Wellfleet Preservation Hall

This workshop is free, but pre-registration is required for planning purposes
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Acting is a practice - like yoga or tai chi. You enter it humbly, knowing that there is more to know about it than you will ever know. But you practice it. You try, you fail, you fail better, interrogating the experience of it as you go.

Actors today, whether they know it or not, descend from two great rivers of practice that are both distinct and intertwined. One of those rivers descends from Constantin Stanislavsky, who devised a system for gaining mastery over both the outer elements of the craft - movement, speech, gesture - and the more elusive inner elements - intention, motivation, emotion. That system became The Method.

The other river - equally great, but lesser known - descends from the French gurus, Jacques Copeau, his leading lady and lover, Suzanne Bing, and Copeau’s nephew, Michel Saint-Denis. They shared the same goal as Stanislavsky - to bring truthful lived experience on stage - but went after it in a different way, mining the world of Commedia dell'arte with its improvisation, mime and mask. The training methods Copeau, Bing and Saint-Denis pioneered are still taught in all the major conservatories.

Along the way, the two rivers intermingled with elements of the Method infecting the conservatory - and vice versa. The best actors today share a rich vocabulary of skills and techniques drawing from both branches.

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