I read your comments. Sometimes I respond, but I always read the comments. This week’s blogs are in reference to a comment I got from my friend Skinny Arbuckle who wanted to know more about the classes I teach, so this week I’m going to tell you about them. It is both something new, keeping in line with “Do New Things January,” and it makes it easy to pick a photograph every day.
Hehehe.
Monday: My Monday night class is for older teens and adults. It is a beginner class for adults and slightly more advanced learning for the teens. This last 10 week session has been a bit light on regular attendance, hence the three students in the picture.
We start getting into the benefit of making strong, specific choices in this class and one of my favorite things to see is that “Ah ha!” moment when a student feels the difference between a true emotional motivation behind a line and “I’ll be sad on this line and mean on this line…” This is also one of just a couple classes where I make big use of scene work that isn’t directly related to auditioning.
At the school I teach at we teachers have been given a very specific job: prepare the students to audition for agents. Every week we have pretty great agents who come down to do one-on-one auditions of the kids. Most of our students get picked up, which is great! We are given 10 weeks to get the kids ready for these auditions. In most cases students are in larger programs so in one class we’ll focus on the stuff for the agent audition (how to do commercials and a 1-2 minute monologue) and in the other classes we’ll focus on the more esoteric elements of the acting craft. In the adult classes it is typical to be able to do both because adult minds can handle more and really grow under the multiple stimulus. To do this I use mostly real audition material from Showfax and LACasting, but occasionally, like in the Monday class, I’ll use dedicated teaching scenes from our library of scene books. The scenes aren’t overly complex and they allow for different interpretations giving the young actor a chance to make a wide array of choices and see how they feel with the same material. That’s the exercise they were preparing for in the picture.
I’m really proud of these three. They’ve gone from just having a general interest in acting to really embracing the “work” of it.
So that’s a Monday – just wait ’til Tuesday!
See you tomorrow!