Rúnar Guðbrandsson, Iceland 2021
Rúnar Guðbrandsson (b. 1956) is an Icelandic actor, director, and professor of drama who initually studied acting in Denmark and worked there for several years with various performance companies. He got further training from among others: Eugenio Barba at his Odin Theatre in Holsterbro, at Jerzy Grotowski´s Laboratorium in Wroclaw, Poland, Dario Fo in Italy, Jury Alschitz in Copenhagen and other places and Anatoly Vasiliev in Moscow. He has also undergone training in Suzuki- and Viewpoints tecnique with J. Ed Arisona and Ellen Laureen from S.I.T.I Company, New York.
Rúnar finished his MA og Mphil/Phd. degrees in Performance studies and Directing from De Montfort University in Leicester, England 2000.
He has directed numerous plays and performances (around 70) in Iceland and abroad and worked as a drama teacher and acting coach various places in Europe.
Rúnar was the first Professor of Acting at the Icelandic Art Academy. He is now the Head of acting in the Icelandic Film School.
He has runned his own company Lab Loki since 1992, it´s a laboratory that focus on acting technique and progressive working methods and create their performances by various means from scratch. He has also runned The Homeless Theatre ETHOS since 2015.
Rúnar has been involved in various experiments with musicians, visual artists, and writers, including live-art performances, site-specific work, street-theatre, installations, experimental filmmaking, and radio productions.
Lab Loki´s Technique
This is a physical workshop, where the participants will learn through certain exercises to analyze, explore, and understand the possibilities and dynamics of physical actions and to combine them with voice and text. Lot of this work is inspired from Grotowski´s training methods and Barba ideas, e.g. about Pre-expressive work based on the Recurrent Principles.
PS:
It is required that the participants can deliver a short piece of text they know by heart, without hesitation and they should show up in loose clothes ready to sweat a river.