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ActTrue On-Line Video Classes

ACT
accomplish, achieve, attain, bring about, carry out

TRUE
authentic, actual, factual, faithful, precise, undistorted

Acting is undeniable action and imaginative living that is so truthful, so passionate, so clear, that it engages the mind and spirit of the audience, till they breathe with your character.

High standards? A lot to shoot for? Absolutely! Art. Why do it any other way!

We are called actors, not "feelers" or "emoters" or "posers". We DO! Because that’s what makes human beings. We are in action, with goals, objectives, expectations of success. We "feel" because we have set ourselves in motion, in action. Emotion is a result of the actions we take.

We live within a world of circumstances, of place, of time, of relationship, NOT LINES! Young actors standing in hallways outside of camera classes practicing their lines, trying to find "interesting ways" of saying them, are working from a false premise, that it has something to do with lines. The legendary Master Teacher Sanford Meisner said, "An ounce of behavior is worth a ton of words."

And it is behavior that we investigate in our work. Stanislavski’s premise, "Action with thought is behavior" is the basis for our approach to text. My teaching is grounded in the unshakable integrity of the Hagen Process of creating truthful human behavior. As both a student of Master Teacher/Tony Award winner Uta Hagen and then as her associate director on a NY premiere, I have specific professional experience with the application of the Ten Object Exercises.

Ten Exercises that free the actor into action, who lives within the exciting imaginary circumstances of the work, without the inhibiting weight of predetermined emotional choices.

Ten Exercises which reveal the Thoughts which create action as human beings, Exercises which have been applied to acting challenges for over 50 years at HB. Studio in NY by actors who have gone on to create acting in America:

Al Pacino, F. Murray Abraham, Debbie Allen, Anne Bancroft, Candice Bergen, Peter Boyle, Matthew Broderick, Gary Burghoff, Stockard Channing, Jill Clayburgh, Whoopi Goldberg, Judd Hirsch, Hal Holbrook, Harvey Keitel, Jack Lemmon, Bette Midler, Penelope Ann Miller, Geraldine Page, Sarah Jessica Parker, Jason Robards, Fritz Weaver, Sigourney Weaver and many, many more.

Let me quote from a Backstage West interview, Feb. 12, 1998, with Award winning Director Sydney Pollack, (who was also a teaching assistant to legendary Master Teacher Sanford Meisner):

"...behavior is the key...doing is the operative word. Acting is doing. The great misconceptions is that it’s about saying things--that it’s about the way you read lines....In fact, the last thing that happens in performance is speech. Everything else comes first, and is the real part of the iceberg. It holds everything up. Acting is doing something...and the emotion sometimes expresses itself verbally. It’s (emotion) the last thing in a chain of events. And it’s very hard to convince people that that’s where the search always has to be: for the behavior..."

I invite you to join me in that search.

Marc Durso - ActTrue, Inc.