THEATRE TRAINING
MAKE THE WORK THAT MATTERS
Defining your practice as a theatre maker
Online Course – 4 weeks
with Rachel Karafistan
plus two 45 min online sessions during March / April 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 two one-to-one online sessions, offering personalised guidance to help you clarify your artistic direction and fulfil your creative potential.
Event Details:
• Dates: Sundays 22 February, 1, 8, 15 March 2026
• Time: 11:00 – 12:15 (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: 120EUR (4 group online sessions plus two individual 45 min sessions)
If you have been taught by Rachel previously, anywhere in the world you will automatically receive a 10% discount. Just write to us detailing where and when.
FROM FRAGMENTS INTO FORM:
As part of ALTERNATIVE SCHOOL OF THEATRE – TEATR ÓSMEGO 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, we’ll trace imagined journeys, inhabit forgotten spaces, and give form to the fragments that call for expression. Together, we’ll 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, we’ll 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, we’ll uncover new ways of shaping material, reimagining stories, and working with others with curiosity and care.
Event Details:
• Dates: Monday 13 – Friday 17 July 2026
• Time: 10:00 – 18:00 including two hours a day from 16:00 – 18:00 for guided devising in the theatre space
• Location: Teatr Ósmego Dnia, Poznan, Poland
• Level: Open to all those with some experience in devising theatre
Tickets & Pricing:
• Cost: 250EUR
• Special bursary for 4 residents of Poznan – 150EUR
• Also – If you have been taught by Rachel previously, anywhere in the world you will automatically receive a 10% discount of any course. Email us with details of where and when.
RECLAIMING VOICE:
Voice, Song and Embodied Expression
With Patrick Campbell & Rachel Karafistan
As part of ALTERNATIVE SCHOOL OF THEATRE – TEATR ÓSMEGO 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!
Event Details:
• Dates: Monday 20 – Friday 24 July 2026
• Time: 10:00 – 18:00 (CEST Europe time) with two hours for one-to-one work at the end of each day
(to be arranged with the participants on the first day of the course)
• Location: Teatr Ósmego Dnia, Poznan, Poland
• Level: everyone who wants to extend and explore the range and potential of their voice
The intensive includes free entrance to Patrick Campbell’s workshop demonstration THE AFFECTIVE DRAMATURGY OF THE VOICE on Sunday 19 July 2026 at 17:00 also at Teatr Ósmego Dnia (see details below).
Tickets & Pricing:
• Cost: 250EUR
• Special bursary for 4 residents of Poznan – 150EUR
• Also – If you have been taught by Rachel or Patrick previously, anywhere in the world, you will automatically receive a 10% discount. Email us with details of where and when.
Sunday 19 July 2026
WORK DEMONSTRATION WITH PATRICK CAMPBELL
17:00 – 18:00
Teatr Ósmego Dnia
THE AFFECTIVE DRAMATURGY OF THE VOICE is a work demonstration in which Patrick Campbell, core member of the artistic laboratory Cross Pollination (Belgium) and Senior Lecturer in Drama and Contemporary Performance at Manchester Metropolitan University (UK), reflects on his journey through voice. Drawing on his fifteen-year apprenticeship with Margaret Pikes, co-founder of the renowned Roy Hart Theatre (France), Campbell analyses the affective strata that shape his vocal practice and how these layers inform the dramaturgical tactics within his musical work on stage.
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 Poznań, 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.
Please fill out the form if you wish to be among the first to know.