FIRST YEAR TRAINING

In the first year, students gain practical understanding of their bodies and voices, and access and use increasingly deeper realms of their imaginations. Students also learn foundational performance skills that they will expand and develop in their second year.

First Year Acting: (Catherine Coray, Saskia Hegt, Terry Knickerbocker, Kevin Kuhlke) The first year acting curriculum begins with the creation of an ensemble environment-an environment that emphasizes collaboration, where the group provides support for each student's personal creative growth. Through the use of theatre games, sound and movement exercises, sensory work, self scripting, structured improvisations, and rigorous physical training, first year students initially approach acting as free and skillful play independent of scripted text. Students work to release physical tension, integrate the mind and body, gently gain more freedom of emotional expression, recognize and trust their impulses, and use the body as a means to access the imagination and emotional life. In the second semester students begin Meisner realistic acting training, script analysis and scene study, and study a full spectrum of dramatic literature.

First Year Movement: (Wendell Beavers, Mary Overlie) The first year movement curriculum helps students investigate their full movement potential and establish dance as a personal artistic resource. The training includes four approaches to technique and improvisation.

• Developmental Technique, based on the work of Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen, uses progressions of movement sequences as a means of developing strength, articulation, and a fuller range of mind-body coordination.
• Hamilton Floor Barre is a ballet floor barre used to fully warm up joints, strengthen and balance major muscle groups, and foster full range and articulation of the skeletal-muscular system.
• In Six Viewpoints practice, students identify and explore the basic compositional vocabulary of Space, Time, Shape, Movement, Story, and Emotion through structured improvisation. These viewpoints are subsequently developed into compositional tools that become the building blocks of choreography and staging.
• Contact Improvisation is a dance form based on direct experience of body weight, gravity, the physical sensation of momentum, and falling and rising in contact with a partner. Directly related to various martial arts forms such as Aikido and Tai Chi, Contact Improvisation builds physical confidence and an ability to focus and respond to constantly changing physical circumstances.

First Year Voice And Speech: (Cecil MacKinnon) The goal of the first year voice curriculum is to enlarge and refine each student's voice in terms of pitch, range, expressive capacity, articulation, and projection power. The Linklater approach works with breath and imagery, to release physical tension, gain access to resonating areas and help students connect thoughts and emotional life to the spoken word. It also enables them to shape and communicate complex thought through language. Students apply this training to selected text from prose, verse and classic dramatic literature.

Additional Classes:

• Applied Viewpoints (Rebecca Holderness) Use of Six Viewpoints to create original theatre pieces which integrate text and movement.
• Shiatzu/Nutrition (guest faculty) A basic body maintenance course designed to familiarize students with simple ways to reduce physical tension and increase energy capacity.
• First Year Projects (Frances Becker) At the end of the first year all students must complete a project based on a contemporary director or choreographer. This project begins with research, and ends with the student's creation of an original theatre piece.