During the 1 hour “Puppets as Performers” workshop, the members of this highly acclaimed British theatre company will share their approach to working with puppets with the participants who will then have the opportunity to try it for themselves.

‘The Wordcatcher’ is a bizarre tale of something and nothing, of sound and of silence both in the heart and in the mind. The Wordcatcher sees its characters try to fix things in place that don’t fit together and through the expert use of miscommunication, the audience will witness how the holes and gaps in this story fill a void rather than leave one.

More information about timing and tickets is here or you can email PFTC for tickets.

The Spring Term is 5,000 Kc and runs until the end of June. For more information, check out our web pages: http://acting.cz

I will be migrating over the information here about the classes to there, but you should check out the new classes that we’ll be rolling out over the fall and into the winter semester.

We have also moved to a brand new studio in Prague 7, so be sure to come and check it out! Frantiska Krizka 1, 3rd Floor, right next to Vivid Casting!

I’m Boris Wilke and member of the Prague Playhouse Meisner acting group. I blog about our class activities.

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Let me be short and concise again today!

In the last few weeks there were several incidents in class that led certain members to become slightly wary of the Meisner technique.

Some of the repetition exercises bordered on the insane, vicious or at least very insensitive.

While I am aware that that is mighty scary and leaves one unsatisfied, I must insist that this has very little to do with the technique. In fact, Brian rightly pointed out to me that the Meisner technique provides you with all the tools you need.

One example: I felt attacked and cornered once. My reaction was to withdraw into “critic mode” and to lament my partner had not played by the rules. (I was being Meisner-righteous. That’s an expression Tzvi came up with.)

But in fact, there are no rules, except this one: No physical violence.

So let me present you with a remedy to feeling bad about the technique: Be Meisneritious!

If somebody attacks you, call them on it: “You’re attacking me!” “You’re cornering me!” “You take pleasure in hunting me down!” etc.

If somebody calls on things that are not in the moment like: “You’re always so arrogant!” or “You dismiss everything I do!”, look at how they say it! Stay in the moment – at least you! Call them on the way they say it: “You are insistent!” “You are holding on to things!” “You don’t see me!” “You sound indignant!” “You are petulant!” etc.

Non-Meisner-like behavior should incite Meisneritiousness of the first order! Take it personal! Pinpoint your partner’s behavior! Don’t let them get away with it! But then drop it to be open for the next moment.

It takes two to tango. If one partner stumbles, help them by picking them up. In the Meisner-world that means, as always: Be honest, even if you think the truth will hurt! Have trust in your partner, no matter how he scares you! Feel free to react accordingly, though. There is always a door you can leave through!

I insist: Take things personal! Own them! Brian called that kind of taking things into your own hands selfish – I call it Meisneritious!

Please remember: The Meisner technique is supposed to help us broaden our palette of behavior, to act out the most outrageous states of mind.

One needs to let go of fear, rules, self-centeredness, false sensitivity.

Meisner is not for the faint-hearted. But it is for the Meisneritious!

And being Meisneritious means to me to fully make use of the technique. It is there to serve us, not the other way round!

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General stuff:

Our acting class consists of some twelve new and not so new active members, who meet every Monday and Wednesday from 6.30 pm to about 9.30 at the Prague Film School. We do Meisner. And the Meisner-technique really rocks!

If you want to connect with your inmost feelings, expressing them freely in an acting environment and thus getting to know yourself better and better, feel free to join us! If you do, be prepared for some serious thrills! Class will not convene in the week from May 17, neither the one from May 24. And due to Mark Wakeling’s weeklong seminar we also won’t have regular classes from June 7 through 11.

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About the author:

I am Boris Wilke, a German expat in Prague.

I am a writer at large and have been studying Meisner since January 2008. If any of you know of any kind of acting work that befits a laddish, tall 41-year-old, please leave a note!

Based on improvisation studies (Keith Johnstone and others) we are going to create a crossover theater collage, accompanied by some experimental music scores.

Where?

Divadlo Kámen,

Nekvasilova 625/2, Prague 8 – Karlín

Metro Station Invalidovna (B-line)

When?
Friday 28th – Sunday 30th of May 2010
daily between 10 to about 6 pm.

We offer valuable theater experience FOR FREE!

We’re inviting interested artists simply to email us a soon as possible.

Who you are and which artistic discipline  you’re following doesn’t matter!
All actors, actresses, singers, dancers, musicians - no matter if amateur or professional! – of all ages, with or without theater experience are invited to this workshop!

You

- have some knowledge of English or German

- are open for a nonprofit  artistic experience

- are possibly but not necessarily of Eastern European origin!

- if musician, you would bring your instrument with you (piano ready to play in theatre itself)

Please contact us by email markusnieden@yahoo.com

or call 774168801 (English and German speaking)

Every email will be answered!

