Teaching Acting

I have extensive experience coaching professional actors and teaching actors in training in conservatoire settings. Some of the institutions I’ve taught for are listed below.

I lead group classes and coach individual clients at varying stages on their journey. For groups I can offer workshops or courses in a range of performance techniques or create sessions directed towards engaging with particular content or themes. Coaching responds to your unique development needs and can help you develop your technique, or be more dedicated to accomplishing creative projects, self-tapes, and specific role preparation, or explore your ongoing personal creative/expressive challenges.

My current teaching practice centres around acting methodology, acting on camera, self-taping, exploring how to practice and Yat Malmgren’s Movement Psychology. I have been exploring this rich methodology of transformation with Fero Veres, Professor Emeritus University of Gothenburg, for a number of years.

Techniques I have previously offered workshops on: acting on camera, self-taping, Movement Psychology, psychological realism-scene work, mask, physical inhabitation, chorus work, contact release, object manipulation, story-telling, improvisation, and classical text-Shakespeare.

My own creative practice is quite wide-ranging and I enjoy fostering and facilitating others to achieve creative fluency. Although my particular specialism attends to performance within multiple modes of dramatic expression, I am as invested in how people creatively engage themselves in any domain and so I have had the good fortune to coach people from all walks of life.

My teaching explores embodied transformation and creatively imagining identities through a variety of principles, techniques and practices. In my work as an actor I have created roles within contrasting performance paradigms: epic classical protagonists, psychologically real portraits within contemporary film, post-dramatic intertextual theatre, masked characters and autobiographical creation. All these ways of working inform my practice lending scope to respond to the particular creative needs of groups and individuals in training. My teaching is primarily invested in facilitating students to deepen their capacity to use themselves creatively in their work as well as framing processes of transformation through attentive analytic, physical and imaginative reflection. Ultimately, I believe in work in which knowledge of self informs and enriches the capacity for meaningful interpretation and embodiment of character within fictional worlds or real life. I value post-structuralist interrogations which contest the absolute and irreducible essence of identities and given how mobile our conceptions of identity may be, preparation for any given role necessarily involves pragmatic engagement with the assumptions inherent in the world that engenders or informs such a character. The magical other worldliness of mask is compelling precisely because it channels absolute characters without a historical past who live through being incarnated in a compulsive present. In psychological realism we evoke the inner world of our audiences in accomplishing an undefended public intimacy in ourselves, embodying the psychic minutiae of an other’s life through the very fabric of our intellectual, physical and emotional selves. Formally contrasting and distinct methodologies of fictional embodiment share a dependence upon the body as an expressive instrument and demand an ‘ability to recreate seemingly from within the nature of a human other than oneself’. I remain fascinated by how paradigms of thinking and practices of the body enable meaningful transformation and communication within fiction and life.

Previous clients include: