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    Emerson College: Pre-College Acting Studio

    Emerson College: Pre-College Acting Studio

    Details

    • Listing Type: Summer Programs
    • Program Delivery: Day, Residential
    • Destination: United States
    • Provided By: College
    • Session Start: July
    • Session Length: Four Weeks
    • Entering Grade: 10th, 11th, 12th
    • Gender: Coed
    • Category: Performing & Visual Arts
    • Sub-Categories: Theatre Arts, Acting
    • Selective: Yes
    • Ages: 15, 16, 17, 18
    • Minimum Cost: $3,000 - $6,999
    • Career Clusters: Arts, Audio/Video Technology, and Communications
    • Credit Awarded: Yes
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    Overview

    Acting Studio introduces you to an in person pre-professional theater intensive and reflects the training in the Emerson BFA Acting Program. This four-week college credit program, offers an introduction to acting training. Classes are taught exclusively by Emerson's acting faculty. 

    Core Courses

    Acting Technique

    This intensive acting class will introduce students to the foundational skills of how to be truthful, honest, and observant actors, who are able to “live truthfully under imaginary circumstances.” Through work on scenes, dramatic improvs, and character explorations, students will learn to work fully from their impulses and instincts, will begin to learn the art of LISTENING (and reacting), and will learn to stay out of their heads and get into their gut. As its basis, this class will focus on emotional realism, with a significant emphasis on truthfulness in performance. Students will be asked to apply that core truthfulness to a variety of contexts that the contemporary working actor contends with.

    Shakespeare 

    Shakespeare’s plays have urgency and connection to our contemporary lives. This course is an immersive acting class exploring emotion, action, and physicality through Shakespeare’s language. Through monologues and scene work, as well as writing exercises, games, and supplementary video and reading, we will discover acting clues in meter, phrasing, onomatopoeia, antithesis, status, verse v. prose and more—all practical tools to arm the actor in approaching this sometimes, intimidating material. Students will have the opportunity to bring themselves to and find themselves in these wonderfully human and complex characters, and experience the power, beauty, and nowness of these 400-year-old texts. 

    Improv for Actors 

    This class is designed to explore the essential pillars of acting through dramatic improvised play.  At the heart of the course are the same principals of all good acting—behaving truthfully in imagined given circumstances, being fully alive in the breath, physicality, and being emotionally available, vulnerable and responsive to the present moment. Special attention will be paid to character and storytelling, exploring how improv techniques can be used in scene study with written text. Students will also apply these skills to cold reads and creating original content.

    Monologues and Audition Technique

    This class will teach young actors how to approach monologues in an imaginative, specific, and impulse driven way. The course will focus on skills for how to select material that speaks to you in a visceral place, and on how to bring that material to life through a deep and embodied connection to what is compelling you to say these words, in this exact moment, to whoever you are speaking to. Topics covered will also include pre-beats, textual analysis, various monologue structures, and how to listen and react to an imaginary partner. The course will also cover audition techniques, helping young actors gain both the skill set and confidence to begin auditioning successfully.

    Additional courses in rotation might include: Voice and Text, Movement, On Camera, or Stage Combat.

    Sample of Potential Evening Workshops:

    Play Reading Salon 

    In this weekly evening gathering, students will read a play (or screenplay!) out loud as an ensemble, and then dig into examining and discussing the script from a multitude of angles. Plays will be from different genres with a focus on new and relevant material from the last ten years. Discussions will look at subtext, genre, character arc, and relationship, with a particular focus on the challenges actors will face as they work within different genres of playwriting and/or film.  

    Friday Night Fête 

    In this weekly social gathering, students will let loose, build ensemble, and community. Potential Fêtes might include events like a dance party night, a talent show night, or an original guerilla theatre/filmmaking night.