August 13 下北沢 Workshop - Trust/Respect

So glad to have another well-attended workshop with new challengers and returning champions working together! We welcomed back a young veteran passing through on her way to acting work and a life in Okinawa - spending time with us and getting ready to introduce her film at the Short Film Festival. Also happy to have back a more recent champ who just got back from three months of fun and exploration in LA - she brought back wonderful memories and photos with some famous folk.

Our new challengers today were both actors and I hope we can keep making connections and helping people to find work and partners in crime, er, art.

We worked on opening doors to see what's on the other side. A simple action with a million variations. The goal is to practice them so much that you can do anything of the sort without thinking. Which is great because you'll have to do the same thing when you encounter the person on the other side - and they encounter you...

We played with showing the audience that your character is (or isn't) trustworthy. How that might change once (once!) in a show. And we touched on the need for respect as well.

Truth be told, we covered a lot of stuff in that first hour...

Then we worked on scenes from Bad Habits, Glengarry Glen Ross, and A Life in the Theatre. Very different scenes, but every one of them dealing the questions of trust and respect. Even if the person you're talking to is a bad guy - can you trust them? Can you respect them? Should you? Should the audience? How do you show that?

After the scenes most folks were able to sit around and have some conversations about what people are doing, what might be available, and what the heck does it even mean to study acting...