Tag: acting techniques
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The Show Ends
Last night, we capped off an amazing weekend of drama at the Penang Performing Arts Centre. Good responsive crowds watched as my amazing young actors perform everything from comedy, to dramatic storytelling, to hard hitting drama. It’s such an emotional thing for a writer and director to see the work they’ve toiled on for months…
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Using Verbs to Color Your Acting
One of the techniques I use in my Intro to Theatre Arts class is one that I’ve drawn from several different sources. It’s the idea of using an action verb to help describe what a person is supposed to do in a scene. First, I will tell the actors to think of an action verb…
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Take a Few Days Off to Settle Your Brain (or not)
I have absolutely no scientific data to back up the following claim. But for me, it seems to work this way. Sometimes, when you take a little time away from something, it (whatever it is) seems to gel better in one’s brain. My tangible example is when I lived in Vietnam, and I spent month…
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Meeting up with the Footstool Players
My drama group, The RLT Players, had an awesome afternoon yesterday meeting up with the group which provided the inspiration to start our own group. It was wonderful beyond belief to have these veteran actors and all around great people willing to spend a couple hours to talk about about acting and other aspects of…
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Oops! My fault: A Director’s Mea Culpa
My new show opens in one week. It’s a series of 10 individual dramatic sketches. As I watched all ten performed as a whole on Monday, I realized that one of them was bad. Really bad. It’s not the script. Actually, it’s an award-winning script which will soon be performed in Sydney. No, it wasn’t…
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How to respond when an actor asks, “What should I do?”
I get to teach and work with young actors. Some have experience. Others do not. It’s incredibly fun seeing someone take the stage for the first time and try to find their way, try to understand their character, try to understand the relationships between the other characters, and try to, ultimately, figure out what they…
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A Brilliant Object Lesson on Good Acting
The most awesome thing happened in my Intro to Theatre Arts Class today. We were in our drama circle, and I was debriefing an exercise we did two days ago where one person sat in a chair and was told that if she left the room, her family would die. Another person was outside and…
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The Key to Great Acting: Doing
When was the last time you walked into an office and saw four people standing shoulder to shoulder doing nothing in particular? As in just awkwardly standing there? In the middle of the work day? I suppose the answer to that is never. That was the certain scene I had to wrestle with today in…
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What is acting?
Acting coach Howard Fine has said the following: “Actors wear costumes, people wear clothes.” Here are a few things I think it means: 1. If you are wearing a costume, you are a bad actor. (unless you’ve been cast in the role of “Tree” during the George Washington Cherry Tree play.) 2. Acting is about…
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Drama: The value of character interviews
I had an amazing time sitting down with a bunch of the cast members of our new, original production of “Grandparents’ War” and conducting a series of character interviews. The ground rules were simple: stay 100% in character until I say ‘stop’. They were amazing, and I didn’t ask easy questions. The time frame was…
Author Mark W Sasse 