Polish Your Craft! A Small-Group Ongoing Acting Club for Kids & Teens
This is a two person class and the price is 30$ for a half hour.
Want to break out of your shell, become confident, and learn to speak with conviction? Want to get better at acting, whether you have no experience or a lot?
You have come to the right place! I teach in an encouraging and growth-oriented manner so that students become eager to take the next step, no matter how small, and get excited about this subject. And as students grow in their love of performance, I will encourage them to explore opportunities in their communities to make new friends and try their skills! No previous acting experience or theatre knowledge is required, but any experience students come with is beneficial. Students will grow in confidence and experience what it is like to be an actor, so no matter what their eventual career path is, they will have a richer life and a much more well-rounded education.
Our schedule, though dependent on what students want to learn, would be similar to the following:
Week One: How do you feel?
Acting requires feeling and expressing how we feel deep inside, not how we think we should feel. If you are spending all your emotional energy to smoosh your actual feelings and project the “right” emotion, you will do so much work and still not produce something tangible. This class introduces exercises to open yourself up and start down the path of discovering how you feel, which is the only way to get to how the character feels.
Week Two: What’s happening in the text?
In most works of fiction, the text is critical and needs to be studied closely. This work will often give you clues as to how the author imagines the character will be. This week focuses on searching for information on who we are playing and how what they say and do can tell you who they are.
Week Three: Who are you?
Casting directors choose actors based on the artist's unique and fantastic personality traits, so what are yours? And how can you bring these traits to your performance work? What from your own life can you draw on to create a realistic character? This week puts a mirror up to ourselves and compares our lives to our characters' lives.
Week Four: Who am I in this Story?
Characters play different roles in a play based on its structure and how big the part is. Are you the lead, driving the story forward, or are you the small part standing in the hero's way? Am I the villain, or the love interest, or something else? Knowing who you are from the perspective of the play is crucial to performing your role correctly and excellently.
These are the kinds of class topics we will cover, and many others may come up based on the progress and interests of the class.