Mamet said, “Acting is a craft.” As in any other craft, acting has guidelines which are consistent and repeatable.  When students apply themselves to those guidelines, they will learn to act.  

Simple, honest, and straightforward, Practical Aesthetics is both an acting technique and a philosophy. The technique gives actors an empowering set of analytical and physical tools. The actor learns to analyze scenes for tangible, physically-playable objectives, and uses his or her imagination, voice, body, and sense of play to bring the character and the story to life.

The Practical Aesthetics philosophy teaches self-reliance, professional work habits, as well as mutual support and respect between artists.

Practical: capable of being put to use.
Aesthetics: a particular theory of beauty or art.

Think before you act in order to act before you think.

We prepare in order to improvise.

Always tell the truth. It's the easiest thing to remember.

Invent nothing, deny nothing. Accept everything and get on with it.

All an actor needs is: bravery, will, and common sense.

Practical Aesthetics is the simplest and most effective acting technique out there. With it, your acting becomes more truthful, spontaneous, courageous, and FUN.

In this class you'll learn a way of analyzing ANY scene to give yourself a practical and playable action, and then learn what it means to TRULY pursue an objective in another person.

The focus will be on scene work, so acting "exercises" will be kept to a minimum, and the bottom line will always be: Are you learning something that makes your acting demonstrably better? Because at the end of the day, that's the only thing that matters.

The next classes begin on April 1, and run for eight Thursday nights from 6-10pm, at Fraser Studios.

Class sizes will be kept small (maximum 10 people) so that there's lots of time to focus on each student. The cost is $330 ($260 for AAction/Equity members.)

Students will learn how to implement an analysis through improvisation and scene work. We will focus on how to simplify acting and find the parallels between behavior in real life and behavior required by the scene.

Using a variation of Sanford Meisner's Repetition Exercise, students will learn how to overcome self-consciousness and be active from moment to moment in a spontaneous and truthful way.

The basic skills of acting are:

• ANALYZING a script for a simple action
• PLAYING that action boldly and spontaneously
• COMMUNICATING truthfully with other actors and the audience
• SPEAKING clearly and expressively
• MOVING powerfully and gracefully