Acting Courses
ACTING CLASSES
Now accepting applications for 2009
Bring your imagination, curiosity and acting process and engage with like-minded artists once a week in acting master classes led by Griffin's associate director LEE LEWIS .
Acting Master Classes
Industry pressures placed on actors today allow little opportunity for actors to re-examine either creative process or the complexity of their relationship with other actors onstage. Griffin Theatre Company's eight-week acting classes explore the relationship between body, voice and performance outside the framework of producing a play.
As part of a team of experienced actors, you will use a range of physical improvisation processes (such as Anne Bogart's Viewpoints) to examine ways of clarifying and expanding your vocabulary for shaping, sharpening and expressing impulse. Crucially, these classes are about process - allowing each participant to critically analyze the body of his or her own work more effectively.
Advanced Text Worskshop
The challenges to actors offered up by many contemporary playwrights are many. Often there are few clues on the page as to how to approach the material and, with writing movements such as the ‘post-dramatic' wave, conventional techniques can seem redundant at times. However, we know that this cannot be the case entirely. So, focusing on two contemporary plays, Tom Holloway's Don't Say the Words and Mark Ravenhill's Pool No Water, this workshop will explore the ways new texts demand new approaches.
Applying the physical techniques explored in earlier classes, the aim will be to both analyze the scripts and develop ideas of how to move the plays toward performance, from an actor's perspective.
Further information and to enrol
Griffin's acting classes are master classes and only suitable for those with three or more years of practical acting experience or those who have completed formal acting training. Courses are physically demanding and may not suit those with existing injuries. Participants in the Advanced Text Workshop are required to have undertaken a series of Acting Master Classes, or to have trained in Viewpoints. To discuss your suitability for the course, please contact the Griffin office on 02 9332 1052 or email lee@griffintheatre.com.au.
Master Class 1: 16 February - 8 April
Master Class 2: 11 May - 6 July
Master Class 3: 31 August - 19 October
Advanced Text Workshop: 22 September - 11 November
Classes run from 6.30-9.30pm Monday evenings (excl public holidays) at UNSW. The Advanced Text Workshop is held on Wednesday evenings from 6:30-9:30 at UNSW.
Cost: $380 (class limited to 16 participants)
To enrol, please download the form from this page and return to the office, together with a brief CV.
Lee Lewis
Lee was NIDA's first graduate to receive a Masters in Directing. Prior to returning to Australia, Lee completed her MFA in Acting at Columbia University and worked for ten years in New York on Broadway and off-Broadway with directors as diverse as Julie Taymor, Andrei Serban, Anne Bogart, Andre Gregory and Robert Woodruff.
Her Australian directing credits include The Nightwatchman (Griffin Theatre Company), Love Lies Bleeding (Sydney Theatre Company), Stag and Motel (STC Wharf2Loud), 2000 Feet Away, A Number, Half & Half, 7 Blowjobs (B-Sharp); Drowned World and Vicious Streaks co-directed with George Ogilvie (Darlinghurst Theatre); Kikia Te Poa, The Share + The Hour Before My Brother Dies (Old Fitzroy); Shopping and F**king, Big Love and Arabian Night (NIDA); Trojan Women: A Love Story and Julius Caesar (Theatre Nepean); Our Town and The Tempest (New Theatre). As Assistant Director, her credits include: Boy Gets Girl, The Art of War and Riflemind (STC) and Cosi Fan Tutte (Sydney Conservatorium).
Lee also wrote Cross-Racial Casting: Changing the Face of Australian Theatre, a Currency House Platform Paper, published in 2007.
* As Griffin's tutors are professional, working artists, Griffin reserves the right to make last minute substitutions.