And just have a look at www.rhiz.eu!

In the search box above right you put in: ”Hotel Red Cello”

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If you consider coming, please everybody bring some personal object related to a hotel or a private room with you that could be for example…

door key(s), book, mirror, item of clothing like jacket, shirt, cap, hat or shoes…

object from daily life like umbrella, mobile phone, letter to post, other documents, passport…

bracelets or rings, hairdryer, soap, shampoo, razor…

calendar, price list, urgent files, magazines, bottle of wine, champagne, vodka (empty, of course), suitcase…

You name it!

We need it to play with in some way.

Thanks a lot!

DONT FORGET TO CONFRIM YOUR PRESENCE BY EMAILING OR CALLING ME!

See you then and there, hopefully!

MARKUS

markusnieden@yahoo.com

774168801

I’m Boris Wilke and member of the Prague Playhouse Meisner acting group. I blog about our class activities.

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Let me be short and concise today!

I am totally thrilled about Mark Wakeling’s return to Prague in a month. In case you haven’t heard of him: He is a teacher at the “Actor’s Temple” in London. He held a weekend-seminar in late November of 2009 for us Meisner students at the Prague Film School. (Click here to read about it!) Now he promised to be back from June 7 to 11.

The seminar last year rocked my soul. It helped me keep on keeping on at this difficult time, where none of my efforts at getting started as a professional actor really seem to succeed. His version of Meisner also kept me from dropping out of this class. I have been looking forward to his oncoming seminar ever Brian started to talk about it, i.e. at least four months.

If you can afford it and have the time, please register for the seminar!

Mark will try his best to confront you with the inner barriers you set up to protect yourself against intense feelings. He is relentless in a way. But since Meisner is about the truth, it is absolutely necessary to get rid of these blocks. Mr. Wakeling will get you at places you wouldn’t even have known existed. If you trust him at least a little bit, he will help you free quite a bit of the aspects you carefully held captive inside for so long. You will shine!

Meisner is about getting ready to play anything – no! to be able to live it under imaginary circumstances. If you dare use the technique to the extreme – which Mark will help you with – it will get you there.

Mr. Wakeling will give you a good kick in the butt that will let you fly in the right direction.

He will take Meisner’s image of “the pinch and  the ouch!” in a totally new and really pinchey-ouchey direction.

And that is absolutely, mind-bogglingly exiting to me.

**********************

General stuff:

Our acting class consists of some twelve new and not so new active members, who meet every Monday and Wednesday from 6.30 pm to about 9.30 at the Prague Film School. We do Meisner. And the Meisner-technique really rocks!

If you want to connect with your inmost feelings, expressing them freely in an acting environment and thus getting to know yourself better and better, feel free to join us! If you do, be prepared for some serious thrills!

+++

About the author:

I am Boris Wilke, a German expat in Prague.

I am a writer at large and have been studying Meisner since January 2008. If any of you know of any kind of acting work that befits a laddish, tall 41-year-old, please leave a note!

While I wouldn’t necessarily apply a Meisner exercise directly to a problem in working with a text (although it’s perfectly legitimate to do so, even with early work like repetition and activities), the underlying concepts that those exercises are training — listening and attention for repetition, the reality of doing for activities — are directly applicable to working with a text in the “real world”.

The idea of Risk, Passion and Imagination also plays a part in the training.

Risk, or the willingness to try and fail, is absolutely essential in art — or any worthwhile endeavor, for that matter. Too often I see exercises where the students, for fear of looking stupid, not knowing for sure that something is going to work, or the fear of going into the unknown or scary place inside themselves, limit themselves in their experience. The desire to stay in a safe place, a known place is death to an artist. By using the activities and repetition with a thought towards risking (risking being vulnerable to the other person, risking showing weakness, risking bringing something really meaningful or on the edge of what you’d think is safe), students can start to gain the habits that will serve them very well in front of a camera or on the stage, where people pay good money to take these “risks”. By practicing risking in a safe environment, both in class and in rehearsals for class, students can learn that only through risk can they really achieve greatness.

Passion is another way of saying bringing meaning to the work. Lately, especially now towards the end of the school year, I see that passion for the work has waned. The thing that really differentiates actors from each other, aside from physical type, is the passioned opinion. To an actor, who is going to face a mountain of rejection, cultivating a sense of passion and purpose is a huge benefit. I would much rather work with a mediocre actor who attacks the work with a passion than an extremely gifted and indifferent actor. So much of our work is perseverance and survival. It is our passion that will sustain us through the hard times. It is our passion that will wow audiences and move them to tears or anger. The worst thing an actor can be is indifferent or apathetic. The process of doing the beginning work can be used to instill a passion in us: a passion for the other person, a passion for what we are doing in the moment. With that passion, what happens in the moment is never boring. Without it, I’d just as soon go home.

