I’ve reconfigured the Workshops page (formerly “Seminars”) to include a number of shorter workshops.

The Spacious Acting™ Workshop remains the broad overview of the most important aspects of acting, an intense way of being immersed in what acting really is.  It’s intention is to give you the experience of what you’re driving toward so that you can identify it in the future and work toward it in a more intentional and productive fashion.  Without that experience, you think you’re doing great work when you really aren’t, simply because you have nothing to compare it to.  Once you have that experience, you can move to a whole different plane.

However, it’s not for everyone.  For one thing, it requires three days (or two long ones).  For another, there are topics that can’t be properly covered in it.  So there are some shorter workshops that can improve your work.  Here they are, in brief:

Beats and Verbs: They sound simple, in concept.  They’re tough, in practice.  This workshop gives you a good grounding in them that will help you take ownership of the concepts and apply them in your work.

Connecting the Dots:  Script analysis is apparently one of the trickiest things for untrained actors, and I’ve found they don’t even realize what they’re missing.  If you aren’t naturally gifted in this art, you need someone to show you the way.  Most texts on the subject are too mechanical and don’t help you to understand how to put into practice what you discover about your character.  I do.

For Directors Only:  All actors are different, but they fall into easily identifable groups.  Understanding what group an actor is in tells you what he needs from you to produce his best work.  His learning style, how he processes information, and what makes him most creative is key to getting the best performance you can from him.  The odds are that you’ll have someone from each group in every play you stage.  You need to deal with each of them differently.  In addition, we’ll cover the most useful approaches you can take with actors of varying capabilities, no matter what group they fall into — including the neophyte actor!

Plugging in on Stage:  This is all about receiving from your scene partner and reacting only to what you get.  I don’t see nearly enough of this happening in community theater, even among experienced actors.  This is a completely experiential workshop.  We do it until you get it.

Creative Blocking:  Good blocking that keeps the audience interested, maximizes the fun, and improves the storytelling can be so hard to find.  Yet it’s the simplest way to make dramatic improvements in both the quality of the acting and the audience’s enjoyment of the production as a whole.  I show you how it’s done.  This one’s for both actors and directors.

Pre-Production Essentials for Directors:  Because most community theater directors get promoted from the acting ranks, they don’t always realize that there’s a ton of work that should be done before auditions.  This workshop helps you to understand how to improve your shows by preparing well.

Not all of the workshops’ detailed descriptions are posted yet, but they will be soon.  Keep checking!