Lisa Jo Epstein, the 2012-2013 Humanities and Social Sciences Artist in Residence, will offer a course titled "Performance through the Body: A Physical Approach to Acting" during Winter 2013.

This course will introduce students to a physical approach to acting that connects their voices and bodies with the play of emotions. This studio intensive course will teach an approach to performance that helps free actors from blocks that prevent them from embodying emotional truth and creativity. Students will strengthen their capacity for the expression of feelings through body, breath and voice work, and learn how a physical approach to acting embraces how, as Stephen Wangh once wrote, “the body serves as a pathway into our emotional life and as a means of knowing and expressing what we feel.” Students will gain skills in how to become physically articulate actors.

• Activate all parts of your bodies and mind, move more fully and freely so as to strengthen how you physicalize emotions and impulses with honesty and simplicity.

• Cultivate your skills as a thinker, listener, ensemble member, and artistic creator.

• Utilize ideas, interests, desires and lived experiences as the grounds from which to devise original movement and performance material through solo and group improvisations and exercises.

• Banish the inner critic, take risks in unexplored territories where the mind and body reconnect

• Surprise yourself, discover things you hadn’t thought or noticed about yourself, the world and yourself in the world; uncover and activate abilities you carry deep within you.

• Gain knowledge about the economy of gesture in performance so your presence onstage has clarity without needing an explanation

• Hone your attention to your own creative process

• Cultivate openness and generosity to the self and classmates, develop your skills as an active, respectful, supportive ensemble member

• Winter 2013

• THEA 412.01

• CRN:  10362