Finding your Voice: An Acting Workshop for Young Directors
The best way to understand acting is to actually experience the process. Beginning with a series of essential Meisner-inspired exercises and continuing with improvisation techniques, monologue and two person scene work, this 2.5 day intensive workshop offers a safe environment in which to enhance your ability to connect to actors by stepping into that vulnerable place yourself. You will have a concrete physical experience of what you’re asking actors for and understand how to make a performance active by experiencing action in your own body.
Living truthfully under imaginary circumstances. Sanford Meisner
This workshop will enhance your director’s toolkit and develop your “eye.” You will do acting exercises, improvisation and scene study, and will learn:
- how to establish an open and collaborative relationship with actors
- how to do a character interview
- the importance of “listening” between actors
- how to work with active language; why “results” direction is ineffective
- how to work with the magic “as if”
- how to use “sense memory”+ “personal substitutions” in directing and writing
- how to add “layers” to a characterization
- playing opposites - paradox and revelation
- how to be specific and effective with your direction
- keeping a performance alive take after take
- working with specific problems in performance and how to encourage flow
- how to encourage creativity in an actor, trigger your own imagination and insight, and become a superior storyteller
REGISTRATION INFORMATION: Email carolmcbride@sympatico.ca
Dates: TBA
Time:
Cost:
Location: ARCADIA ARTISTS’ CO-OP, Performance Space, 680 Queen’s Quay W.
*No refunds unless workshop is cancelled.
INSTRUCTOR Carol McBride is a professional Life Coach and Certified Psychotherapist specializing in creativity and narrative coaching. She has studied acting and directing with Judith Weston in Los Angeles, New York and facilitated her Directing Actors workshop in Toronto. She also studied Meisner technique in New York and Toronto. After working for over 17 years in the professional film industry she founded The Drama Lab in Toronto to create a safe and intimate workshop environment for emerging filmmakers to explore the creative process of storytelling. Workshops have included Acting for Directors, Blocking, Editing for Performance, Casting Made Easy, A Director Prepares, and creative writing. Carol has taught and facilitated over 150 workshops and courses for both artists and organizations.