Shoes change how you walk. How you walk changes who you are.
Costume lets the imagination arrive all at once. Characters emerge spontaneously, fully-formed. We glimpse them from the corner of our eye, put them on, and discover what they want.
In this workshop, Purpose Machine invites participants into the playful atmosphere of the dress-up party, where texture and impulse transform the body and open unexpected theatrical worlds.
Bring existing material or begin with nothing. Leave with new creatures, new possibilities, and a deeper understanding of how you want to create.
About
Throughout the Autumn Season, London Performance Studios is excited to host a series of five workshops led by our resident theatre company The Director’s Theatre Writer’s Theatre (TDTWT). The workshops are tailored to professional actors, physical theatre practitioners, and drama students. Each workshop offers 15 hours of immersive exploration over three to five days. Led by artists across a wide spectrum of disciplines, these sessions will explore Active Analysis, mask work, puppetry, physical theatre, and voice.
Purpose Machine is a Berlin-based theatre collective co-founded by Mara Zigler and Dylan Aiello. They explore the urgent and absurd dramatic potential of everyday experience by integrating rigorous acting methods with physical, ritual and spiritual practice.
Dylan Aiello is a queer physical theatre artist. He is committed to telling stories of the depths and heights of human experience through a promiscuous use of farce, physical action, animal transformation, trash, pop and the absurd. Trained at RADA and based in Berlin, he has presented acclaimed works across contexts of live art and new theatre in the UK and Europe, including Soho Theatre, London; Emily Harvey Foundation, New York; Fluentum, Berlin; and Mint, Stockholm. He has collaborated across disciplines with artists including Euripides Laskaridis, Bruce LaBruce, Gabrielle Moleta, Wet Mess, and Rosa Aiello.
Mara Zigler is a Canadian costume designer and theatremaker, whose practice moves between puppetry, textile art and performance. Her work places costume at the centre of creative development; materiality drives transformation. With six Canadian Screen Award nominations for her costume design in independent narrative film, Zigler is now bringing this approach into theatre devising, where costume becomes a starting point through which character and performance can emerge.
The Director’s Theatre Writer’s Theatre (TDTWT) is an international ensemble that has been creating plays primarily within the contemporary visual art context since 2013—integrating the black box of the theatre into the white cube of the gallery.
TDTWT’s work forms a hybrid of dramatic and post-dramatic theatre; blending post-dramatic aesthetics, classic narrative structures like melodrama and queer theory, and utilising Stanislavsky’s Active Analysis and structured Etudes. TDTWT stages original writing, adaptations of plays or novels, and commissions new plays by associate writers.
As of 2025, TDTWT is the resident theatre company at London Performance Studios, where it produces and programmes productions or workshops on a seasonal basis with the aim to create a solid and constant repertoire of contemporary theatre and performance.
No one will be turned away for lack of funds, to discuss this with the team email info@londonperformancestudios.com