Acting Classes Nyc Ny: Improv Acting Class: Theatre Group
Q: What are your classes like?
Q: What are your classes like?
A: My classes are a blend of playfulness and rigor. The playfulness comes from my teaching philosophy. I believe that 1) each student is capable of doing great work, 2) it is my job to find the keys to unlock the creativity in each student, and 3) many of the keys I have discovered over the past 28 years are simple points of focus that are easy and fun for students to do - and produce riveting scenes. So, the classes and exercises are fun, and the students don't have to worry about doing well; you know, meeting some imagined expectation they may have or think I may have of them. I take on the responsibility of their doing well. This allows students to relax and enjoy the classes and exercises.
The rigor comes from my goal: to teach students to work together to organize their collective impulses into truthful, coherent, moving, and exciting plays that incorporate the same type of character development found in good plays and films. To achieve this goal, my classes combine the standard playful improv games with playwriting techniques disguised as fun exercises, and simple side coaching.
These classes are a radical departure from conventional improv work. Because conventional wisdom states that the skills it takes to improvise a play - thinking about how the various scenes fit together to produce a coherent narrative with accelerating intensity - are the opposite of the skills to improvise well - focusing on the present and one's moment-by-moment, honest emotional responses.
But after wrestling with this conundrum for 18 years, my theatre company and I developed techniques to meld these seemingly antithetical skills and techniques. When students practice these techniques, they create wonderful plays of surprising depth and power. As a result, my classes can be tremendously exciting.
Q: What are these techniques?
A: They are all embedded in a carefully sequenced set of fun and varied games, exercises, and scenes that permit students to learn various dramatic devices from the inside. Eventually, students learn to create exciting and dramatically coherent pieces lasting long enough for character development to often occur, one of the touchstones of a great work of art.
For example, a well-known playwriting principle dictates that there must be some kind of conflict in a scene. This principle is certainly easy to practice when improvising. All you have to do is tell your scene partner "No," whenever they want something from you. Instant conflict! But conflict without context is not satisfying to an audience.
So, we practice doing scenes in which we do not impose a conflict. Instead, we spend a lot of time improvising scenes and performing exercises that focus on two related skills: becoming aware of and then acting on our honest spontaneous reactions to our scene partners while exploring how to establish emotional intimacy with our scene partners.
What we discover after improvising dozens of scenes is that if two people in an emotionally intimate relationship react honestly to each other, conflict will naturally arise without conscious volition. We don't need to impose conflict from without. It will arise from within if we follow our honest reactions. So, we learn from the inside, how to generate conflict completely believably in a scene. And by the end of the semester, these and other acting, directing, and playwriting skills build on each other to allow the students' honest and spontaneous reactions to generate an entire play without having to think about a lot of playwriting rules.
Q: This sounds like great training for improv actors, but what about actors who prefer to work from scripts?
A: Since actors who prefer working from scripts can find improv intimidating, especially the improvising of entire plays, I create a supportive, fun, and no-fail environment in which students feel comfortable taking artistic risks. In the first class, I quickly get scripted actors feeling comfortable and safe with improvisation, and once students become comfortable with this kind of spontaneous exploration, they become adept at identifying and acting upon their honest, spontaneous impulses. But even if I can make scripted actors comfortable with improv, the question is why should the scripted actor learn improv? Well, it is my belief that improv skills are an essential tool for scripted actors to create great performances, whether it's in an audition, a rehearsal, or in front of the camera or on stage.
Q: Would you please explain that?
A: The goal of scripted acting is to create a double illusion: that the actors are characters different from themselves, and that their words and actions arise spontaneously in response to unfolding events. And while the first skill is important, any performance will fall flat without the second. Actors learn many techniques to create the illusion of spontaneity; but audiences and auditioner's can tell the difference between the illusion of spontaneity and real spontaneity. Only real spontaneity generates the kind of excitement associated with great performances.
The ability to be completely present and to explore one's honest spontaneous reactions to everything that happens on the stage or set (within the confines of the script and the blocking) is the essence of improv training. With good improv training, the scripted actor can learn to inject spontaneity into even the most tightly choreographed scenes.
Q: Would you give an example?
A: Sure. Imagine that your scene partner shouts a line of dialog with more intensity than you'd worked out in rehearsal. Your real, honest, and spontaneous reaction will be one of surprise. And, if your character's reaction to that line, worked out in rehearsal, was a combination of fear and anger, you may find yourself honestly reacting more fearfully and/or more angrily than you did in rehearsal. These are real feelings, generated spontaneously and without your conscious volition in response to the real and unique circumstances on the set at that moment. If you ignore those impulses and react as you did during rehearsal, the audience will sense that your reaction is not quite honest.
Since no two performances are ever exactly the same, in the course of the play or film, there will be dozens of opportunities to react honestly. If these opportunities are missed, the accumulation of these missed opportunities will result in a performance that falls flat, or at least fails to excite. Because the audience senses at some level that the performance is not quite honest.
In contrast, great performances use all of those spontaneous reactions, within the context of the blocking and the script, creating an on-the-edge excitement that is thoroughly captivating. Average performances don't. Improv classes train the actor to become more aware of these spontaneous reactions and impulses, and to learn how to welcome, trust, and use those reactions and impulses to create great performances.
Q: I heard you also teach improv classes for writers. What is that about?
A: I taught a class at the Bethesda Writer's Center last Spring called "Improv and the Writer" and I'm teaching it again in the Fall. The students were writers who wanted to use improv to help them write. Most of them had never acted before, let alone done improv. We had a great time and they learned a lot. We did scenes more than entire plays, though they did create a twenty-minute piece once. What they did was amazing - startling in originality. I think the students were a bit in shock at the end of several classes as to the high quality of scripts they had created improvisationally.
Some writers report, when they talk about their writing, about entering another world - living, seeing, and feeling it, either observing the characters or being the characters interacting, and part of it becomes almost like taking down dictation. That ability to so powerfully enter another world, to enter your imagination is part of what the improv exercises are designed to do. They are designed to give you such a high degree of emotional connection with your material that writing becomes much less of an effort.
by: pbmorales83
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