A Casting Workshop: Audition From Your Strengths

Through an objective process, students discover three or four character types derived from their "look" and personal qualities. Then working on targeted material, actors learn to fulfill each character in order to present themselves as a complete, castable, acting package.

Actor Improvisation Workshop

Emphasis is on the actor rather than performer improvisation. Organic behavior and emotional truth are valued over cleverness. Teaches physical and vocal risk-taking, impulse work and a personal sense of truth. Numerous improv formats are motivated by both internal and external circumstances.

Acting With The Camera

Exercises, monologues and scenes leading to the internalization of emotion needed for on-camera behavior. Students also learn how to adjust for different frame sizes, get accustomed to camera terms, direct, operate camera, and deal with realistic set conditions.

Character Masks

The classic "outside-in" discipline employing a unique collection of celastic masks in the French tradition. Precise character development from the mirror leads to full-blown characters. Behind the "safety" of the mask, actors learn to work boldly and break through habitual limitations.

Dirty Acting 3

Designed to promote lively, truthful, "dangerous,” moment-to-moment work. Emphasis on risk-taking, impulses, awareness, bold choices and follow-through. Eliminates actor tension, stale performance habits, personal cliches and artificial behavior.

Physical and Vocal Adjustments

Characters probably do not look or talk exactly like you do. Actors experiment and learn how to take physical and vocal risks while integrating these choices into the emotional life of the character.

The Actors Emotional Preparation

Learning what do just before an entrance – how to make strong choices and internalize them right before a character enters. Based on the actor’s choices of intention and obstacle, the right emotional preparation carries the actor through the scene without any need for pushing or falsification.

Living Shakespeare

Int./Pro – Santa Barbara

12 Thursdays at Noon

Begins September 22

Owning Shakespeare featuring “Sounding” of the text, an emotional exercise and enables the actor to connect with Shakespeare’s characters in a visceral way, internalizing the needs and pains of his characters without sacrificing the elevated language or the impact of the work.