"FReeDOm" in VanCOuveR

DESCRIPTION

I will offer a one-week intensive training in Vancouver, British Columbia. More details to come. Feel free to email the studio in the meantime if you are interested. The first thing Chekhov used to say to his students was, "I'm not going ot teach you anything you don't already know." Most of the technique is making oneself aware of what is already going on naturally, bringing consciousness and movement to the organic processes that dictate the human experience. We trade in gesture, tempo, space, direction, color, image, falling, expanding and contracting, all things that are seen in nature and that we do 700 times in a day. In the training, we bring awareness to these activities and begin to work with the body like a pianist would practice their scales on a piano. In performance, we've crafted such a relationship between our body's experience and our imaginations, that our inner life takes over and we are actuvated, full of inner movement and feeling. In all of my years learning different approaches to acting, never did I experience the liberation I have felt time and again in a Chekhov class. I have been liberated as an actor from needing to please the casting director, the writer, even the director! Hell, my parents, ha ha ha. I have been liberated from the limiting belief that I am only my type, that I am only what the casting world sees me as. If the work tells me I am not limited to my own experiences to be able to fully assimilate the given circumstances, then I am not limited to my own given circumstances either. There is a kind of true freedom, like a battle cry, that I have felt well up within me so many times over the years while diving deep into this work. As a result, I feel I can walk into any room, regardless of the pedigree or hierarchy of the other actors, directors, or producers, and I trust myself explicitly to do the job, and not just the reasonably good job, but the one where you will certainly see the contents of my soul, and you will catch of glimpse of the beauty that lives there. How wonderful to know time and again that we are capable of that. That is true confidence, and it is captivating, and it is beautiful, and it is freeing!