Standing Down Straight for Actors (362-0-20)
Instructors
William Lewis Siegenfeld
847/491-3147
10 Arts Circle Drive
Office Hours: Tuesday and Thursday, noon-2:00pm and by appointment
Meeting Info
Wirtz Center SOUTH: Tues, Thurs 11:00AM - 12:50PM
Overview of class
Standing Down Straight® for Actors (SDS) is a method of body-and-voice training that teaches people to speak, sing, and move both more relaxedly and - in a seeming paradox - more powerfully. To discover how to do monologues and scenes in this relaxed-but-powerful way without strain and without injury, we study the anatomy of the body. We do this to discover how Nature has constructed the body to work rather than how our too-often misguidedly overthinking human mind thinks the body should work. Knowing how to use our voices and bodies according to the laws of Nature can not only unlock the physical-emotional energy in our acting. It can also unlock this energy in our humanity. That is, the work of this class involves discovering how being vulnerable, grounded, and direct can fuel being vulnerable, grounded, and direct as a person as well as an actor. Describing with more particularity the physical-emotional work of the class . . . . SDS explores how the human body is designed to work with gravity than against gravity. That is, by learning slowly - to emphasize, learning slowly - how to use gravity's cost-free, always-available support, we explore how to perform any movement or vocalization more by letting go of the muscle-encased bones of our body than by hypertensely holding on to them. In sum, we learn to work with greater efficiency. Working with greater efficiency means learning how to use the least amount of energy - emotional as well as physical energy - to complete a task. A synonym for working in a more efficient way is working in a less is more way In SDS, we apply this less-is-more way of working to our warm-up exercises. Given the goal of letting go of our bones rather than holding on to them, these exercises focus on teaching our bones - which we'll learn to identify the form and function of in the anatomy-focused part of class - to gently give in to the downward pull of gravity rather than hypertensely resist its downward pull. Toward this goal, we learn how to free our bones go where they want to go instead of where we - possibly influenced by a previous, anti-gravity instruction - think they should go. To help get our heads around this admittedly quite challenging giving-in-rather-than-holding-on point of view, we - again - slow down. We slow down maybe a bit more than we speeding multitaskers might want to in order to weave the following three actions into the exercises: 1) exhale so as to release unneeded physical and emotional tensions; 2) let go of the bones of the body by sensing where gravity "wants" them to go: down 3) team up the movement of the eyes, hands, and voice so that, in unison, they can direct us to get what we want with LESS physical and emotional strain and MORE physical and emotional power.
Class Attributes
No Freshmen