Acting

The acting component of TTRP is both Stanislavskian and post-Stanislavskian in that it reflects upon and draws from Stanislavski's legacy, yet holds no so-called method or system to be complete or all-encompassing. It examines and appropriates many tools and avenues of exploration that follow from Stanislavski's enquiries and texts.

In the first year, the focus is on the actor, and the links between life and acting. The accent is on the self, self-awareness and recognition of the habits of body and mind which facilitate or hinder expression corporeally. The work, framed by the observation of life, the generation of personas by mimesis and personalisation employs tools from Stanislavski and from Sanford Meisner, Michael Chekhov, Suzuki Tadashi among others. The year's work seeks a clear contextualising of the major thrusts of acting theory throughout the twentieth century, and a deconstructive understanding of the components of professional acting in practice.

The second year of the course is focused on the actor and the character. This implies the actor's engagement with text, characterisation, and - increasingly throughout the course - with a variety of dramatic writing genres including Realism, Shakespeare, Theatre of the Absurd, movement-based performance and others.

In the final year of the course, we concentrate on the actor, the character and the performance. This means respect for the audience as the final crucial component, and the application of the audience's (including director's) needs: the performance aesthetic.

Movement

This course spans all three years of the TTRP and is designed to teach knowledge of the domain and support the various other aspects of training that are founded on a sound knowledge of the body and its potential to move. The course delivers core knowledge pertinent to Movement while also preparing student physically to undertake work and training in Acting, Immersions in Theatre Traditions, Post Modular Labs and the Theatremaking Modules.

Inevitably, the first two years of this course are by far more structured and prescriptive. By the end of two years the student is expected to know, embody and apply proper alignment, breathing, core-strength, improvisation and locomotion techniques to various kinds of physical work in theatre. In addition the student must know how the body works, physically and kinesthetically, use techniques of body conditioning, understand principles of working safely and without injury and achieve grounding, release and awareness of self and environment.

Movement in Third Year is aimed primarily at supporting students public performance and project work. Contingent on the student’s talent, ability and progress, advanced training in physical performance, dance and choreography may be offered.

Voice & Speech

The course aims to help the actor discover and develop their natural voice for use in the contemporary theatre. Towards this, the student is taught exercises and drills based on natural processes for breathing and vocalization, as well as sufficient theory to help them connect to the complex physiological processes, which enable voice and speech.

The work is as much as about re-training as it is about training and the acquisition of new skills and abilities. Students will have to make critical decisions along the way to give up deep-rooted, habitual ways of being, if these turn out to be inefficient and stand in the way of a free and natural voice. The changes needed may touch on body posture, breathing, voice and speech habits, as well as attitudes and aspects of the personality.

To be successful, both the student's body and mind (and this includes the imagination and personality) will need to be responsive to change, as the training proceeds from work on the body and breath to voice, speech and text.

Basic Taiji & Mediatation

The Basic Taiji Quan and Meditation Component is closely linked with the Movement training course in the TTRP. It trains the student-actor's body and mind as a continuum. The work is on building sensitivity to detail as well as the whole, awareness of the body-mind in relation to itself, awareness of the body-mind in relation to the space, finding grounding yet lightness, finding release through developing control, physical malleability through wielding base principles, and sustaining flow/change through the connection of moments.

The aim is to give the student-actor a basic set of tools with which to shape his awareness, focus and physicality, through the practice of principles embedded in the form. And together with the Movement Component, this component also aims to help the student-actor undergo the strenuous training of Traditional Forms, at a relatively older age, with greater ease and less risk of injury.