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Course Description

Summary

Walt Whitman said, “I contain multitudes.” The same can be said of a transformational actor. Playing against gender, age, and type, allows actors to perform the impossible; Become another person. The result is empathy for people that the actor might not otherwise know. It is also really fun! In this class, we will study techniques actors use to become characters who are different than themselves: whether it be Meryl Streep transforming into an old male Rabbi in Angels in America or Jeromy Pope into 1980’s wunderkind art star and drug addict Jean-Michel Basquiat in The Collaboration. We will address the challenges this places on the actor's instrument - vocally, physically and emotionally. We will explore techniques of movement from Rudolf Laban, voice from Beverly Wideman, speech from Timothy Monik, and Dialect from Gillian Lane Plescia. There will be journal writing, research, sense memory, and improvs to explore how this person can live in you. The class will culminate in scene work playing a character that is completely against type.