The last concept we discussed today was Imagination. It seems silly to say that imagination is needed in our work. It seems obvious. Yet we are so obsessed with the Truth or “what I would really do in that situation” that we lose sight of the imaginary situation that could move us. Working on your imagination and especially imaginary circumstances is something that can be really fun. Look around you the next time you go out. Who doesn’t have fantasies about the people that are around? Indulge those fantasies. See how they develop and how they affect you. Is the guy standing next to you a millionaire? What if he was? What if he just offered you a ton of money to do something you always wanted to do? It is so easy to deny that we could ever believe in such a thing, but that is what we are called on to do every time we work! These early exercises are an invitation to say “Yes!” Try out what it would be like to believe in something outrageous. Work on strengthening that imaginative muscle. It will pay big dividends down the road when you have to imagine an entire set while you’re working on a green screen.

DAY 1 (March 27): SCREEN ACTING TECHNIQUE CLASS: Actors participate in a series of practical exercises that develop effective methods for screen acting. Material covered will include learning how to calibrate a performance for close-up vs. wide shot, playing an inner monologue, playing reaction shots and playing in the eyes. All participants will receive a free copy of “Secrets from the Casting Couch.”

DAY 2 (March 28): AUDITION TECHNIQUE CLASS. This class will target specific strategies for casting, including cold reading skills, and audition technique. Actors will also do a casting session on camera with coaching from Nancy. All participants will get a free copy of “Secrets from the Casting Couch.”

About Nancy: Emmy-award nominated, American Casting Director, Nancy Bishop, has cast over sixty American and British films, from her base in Prague. She has cast for major feature films including Roman Polanski’s Oliver Twist, Hellboy, Bourne Identity, and the recently released Wanted and Prince Caspian. She has been teaching casting workshops throughout Europe, the UK, and the US, and the head of the Acting for Film Department at the Prague Film. She is a member of The Casting Society of America, and the International Network of Casting Directors.

About the Secrets from the Casting Couch: Why is it that so many good actors don’t perform well at castings? Secrets from the Casting Couch gives practical advice for actors, written from a casting director’s point of view, teaching the craft of film auditioning in front of camera. It shows how actors can work with today’s internet technologies to book roles and features advice and actual exercises that achieve results in the casting studio.

Details:

FILM ACTING MASTER CLASS

Time: 11:00AM – 17:00PM

Date: Sat, 27 March, 2010.

Cost: 2500kc or 100 EUR, including copy of book, “Secrets from the Casting Couch”,

AUDITION TECHNIQUE CLASS:

Time: 11:00AM – 17:00PM

Date: Sunday, 28 March, 2010.

Cost: 2500kc or 100 EUR, including copy of “Secrets from the Casting Couch”

DISCOUNT COST FOR BOTH CLASSES, including book: 4500kc or 175 EUR

To register please send photo and CV to: workshops@nancybishopcasting.com

I’m Boris Wilke and member of the Prague Playhouse Meisner acting group. I blog about our class activities.

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This blog entry is closely related to my last one on keeping face. Brian has been telling us repeatedly to let go off control. The reaction to one’s respective partner should come “like hiccups”, involuntarily, instinctually.

Meisner’s main credo was “fuck polite”.

Politeness always gets in my way! Let’s say, the person in front of me smells from their mouth. See?! I’m being polite again! I wanted to say: If they stink from their mouth, I fail to tell them, for example. I suppress my instinct. Shame on me!

As an interesting note aside: “To stink from one’s mouth” is the direct, i.e. German, way to say it. The cowardly polite Anglos talk about “bad breath” or “mouth odor”. That sucks! In the English language there seem to be either euphemisms or four-letter-expletives. Where is the zone of truthful naming it, nailing it – so to speak – in between those two extremes?

“You have bad breath…” “I have bad breath?” “You have bad breath…” That’s as boring as a cold potato! Go get yourselves a life, people!

It is: “You reek from your mouth like a cow out of its ass!” Where is the fuck, the shit, the damn, the cunt, huh? None of that! And still, this is painfully truthful!

God! That gets me going!

Why are we like this?

I, for one, know that I am absolutely scared of total defeat. And total defeat is a possibility if one “drops one’s bowels onto the stage”. In the past people have been sneering at me, belittling me, pointing their finger at me laughing because of my openness. They called me naive, immature, nasty, weird. They deemed themselves superior and took it out on me by ignoring me, bad-mouthing me, excluding me, cursing me, even hitting me.

The worst thing was, when they let me feel like a weirdo.

I got to nurture my inferiority complexes big time.

I still knew, deep inside, that they sensed somehow I was giving them a gift: my true self. I gave them my heart. But instead of being happy and thankful about it, they dropped it on the floor and trampled on it, just because what was not to be, could not be. And love simply was not an option for them. So they destroyed it, even before it really reached them.

