The ensemble of Apollo [Part 1]: Lebensraum, which performed at the Fertile Ground Festival in Portland

Left Coast resources which offer exceptional actor training for original works.

When it comes to interpreting new works, a good actor needs a specific, and specialized, skill set. He or she should be exceptionally flexible in terms of collaboration, highly skilled in terms of physical movement capability, and completely in tune with the process of breaking down an original text as organically as possible. Seems like a tall educational order, but on the West Coast, a number of highly respected, uniquely focused training programs have met the challenge—and then some. Here’s an insiders’ view of how each program prepares its students to invaluable performance achievements.

Enriching the Actor’s Unique Voice
At Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle, Wash., BFA candidates in theatre are challenged to develop every aspect of their individuality through personal and creative self-awareness. To this end, learning personalized strengths and weaknesses, plus discovering the most powerful ways to use the body and imagination, often occur via performance.

Actors from Living Out

“One of the things of substantial interest to our students is not just established works, but experimental works,” says Richard E. T. White, department chair. “Our students think out of the box, and collaborating with playwrights and directors on original pieces is enormously helpful to them as actors. We want our student actors to move fluidly, as one of our stated goals is to place acting at the center of the generative process.”

Cornish is one of the few U.S. institutions that actually offers an original works major in addition to more traditional acting and musical theatre concentrations. Students seeking an original works degree must audition their junior year with a 10-minute original piece; if accepted, they create their own original work senior year. Classes in ensemble, cross-disciplines and personal clowning sharpen their abilities along the way, as do numerous innovative teaching techniques. “Auto Core, for instance, presents students with a problem at the beginning of the week, and at the end of the week, the ensemble comes up with and performs a solution,” White elaborates.

Another imperative of the program is to prepare student actors for the professional world. “As faculty, we are working theatre artists, and we understand the value of having a real tool box of performing multiplicities,” White stresses. Graduates like Margot Bordelon, whose production It Happened At Camp Chestnut has been a hit on the fringe circuit, exemplify this goal: “We want our students to view themselves as actor-producers, to say, ‘I can have a hand in creating my own destiny’ through original works and/or solo performance—to craft a piece they can then perform as they enter the marketplace.”

Success Through Support
At Oregon’s Portland Actors Conservatory, the emphasis is on putting theory into practice—and when it comes to doing this through original work, students receive outstanding encouragement and feedback. The only professionally accredited two-year acting program in the state, PAC’s artistic director Beth Harper founded the school “as a home for wayward actors,” she explains. “My mission has always been driven by the work—that’s my educational impetus.” Harper and her faculty of master teachers immerse student actors in a well-rounded curriculum, including a full slate of performance instruction plus stage management, breath and energy, professional orientation and more. “My goal is to empower the artist, so if my students are going to create a piece of art, they need to see the big picture—that means taking tech classes so they can design their own performances.”

Harper feels that breaking down original text is a vital element of her students’ training. “In terms of collaboration, I don’t want my actors to overtalk or overthink anything,” she explains. “I do want them to feel the freedom to experiment, to try this or that; eventually, this will help the work settle into itself. Still, the text is everything—we find our imagination around it. I always say, the script is God, and we are worshipping at its altar!”

Movement is also strongly emphasized as a powerful tool for original interpretation.

“Performers need to have a clear understanding of how their instrument works, to allow for a free flow of expressive energy,” says Philip Cuomo, PAC’s project manager and teacher of movement, mask, clown and improvisation. “They need to understand how their physical relationship to the world of the play, the architecture onstage, and the audience.” Self-created short pieces that are constructively critiqued by faculty and classmates help this process enormously. It all culminates in a lightbulb moment; Harper says, “when an actor gets so into the work in his or her head—all of a sudden, there’s a ripple in their body, and they can see, feel and smell the work in the moment. That’s success to me.”

A stage combat class at Cornish College of the Arts.

Revitalization Through Risk
The Dell’Arte International School of Physical Theatre in Blue Lake, Calif., reforms actors’ traditional interpretive techniques through an innovative courseload of movement, melodrama, commedia and more. When it comes to creating an original role, founding artistic director Joan Schirle believes in actors being as physically open as possible.

“The actor is a poet whose language is the body, and thus an equal collaborator in bringing a play fully to life in the space of the stage,” she observes.

Dell’Arte offers an intense one-year professional training program that extensively encompasses disciplines such as Alexander Technique and performance labs. The school’s three-year MFA program in ensemble-based physical theatre stresses the individual point of view, and students create their own projects—which are often daring, original and outspoken, and almost always lead to creative epiphanies. “Inviting students to take risks—physical, psychological or spiritual—moves them past habitual habits and ‘trying to get it right,’” says Schirle. “The simplest breakthrough is realizing that acting is movement in space, that theatre is a spatial event with such possibilities for dynamic play that being fully focused on it leaves no room for self-consciousness. Self-awareness—yes. Self-consciousness—no.”

Students also get the chance to observe and work with Dell’Arte’s professional acting company in residence; the company produces everything from collaboratively devised work to new pieces by single playwrights. Ultimately, says Schirle, “Students get a chance to observe professional actors, directors, writers and designers in production.”

Putting Training On Its Feet
Even after an actor completes one of these illustrious programs, their training isn’t finished—it’s vital they learn how to survive and thrive in real-time original works performance. In Portland, Ore., the esteemed Portland Center Stage offers talented actors the chance to do just that. PCS provides two affiliated top-notch festival settings that allow performers the freedom to flourish while working with locally and nationally distinguished writers and directors.

A moment from the Dell’Arte International MFA production of The Iliad.

The JAW Playwrights’ Festival is noted for its extensive development process, which allows actors and writers to reshape pieces together. “The thing I look for in actors when casting new work is, first and foremost, flexibility,” says Rose Riordan, PCS associate artistic director and JAW festival director. “They must be able to think on their feet, and (the work) must be playwright-driven in order to fully realize a vision. My excitement is experiencing the collaboration of writers, directors and actors all getting in a room together and watching the growth of the play.” Interpretive performers may also find a home at the Fertile Ground Festival, an annual slate of more than 20 original play premieres held all across the city. Participating artists are given great responsibility, and good actors invaluably rise to the challenge, as the fest is always a huge audience favorite

“An actor in a new play has to be one part dramaturg, one part midwife,” says Trisha Mead, Fertile Ground’s festival director. “You have to be very conscious of the fact that your performance choices are actively shaping the final outcome of the play. We have performers aged 8 to 80 participating in the festival, with a broad range of education and performance backgrounds. There can be a lot of advantage to that in new work, because the diversity of perspectives can make for a more robust finished piece.”

Back at Portland Actors’ Conservatory, grads can also find work through the school’s Alumni Performance Network, which is overseen by Philip Cuomo and facilitates the creation and generation of self-produced pieces. Through an application process, participants are given full infrastructure support and mentoring in terms of business, marketing, fundraising and artistic concerns, and put up fully-realized productions of their own. “It’s been my dream to champion this impulse in our alums as they gain a sense of ownership over the theatre they want to put into the world,” says Cuomo.

Security Check. Please enter this code.