At the beginning to work from the purely physical to the discovery of sound produced by the moving body – call this non vocal movement and gesture – the essence of the work done at Centrestage, Confidence for Life. The confidence of a practiced and highly expressive body allows the performer to develop and use voice because of its connections to the performers rhythms, pace and breathing and not for its own sake – allows connectedness. So initially working from the subconscious to the physical without a voice allows the performer a unique experience – protection from uncomfortable personal exposure due to the multiple interpretations of his/her work and yet out there in the cauldron of performance exposed and free. Or as Artaud put it – "signaling through the flames". The Physical non-vocal is the least controlled, the most highly revealing, yet the safest - it releases the inner life, revealing and sheltering the performer. Most of all it develops the facility for the performer to express his/her emotions, sensations, images, memories, and fantasies and to share them. It provides an understanding of the kind of confident vulnerability needed to become a sensitive and communicative human being and artist. This leads to an ensemble relationship with the people you work with – developing trust, freedom and confidence in a supportive environment that is also demanding of the individual. It gives us:

Developing the ability for the performer to begin their movement work from a physical impulse without preconceived planning or thought – and to allow this movement to find its form in total improvisational freedom until its over is to develop the work at Centrestage to its highest level. This develops in the performer an awareness of the following concepts:

It allows the student to be open to all options and ideas, to recognize intuitively the stillness that precedes action and that "feeling of ease" that characterizes the exceptional performer that is in all of us once we can get connected to out creative self. It allows Grotowski’s VIA NEGATIVA – the freedom to be active in all areas – to be wired and connected to the moment and to recognize in that moment the state of imbalance that exist in the true artist – what Eugenia Barba calls "precarious balance" and creates a dilated body – full of the energy (Ki) needed to be a true artist. This is symbolized in the Centrestage, Confidence for Life emblem:

By working on three areas that allow us to develop an awareness of how we construct ourselves through movement - these areas are:

"Awareness" is defined by Rudolf Laban as a means of knowing how to control the speed, force and duration of a movement and to correlate movement to feeling and action.

Movemental learning works on 3 levels psycho-motoric, affective, and cognitive.

As we grow in bodily confidence and develop trust in those around us so we become capable of deconstructing and reconstructing our self in relation to the different demands of the world. We are in control of ourselves in space, of the space inside ourselves and of our spatial relationships with others. This greater sense of control gives harmony and balance to our actions and reactions and allows us to grow into creative and imaginative people.

Work in these areas begins to makes us aware, consciously and subconsciously, intuitively and imaginatively, of our self in relation to space – our personal space, the space that is common to the group, our imaginative space where we construct our dreams, and our inner space where we find harmony and self belief.