Deepen your understanding and emotional expressivity as you work towards deeper levels of practice in this workshop. Suitable for beginners and experienced students alike who wish to develop greater sincerity, authenticity and depth in their acting. Explore the principles of psychological realism pioneered by Stanislavski and developed by the Method practioners to enrich and enhance your performances and characterisations. Learn new skills and hone existing ones in this supportive and expressive environment.
An exploration of Stanislavski's acting technique - learn, extend and challenge existing approaches. Sometimes, suddenly in performance, all around you feels alive and real. Impulsive responses arise spontaneously and rich, detailed behaviour emerges without effort. Stanislavski called this ‘experiencing’ the role. This course trains the elements that support the emergence of this creative state in performance. Making use of the approaches to preparation and characterisation developed by Stanislavski, as well as the Method practitioners who elaborated his work further, your ability to generate rich, detailed performance choices and the range and depth of your characterisations will be extended and strengthened. The course is designed as a workshop studio that provides a focused and supportive arena in which to develop your talent, hone your craft, tackle the problems that you may experience that prevent its full and free expression, and learn new skills.
We will explore exercises and training techniques that develop your ability to experience real responses from imagined stimuli and to mobilise subconscious creativity in your work. You will learn how to create more vivid and affecting inner images to justify action, to develop the use of oneself as a creative resource, and to avoid more consistently mechanical acting, conventional choices, and the faking or forcing of emotional expression. We will explore characterisation techniques that target the specific qualities that separate you from characters very different to yourself, along with psychophysical processes that facilitate a more expressive embodiment. We will also examine the means by which blocks and inhibitions to a freer expression of impulses and a more connected and vulnerable mode of performance may be addressed. As actors progress through the training, we will explore the ‘active analysis’ of drama and a deeper engagement with the structure and dynamics of dramatic action.
Please note that acting classes by their very nature can involve exercises and the exploration of material that some students may find challenging.