They made me feel like shit – asocial, useless, deranged, ugly, geeky, clumsy – even presumptuous!

Most of those fuckers, I would refuse to touch even with a ten-foot-pole. But they mistook my love for a fumbling pass.

And then I closed myself off. I kept my gob smack shut and pretended to play along. I smiled and went through the moves as well as I was able to. I started to hold back – and later ration – the love I had to give.

I know, some of you will react to my liberal and free – yes: liberated! – use of the word love by putting me down like this: “How dare he say he was loving! He thinks he’s better than us – what does he call us? – «fuckers»?”

But I am talking about my past. This hell started in kindergarten. If this applies to you – yes! – then shame on you for letting innocent, lovely people run into your ready and open knives – for subjecting them to social suicide, just because they were being bold enough – no! They simply dared – to be themselves!!! You let them suffer for their refusal to play by the rules of make believe and cheapskate charades that kids and certainly teenagers create around themselves to spread fear and misery. And all that, because you were even more scared of showing your true colors than we were.

Why?

I have been asking myself this so many times: What do people have to hide that they think they’d rather die than tell us? In class of late, we have been hearing stories like: “My step-mother laughed at my singing in public. I used to love singing. But I’ve hated my voice ever since and never sung out loud again!” or: “Just a few days after my arrival at our new home, my uncle and my father drove with me to a soccer field. And I was supposed to train with the local kids. They were playing in a way that reminded me of urban warfare – so tough! I was scared stiff and refused to get out of the car. But instead of understanding me, my elders were disappointed with me and made me feel like a total loser! They were actually ashamed of me and let me suffer for it, too!”

These stories are lovely in that they talk about true anguish and failure. They make the people who tell them human and amiable. All Tarantino-style bragadero bullshit you hear from so many people “in the business” is just so bloody lame. Yeah, Warren Beatty had sex with over 12,000 women – or was it inflatable dolls?

Who cares? Thinking about it: What do stories like this tell us about their creators? Why did they have to go to such extremes? How wretched must they be, really? Poor things!

True stories about what we feel deeply about – oftentimes it is shame and defeat – are harder to tell than those overblown success stories from the media. But the more of these truly intimate tales we hear the more we come to realize that what we thought was unique in us and dreadfully shameful, is commonplace among our peers. Even murder and incest are aspects of the human condition everybody has to deal with in some way.

Telling these stories is therapy without a therapist – self-healing, so to speak.

So what keeps us from letting go off control? It’s ancient events, the memories of which we buried deep inside, thinking if we ever unearth them we will die of embarrassment and/or shame.

How will we be able to “spill our guts”, as Brian calls it, though, if we get spooked by these ghosts from the distant past? They are just figments of our imagination, really. But they will keep on haunting us, if we don’t finally address them by dragging them out in the open and facing them in broad daylight. What seems like powerful wraiths while rummaging around in the bowels of our subconscious will turn out to be a puny puff of fog fading faster into the air and with way less smell than a real fart you let.

I have seen so many class members give in to self-generated fear. They refused to go back to class due to their reluctance to lift up their carpets and chase those pesky little ghosts from the past out. I am afraid that to this day they keep them roaming inside like gas moving up and down one’s intestines. A simple fart can give you a bad bout of colic, you know? I’m sure even the Queen of England has been told time and again by her doctors to rather create a stir among her subjects by breaking wind than keeping the little buggers inside.

And I think while it would be nice of us to expose our shit from the past to the scrutinizing light of day in class, we are free to use other ways to do it. Therapy is an option. But that takes time and money. Writing a journal about it is free and quite powerful – for the ones who can relate to that. Meditation is fine; so is yoga – even sport! Talking to one’s best friend can do the trick as well.

But done it must be! The sooner we realize that, the better off we are, i.e. the faster we can let ourselves go, the more truthful and in the moment we become. Remember: Meisner training is getting us prepared to act. And to me acting is the best thing in the world!

Yes, we can become instinctual. Yes, our reactions can leap out of us like a cough or a hiccup: wild, loud and ugly! That really is beautiful – and true!

We just have to let go off control.

So let’s do it! Just do it!

**********************

General stuff:

Our acting class consists of some twelve new and not so new active members, who meet every Monday and Wednesday from 6.30 pm to about 9.30 at the Prague Film School. We do Meisner. And the Meisner-technique really rocks!

If you want to connect with your inmost feelings, expressing them freely in an acting environment and thus getting to know yourself better and better, feel free to join us! If you do, be prepared for some serious thrills!

There will be no class from the second week of February on until the end of the month. It will resume in March!

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About the author:

I am Boris Wilke, a German expat in Prague.

I am a writer at large and have been studying Meisner since January 2008. If any of you know of any kind of acting work that befits a laddish, tall 41-year-old, please leave a note!