Evening Acting Course (Full-time)

The evening acting course covers the same ground as the full time acting course, however it’s contact teaching hours are concentrated into three evenings during the working week and a full day on the weekend. This timetable allows it’s students to be able to combine work and study which is the reality of many students or performing artists in London.

Under certain conditions a student of the part time course can transfer to the full time course.

Core Syllabus:

Attention:
We will teach you to focus your attention where you and the director have decided it should be. You will learn to move your attention without thinking about it.

Inspiration:
Have you ever thought that playing the same part again and again might become boring after the excitement of a few opening nights? No job is ever boring if you are inspired and the same is true of acting. By the end of the first term you will know how to become inspired before a show, rehearsal, or at anytime by using a simple technique.

Free-body (Relaxation):
It is quite common in the theatre for an actor to say to a director that what he or she is doing feels “awkward”. This is because the actor’s body is not used to the movement or posture he or she is being asked for. You can free your body from holding onto or picking up habits which are useless for an actor, and prepare it to accept the new character’s physicality. Having learnt how to do this, you can create characters with any kind of physicality with much more ease.

Purposes:
Everything we do in life, whether it is soothing a child, scratching our neck, sending money to a charity or robbing a bank, is to achieve a purpose – to make ourselves happy. We are unaware of most of our purposes but they are what stage characters should be based on. As the course unfolds you will learn how to understand purposes and how to hold the purposes of the character you are playing. You will also aquire the ability to see what purposes characters have in plays.

Creating a Character:
By the end of the course you will not only have a very thorough understanding of what a character is, but how to create one in any timescale: from a few seconds at an audition, to 8 weeks of rehearsal. The range of Acting exercises chosen on the course are designed to slowly build up the Actor’s skill and versatility from simple exercises to more complex pieces, culminating in full productions. Continuous guidance, whilst building on other stage skills at the same time (Stage Combat, Dance, etc), will ensure you are fully prepared for the profession.