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Course in Essentials

Body-Mind-Word

Advanced Workshop

The Company

Course in Essentials

The purpose of the course is to make available to you the acting technique I learned at the Yale School of Drama. The technique is presented through exercises, discussion, and scene work. The exercises are carefully-crafted, purposeful, exciting explorations that are designed to give you an experiential grasp of the elements of the technique taught in the class. Discussions elaborate on the principles presented in the exercises. Also, the technique portion of the class includes a weekly body work component, designed to help the actor build awareness of habitual physical tensions and the ability to let those tensions go.

The goal of the scene work is to help you, the students, see how the tools and principles of the technique function within the context of practical work. You work on one scene for the duration of the course. When you go up in class with your scene, I spend an hour or more with you and your partner to help you identify and fulfill the next aspect of the scene that confronts you. You'll rehearse with your partner every week outside of class, and each week you'll have provocative new tools that you encountered in the last class to try out in your rehearsals. At the end of ten weeks, you will have come a long way towards making a character come alive and illuminating his or her experience. You will present the scenes at Session 10, "Friends and Family Night", an informal open house where a supportive group of well-wishers gather to show an interest in the work you have been doing. You will leave the course confident in the knowledge that you know how to approach work on a role. The rest is up to you!

Body-Mind-Word

I am very excited to be kicking off 2010 with an announcement of a new course offering at the Mother of Invention Acting School. The course is called Body-Mind-Word. It will challenge actors to find their way to integrating body, mind and spoken word, thus becoming viscerally compelling through the use of various practices that lie outside the purvey of the Stanislavsky-based approach I teach in the Essentials class. In this course, I will derive inspiration from my background and experience with Suzuki, Alexander technique, Pilates, capoeira, T'ai-Chi, yoga, Grotowski, Limon dance technique, and the practices of Cicely Berry and Kristin Linklater.

I continue to believe strongly in the power and usefulness of the approach I present in the Essentials class. In that class, we focus on making use of our capacities of imagination, empathy and analysis to embody the role and to achieve activation at the visceral level. However, I recognize that it's wholly possible to "play both ends against the middle", and that it would be valuable to offer actors the chance to attempt to approach the challenge of acting in a more immediately physical way. Thus, this course was born.

I plan to engage guest teaching artists to come to the class to introduce some of the modalities we will be exploring. The class will be physically challenging. Part of what we will be exploring is the possibility of freeing the instinctual by taxing the the actor's physical capacities. No one will be expected to do anything that makes them uncomfortable, and everyone will be responsible for assessing the challenges that come their way and deciding whether or not to accept them in each case.

Advanced Workshop

Students who have participated in two ten-week cycles of the course are eligible to join the Advanced Workshop, which is offered in addition to the Monday night class periodically according to demand. In the Advanced Workshop, first and foremost, we continue to develop our facility with the skills and principles presented in the Monday Night class. Students are admitted to the Advanced class not because they have necessarily reached a level of skill in their acting but because they have achieved some comprehension of the approach taught in the Monday Night class. In addition to working to hone skills as described above, typically in scenes from Chekhov, in the Advanced class we look at the problem of verbally dense material and verse drama, and students work on Shakespeare monologues.

The Advanced Workshop affords highly dedicated students of acting who share a way of working the opportunity to work together and be challenged by rich, demanding dramatic works.

The Company

In the future, students who have completed the Advanced class twice will be eligible (by invitation) to participate in 10-week cycles in which students work together with me on a single play. There will be an informal presentation at the end, with the possibility of presenting a full productions for particularly promising projects. All participants (including myself) will pay only for space rental-- there will be no tuition for participation in the Company. One can join a company cycle for 10 weeks at a time, with no further committment required.