Caspar Schjelbred
Caspar Schjelbred is a performer, teacher, and director specialised in physical improvisation. He is the founder of Impro Supreme – a structured training methodology rooted in physical improvisation, clown, and mime, founded in Paris in 2010 and now based in Copenhagen.
Background
Caspar first met Ira Seidenstein in 2008. After a number of workshops in Paris, he attended five Quantum Clown Residencies in Brisbane, Australia, from 2010 to 2014. He also co-directs Impro Academy Paris.
He holds an M.A. in History of Science from the Sorbonne, where he specialised in the history of psychology and the study of the emotions.
As a performer, Caspar has worked in independent film and music video. He has played Puck in a French production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. His first solo project, Wilde Tales of Love, drew on Oscar Wilde’s fairytales. He has performed his solo improvisation show PLAN C on three continents.
Testimonial
Working with Ira has been the end of dabbling and the beginning of being a professional artist. I finally know what I’m doing and it gives me a confidence that is very real. It has not only changed the way I perceive myself, as a performer, as a teacher, as a person, but also the way I think of the activity I’m involved in.
Ira knows the demands of the profession through first-hand experience — a significant detail that makes a priceless complement to his teaching of the art and the craft. He knows what it takes in the world of acting, clown and theatre, and he tells it like it is. Or rather: he makes you question the given circumstances — you begin opening up to the possibility that perhaps “it’s not what you think it is”. And once you open that door… you’re well on your way to entering a different space. He describes his work as being “deceivingly simple” — it is. I’d almost call it infuriatingly simple. If you assign yourself to this simplicity — which is exactly that: logic and devoid of mystification — the illusions fall, one after the other. Illusions about yourself, illusions about what you’re doing (or not!), illusions about the world.
In his workshops you are never just an actor or a student, you are first of all a person. Ira’s method allows you to practise a direct encounter with yourself that is not self-indulgent but honest and true. In a way, you realise that you are more important than what it is that you are trying to achieve. And that makes all the difference in what you actually do achieve. Ira’s work is not about serving the industry, it’s about serving you in the industry.