Dreamwork for Actors and Artists with Ken Barnett

In this workshop, participants will be engaging with fresh material from their unconscious as delivered by a dream. This potent material provides the opportunity to drop into our most intimate inner lives.

Working physically, participants will be guided to ask the thinking mind to soften in order to invite the truth held in the body to express freely.

Discover what is within you that is longing to be expressed in your creative work, and unveil the patterns of thinking or behavior that are limiting you in your capacity for full expression.

“The dream is a theater in which the dreamer is himself the scene,

the player, the prompter, the author, the producer, the public and the critic.”

Carl Gustav Jung

What is standing in your way in your acting/writing/creative work?
What might you be holding on to that you no longer need?

By engaging with one’s own dream material, the artist learns tools that can then be applied to any script or creative effort in order to deepen the personal connection to your work. As is true with each dream, each role or project becomes a new opportunity to learn, grow, and move towards wholeness.

Actor and teacher will return to The Schott Acting Studio for a 6-day workshop sharing the tools of Dreamwork, while focusing on using unconscious material to develop a character. Each participant is asked to choose a role to prepare and also bring in a dream to explore. The process of using Dreamwork to create a role is a beautiful, mysterious, and profoundly inspiring methodology. By engaging with fresh material from the unconscious as delivered by a dream, we find the fertile intersection between our own selves and the character. We then discover what is deeply personal about the script and how urgent it is for us to inhabit this story and character. As is true with each dream, each role becomes a new opportunity to learn, grow, and move towards wholeness: a call from one’s destiny.

This is the first time we will focus on character work. Working physically, Ken will guide participants in asking the thinking mind to soften in order to invite the truth held in the body to express freely. Discover what is within you that is longing to be revealed through the fiction of the character, and unveil the connections to your personal truth that are held in the script. We will work with gesture in the body, freedom in the voice, and an expansive approach to engaging the imagination. Prior experience with Dreamwork is welcomed but not required.

Ken is an actor, director, acting coach, and teacher of Dreamwork for Artists. He studied and trained extensively under his mentor, Kim Gillingham, in Los Angeles, and he has furthered his study of Dreamwork with the Jungian Psychoanalytic Association of New York, the C.G. Jung Foundation, and Pacifica Graduate Institute. Ken has been coaching privately and teaching workshops in New York and LA for over a decade. He has worked with actors, writers, and artists of various disciplines who are interested in exploring the unconscious. Ken has been honored to lead workshops at training programs and retreat centers such as The Actors Center Workshop Company, The National Alliance of Acting Teachers, New York Stage & Film’s Powerhouse Summer Training Program, The Lucid Body House, and Space on Ryder Farm. dreamwork.nyc.