The last class.

It is amazing how fast six weeks can fly by, it is also just as amazing how much you can do in that seemingly small amount of time as well. For this last class we had a guest, Andy Garrison, who came in to supplement our final audition pieces with putting them on camera and reviewing them on the big screen. I thought that this would be a perfect culmination of our audition workshop and would allow the students to see themselves, what works and what doesn't. I think, and I'm sure Andy would agree, that these kids really stepped up to the plate, or "mark", if you will. I was so impressed with how they incorporated all the skills and techniques we used in class to step up, with command, introduce themselves and their pieces, and like a pro - Deliver. Rock On! Having Andy there to offer his expertise and experience with "on camera" work was invaluable, thanks Andy.

It is interesting how we sometimes need to take a step backwards to move forward even further. This was the theme in this week's session. I was pleased to see much of the work and notes that we did last week manifest themselves in the work presented. With all this good work we are now getting into a slippery slope. There are now at least 5-10 things to think about in the work along with actually performing the piece. We as actors can only concentrate on so many things at once, and while we work on new tweaks and adjustments each week sometimes fundamentals, like objectives, get left behind. So we often have to go back to our original questions to reinforce the fundamentals of our pieces and then continue to layer on the "fun stuff". Once these basics come back into the piece the adjustments take on a whole new form and the piece can "sing". Good work everyone.

“Big steps, trips, stumbles and falls.”

This week was spent solely on working our monologues. We approached and attacked them from different angles so we could weed out exactly what works, what's interesting and what doesn't. More often than not, we find our best choices as actors by also eliminating what doesn't. This process of elimination seemed to be the theme of this week's discoveries.

We Succeed by Failing.

Again, great work everyone for giving over to the work and trusting in the process. I am anxiously awaiting next week's discoveries.

Next week we will pick up where we left off and also dive into another aspect of the audition process... cold readings from sides. See you all then.

Monologues round one! This week was a blast seeing everyone up on their feet letting it all hang out. Rarely does everyone come up to bat as this class did. Everyone was memorized and when we went through the questions everyone had their answers ready to go, great work everyone. Big props for Gigi for going first and letting me "beat up" on her a bit, thanks.

I was very impressed with everyone's willingness to take adjustments on the fly. Every time I proposed a different approach or scenario I was never met with defiance or confusion, what I got was "yes", and they all went for it. Keep up that kind of trust and willingness to explore and you will be amazed at the places your monologues will go.

This week we began exploring objectives in more depth. We started the class with an ATS favorite, Open Scenes. Knowing how difficult these can be for even the experienced actor, I was very curious to see how our young actors handled it. We focused on drawing out the objective at its simplest form and cranking it up to a "10", we made some great progress during round two, great work everyone!

I passed out monologues to everyone. We did a dry run of them just to hear them out loud. As always, they need to be memorized for next class. Someone will be "on book" for you, but do yourself a favor and memorize it well, you will get more out of the next class if you do. Also, the Big 5 Questions need to be filled out, in detail - in pencil. We will be working them next week and many of your choices will be modified. Remember, there are no bad choices...just better ones :)

What a great way to start off! I am very excited to be leading this series of classes for our young actors.

My goal for this set of classes is to set in place a solid foundation of strong techniques based on active and interesting choices. I will be using this blog to catalogue our progress and process and share with the community what great things we are doing here at ATS.

First classes are always interesting in themselves. The "ice-breaking" can sometimes take the whole class, but not with this one. It seems like we jumped right into the warm-up games and exercises without hesitation. The goal for this class was to introduce the three main choices every actor has to make at every audition and scene. Objective(what I want), Relationship(who am I talking to and what do they mean to me), and Urgency(what's at stake if I fail). Using the "1234-5678" exercise we broke through the misconceptions that words are everything. We discussed that words are tools, and if there is nothing behind them they lose their magic. Everyone picked up on this very quickly and some great exploration with relationship and stakes began to happen. Great work everyone.