The Essensual Mask is led by Joe Windley and Giaele Mattioli.
What lies behind the mask? This 15-hour intensive workshop explores the "essensual"—a pre-performative space where essence, breath, and sensory awareness converge. By integrating holistic vocal practice with physical mask work, participants are supported to access pre-verbal impulses, vocal resonances, archetypal energy, and a heightened theatrical presence.
The workshop is structured in three parts:
Uno: pre-verbal & raw material: to bypass intellect and engage with breath, acoustics, and pre-social physical instinct.
Due: language & archetype: to experience the mask as skin, bridging the animal body with language, and exploring commedia archetypes.
Tre: synthesis & creation: to share discoveries and apply frameworks to construct a new mask.
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.
Joe Windley is an internationally recognised voice, speech, and dialect coach. Trained at Bristol Old Vic Theatre School and the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama—where he later led the Voice Studies program—Joe has also served as Head of Voice at RADA. He coaches actors for stage and screen while mentoring practitioners across the UK, Europe, the US, Australia, and the UAE.
London-based movement director and performer Giaele Mattioli holds an MFA from the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama and a BA (Hons) from LCDS. Grounded in animal movement, sacred dance, and devised physical theatre, her practice integrates expressive movement methodologies with Commedia dell’Arte, mask work, and puppetry. She regularly collaborates on theatre productions and leads research-driven performance workshops.
Joe and Giaele began collaborating in 2024, uniting their shared approach to actor training to design workshops that holistically integrate movement and voice. Starting with the mask to explore the essence of otherness, this intensive marks the first in a series of workshops tailored for professional actors, physical theatre practitioners, and drama students.
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.