“He who knows no foreign languages knows nothing of his own.”
-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Just as Goethe suggests that the learning other languages allows for a greater understanding of your own, a comprehensive understanding of one’s own sociocultural environment impossible without studying others. The goal of approaching acting as a liberal (i.e. liberating) art is to understand other people and their comprehension of the human experience, while also conversely gaining perspective on oneself and their own thinking. This approach to teaching performance, in turn, broadens students towards a growing tolerance, sensitivity, and imagination.
With the belief that acting is an artform with a purpose of enlightening, questioning, and liberating, I am a teacher and lifelong student of humanistic acting training. My teaching philosophy revolves around the aim to foster educated actors who attain the ability not only to thrive in the theatre industry’s current state, but also to serve as leaders and innovators who are well equipped to shape its future.
An emphasis on the humanities teaches students not simply how to act, but what acting is, what its purposes are, why it moves us, and how it relates to other artforms. The humanistic approach leads actors to engage with theatre in the fullest sense, and comprehend their characters by exploring the customs, conventions, traditions, and habits that frame particular plays and their performances. I believe acting students should be knowledgeable of the theatre’s literature, its literary theory and criticism as well as aesthetics. My courses also specifically integrate acting history and theory into work with practice techniques.
The fundamentals I teach are rooted in the Stanislavski System (relaxation, relating, and pursuit of objective) in addition to the ideas of its methodological descendants. By including the works of Richard Boleslavsky, Michael Chekhov, Stella Adler, and Sanford Meisner, my teaching promotes a multifaceted approach to the craft through improvisatory explorations and permits students to to draw from various approaches in their development of a personalized acting process.
But beyond the American tradition rooted in the Stanislavski system, I also believe in a diverse and multicultural approach to actor training. As the contemporary theatre continues to evolve beyond a particularly predominant style, the eroding distinctions between establishment and alternative theatre call for arts students to be prepared to meet the demands of the multiplicity of theatrical performance styles and genres. As an acting teacher, my response to this evolution of stylistic pluralism is to draw upon an international and interdisciplinary study of the craft in order to further the development of the analytical, psychophysical, and transformational skills of my students.
In addition to those of modern and contemporary realism, I teach techniques of classical tragedy and comedy. I approach non-realistic elements of speech, such as verse and other forms of heightened language, as the source of a character and the key to their emotions. My students attain the analytic skills to confidently approach verse according to the principals of its construction and speak it with the appropriate emphasis, rhythm, and coloring. Because the character is revealed through their speech, finding and understanding how they speak is fundamental to acting.
Movement studies and physical awareness are integral facets of my training. A sound understanding of the mind/body connection and physical use of self is indispensable in character work. My technique’s foundation aims to liberate the body of habitual tensions and ingrained idiosyncratic behaviors so that it can freely respond to uninhibited impulse and genuinely express emotion and imagination. My classes strive to do so by incorporating the theories of F.M. Alexander, Rudolph Laban, and Tadashi Suzuki while also exploring physical theatre through mask, mime, and the Commedia dell’Arte.
An actor should also be in tune with their released natural voice housed within the body and find an enlivened vocal support to further their work onstage. Through the ideas of voice innovators such as Kristin Linklater, Patsy Rodenburg, and Catherine Fitzmaurice, in addition to work with the International Phonetic Alphabet, stage dialects, as well as vocal/respiratory anatomy and physiology, I teach critical components of voice work for enhanced stage performance and discovery of the expressive powers of language.
Ultimately though, the studio is a place of process. While I offer a range of approaches and methodologies to a collection of skills synthesized into the actor’s craft, I believe that the training curriculum must be cyclical rather than sequential, always returning to simplicity and a reliance on the fundamentals of theatre-making. The training is often more subtractive in nature than it is additive and can be experienced as a subconscious byproduct of compelling inquiry. The process of work itself and the search for a greater understanding of compelling storytelling is what teaches us to act. I strive to teach acting as a process of artistic creation and to equip others with the confidence to trust their intuition, unlock their phycho-physical wholeness, and invigorate their histrionic impulses and expressive nature.