FIRE IN THE SNOW ACTING
A once-a-week, two-hour actor/director/writer scene study workshop.
Small cost. Big gain. Build the muscles.
Led by John Wills Martin, Assistant Arts Professor at NYU.
Ring bell for Playwrights, prompt 7:30 start
Film-centric acting workshop
Acting
This is the heart of the workshop. Acting is doing what you can with what you have within a particular story framework. This is not a Meisner class or a Strasberg class. This class encourages you to use all the tools at hand to step into the story, in a specific, accurate and vital way. Conforming to the story teaches the tools. In class, there will be table work with Weston analysis, targeted exercises, scenes and monologues, and cold readings. Risk-taking is encouraged. This workshop is not about polish or perfection. This is a process-oriented class to help bring yourself fully into the material. The actors we care about are the ones who bring their heart, body and soul to the story.
Development
Art cannot be constrained, but it can be focused. An essential focus of this work will be on nature: man’s relationship with a natural world and in particular the animal kingdom, of which man is a part. The industrial revolution severed us from the natural world, just as tech is doing now. Man is not solely defined in relationship to men: Urban life, the family unit, the gangster underworld, or prison. But is also defined by how we treat animals and nature. To this end, works by Chekhov, Shawn, Chaudhuri, and others will keep this idea of nature aloft in the work and workshoppers are encouraged to wrestle with the idea. John teaches a course on performance and animal extinction at NYU and is here to support these projects. Any monies from the workshop, beyond overhead, will be donated to animal charities.
Nature
The workshop is also a forum for new and developing writing. Directors and actors are encouraged to bring in personal scripts, stage and screen, which will be assigned to actors and workshopped with oversight. Actors are strongly encouraged to develop their own material – everyone must have product. Writing for yourself with public development is empowering for the actor. The work feeds self-reliance, a necessity for growth.
Point Blank by Manny Farber
At the end of the play A Lie of the Mind by Sam Shepherd, Meg, the Montana wife and mother of the assaulted Beth, is suddenly kissed by her husband for the first time in twenty years. She looks through the snowy set to her in-laws, the family of Beth’s husband who beat her, as they burn the vestiges of a life they are trying to put behind them.
MEG. (Still with hand to her cheek.) Looks like a fire in the snow. How could that be?
Shephard is full of contradictions and opposing forces. The fire in the snow is a kind of vitality that arises out of tenderness commingled with brutality. It is in the clash of the heart and the mind; the body and soul. For me this opposing image points to a third thing which is the paradox of acting itself, where we can reveal a higher human truth from a game of pretend. The stage is a relative reality. The empathic act of acting itself, of how an actor puts aside their own ego and then finds within themselves that other person’s voice, that commingled reality, is a flame in the snow.
Vart Awakimian and Ian Cramer are playing the roles of Beth and Frankie in A Lie of the Mind in this Open House.