF THEATRE – TEATR ĂSMEGO DNIA
Join Patrick Campbell, co-author (with Margaret Pikes) of Owning Our Voices: Vocal Discovery in the Wolfsohn-Hart Tradition, and Rachel Karafistan, theatre-maker and passionate voice facilitator trained by Frankie Armstrong, for a dive into the expressive landscape of your voice.
Rooted in the Wolfsohn-Hart approach to extended voice and the philosophy and principles of the Natural Voice Network, this practical and experiential workshop explores the full spectrum of human sound, from pre-verbal sounding to song, through movement, breath, and embodied imagination.
We will work with the Vocal Sources, psychosomatic centres along the spine, awakening different vocal timbres and resonances through focused exploration. Participants will engage with creative vocal stimuli, designed to spark authentic vocal expression and free the natural voice.
You will:
⢠Reconnect breath, body, and voice in a grounded and playful way
⢠Move from pre-verbal sound into rich vocal textures, text, and song
⢠Develop confidence in your own vocality, its power, nuance, and emotional truth
⢠Discover where the rhythms of the body meet the rhythms of voice
⢠Explore collective sounding and the liberating possibilities of vocal improvisation
This workshop is open to all levels of experience, though familiarity with theatre, dance, or singing will be helpful. We are all born with open, expressive voices, but over time, life shapes, stifles, or scatters them. To reclaim the voice is to reclaim power. This workshop invites you to listen inwardly, act authentically, and uncover the sounds and songs that live inside you. Whether you’re a performer, artist, educator, or simply curious, come prepared to move, sound, and sing!
NEW! COSMINO THEATRE CERTIFICATE IN EMBODIED THEATRE PRACTICE 2026/7
We are currently working with our partners in Poland to offer the opportunity to gain a certificate in EMBODIED THEATRE PRACTICE when you complete six intensives from the following programme:
- PLAY, PLEASURE, PATIENCE: awaken the voice and body of the imaginative actor
- RECLAIMING VOICE: voice, song and embodied expression
- POETIC BODIES: discover the process of embodiment and the interconnectedness of performer and the world
- YOUR ANIMAL IN PERFORMANCE: explore transformation and characterisation through playing in animal
- OBJECT AND PERFORMER: explore the potential of objects / puppets in performance
- ABSOLUTE CHAOS: dive into your clown and prepare to be seriously funny
- FROM THE SHAMAN TO THE ACTOR: reconnect the wisdom of the shaman with the demands of contemporary performance
- FROM FRAGMENTS INTO FORM: what theatre do you want to make?
- DIRECTING DEVISED PERFORMANCE: bring your creativity directly to the stage after this five day intensive
- GOING SOLO: all you need to know about creating a monodram
The intensives FROM FRAGMENTS INTO FORM and RECLAIMING VOICE will both run in July 2026 in PoznaĹ, Poland. The dates and locations of the other intensives for 2026/7 will follow shortly along with the full costs and details of the certificate programme. The intensives can all also be taken separately.