A weekend workshop hosted by The Deep Play Institute
Psychological Gesture is an embodiment technique developed by Russian actor and teacher Michael Chekhov in the late 1920s and early 1930s to help actors embody a character’s inner life through movement. By distilling a character’s main desire or emotion into a single, expressive action, Chekhov used the gesture as a gateway to genuine feeling and psychological truth, allowing actors to access emotion through the body rather than through analysis. For our weekend workshop, The Deep Play Institute will be bringing in Anna Karpukhina, a renown theatre and movement trainer, director and choreographer from Seattle, who will be leading a workshop drawing from the core principles of Chekhov’s technique.
The workshop will be about learning to hear the language of genuine impulses, to trust them, and let them guide your expression. When you stop trying to be right, to please, or to control the outcome and simply let the movement lead something authentic begins to appear. You start acting, moving, and feeling from your natural truth, not from performance. We’ll explore how movement awakens emotion, how gesture carries meaning, and how the qualities of movement shape our presence. Through these explorations, participants open a sense of honest embodiment a connection to their natural expressiveness and inner clarity. The goal is not to perform, but to be real: to discover how sincerity and imagination can meet in the body, and let your movement speak - freely, consciously, and in your favor.
The workshop will be conducted in both English and Russian, with live translation provided, as Anna Karpukhina will be teaching in her native Russian.
–— PRACTICAL DETAILS —–
Schedule: The workshop will go from 10am-5pm on both Saturday and Sunday with a 1-hour lunch break. Participants are encouraged to pack a lunch for the sake of time and ease.
Price: Price is tiered sliding scale based on 3 income levels. All prices are in USD.
EARLY BIRD (until Dec 10): Tier 1 $550 / Tier 2 $450 / Tier 3 $350
REGULAR: Tier 1 $600 / Tier 2 $500 / Tier 3 $400
Register: www.deepplayinstitute.com/gesture
Instructor bio: Anna Karpukhina is a movement director, choreographer, and acting coach with over 20 years of professional experience in dramatic theater. She has worked on more than 45 productions as a movement director and choreographer, developing a distinctive approach that blends expressive physicality with imagination and emotional truth. Her teaching is rooted in the Michael Chekhov Technique and focuses on helping actors connect body and impulse to reveal authentic expression on stage. Anna is the founder of BodySpeech, a studio dedicated to training performers in movement, gesture, and embodied presence. She is the recipient of the Outstanding Choreography Award at the WSCTA Kaleidoscope Festival in Spokane.