Over his twenty-five year directing career Richard found that many actors he auditioned didn’t actually listen. They acted listening to pre-planned choices they had intelligently worked out as a result of their preparation. That pathway plainly didn’t work – it was fake. Even actors who had emerged from the major teaching institutions often couldn’t listen for real.
By Richard Sarell | News
Well we are finally here. We have a new website.
Please bear with us over the next couple of weeks as we tweak the final bits and pieces to get everything perfect.
Most importantly, make sure that you check out our latest workshops that are ready for enrollment.
Thanks for visiting!
Richard…
By Richard Sarell | Acting Classes & Workshops
Dates:
Duration:
Times:
Tutors:
Full Fee:
Deposit:
Thursdays 31 Jan – 4 April
10 weeks
7.00pm to 9.30pm
Richard Sarell
Kyahl Anderson
$615
$61.50
Learn the professional skills that have you offering NINE different characters for any audition. When a Casting Director wants a different type of character change from one to another in under 10 seconds. Surprise Casting Directors with your flexibility and stand out from the crowd.
"Something clicks in every class. It’s an amazing feeling - knowing that you are going to learn something profound but you are yet to have any idea of what that is until it happens. I return each week excited knowing that I am about to experience this."
Actors with university degree courses (like NIDA) are taught to find the perfect performance for a scene. But in the professional audition room Casting Directors know there isn't one perfect version of a scene. Casting Directors know there are many options for a scene and the professional actor who can see lots of possibilities is an actor who can take direction.
An actor who creates characters that experience real 'moments of surprise' stands out in the audition room and on the set. All the great actors play beautiful moments of surprise. Learn techniques for playing surprises that are ONLY TAUGHT HERE. Moments of surprise are the key to being real in performance.
Directors want to hire actors who can engage an audience with the comedy or the drama. If you can totally engage an audience with your performance, the professionals who want to hire you will instantly recognize your skills.
This is a no bullshit approach to traditional theories. It cuts through the complexities of other acting processes and explains them in a simple common sense language. You will be empowered by your new understanding of Stanislavski process. This is an acting process that makes sense.
Instead of questioning if you actually understand the story of a scene. Learn how to break down story effortlessly every time.
Instead of walking out of an audition feeling flat and confused. Learn how to make every audition count. Acquire skills that enable you to measure your success.
IF YOU FEEL THIS COURSE IS TOO BASIC FOR YOU explore the Intermediate Workshop HERE
By Richard Sarell | Acting Classes & Workshops
Dates:
Duration:
Times:
Tutors:
Full Fee:
Deposit:
Mondays 28 Jan – 1 April
10 weeks
7.00pm to 9.30pm
Richard Sarell
Kyahl Anderson
$615.00
$61.50
Acquire skills you will use throughout your career. Learn to be real, to be versatile, to be a great listener and to be skilled in auditions. The Intermediate Workshop will make you the director’s best friend.
For an actor a scene must do more than further the plot - it must explore the relationship between the characters. Richard has a gift for making this process clear and simple. His direction gives me confidence to trust my own intuition, thus allowing the character room to breathe...
Listening is a core foundation skill that many actors find hard to manage. The key is to actually listen. Often the default choice for an actor is to ‘act’ listening – that never works. The focus of this workshop is on building real listening skills
This adaptation of Meisner process is enormously effective at building listening skills. These challenging exercise develop a number of real skills that you will use in many different ways throughout your career.
Clearly understanding and controlling your character’s place in a scene is an essential skill for an actor. Those choices are crucial to delivering the unfolding story. These are the skills that drive the story forward and engage the audience. Nowhere else are these techniques taught so effectively. These are the skills that have you standing out in the audition room.
How to change the nature of the character and balance that against the drama of the story is a skill that is not commonly taught. You will learn to make powerful choices that are dramatically engaging. With practice these skills are easy to manage. You will have a powerful professional presence in front of a Casting Director.
Impulses are an instinctive part of daily interactions. But many actors take their importance for granted. The key to being real and believable is understanding what drives the impulses in a conversation. That understanding enables the actor to control a path to realistic but highly dramatic performances.
The final exercise in this workshop is to test your burgeoning skills in front of a professional Casting Director
Over his twenty-five year directing career Richard found that many actors he auditioned didn’t actually listen. They acted listening to pre-planned choices they had intelligently worked out as a result of their preparation. That pathway plainly didn’t work – it was fake. Even actors who had emerged from the major teaching institutions often couldn’t listen for real.
As a result a major focus of his work with actors both on the set and in the classroom has been to build techniques that develop ‘active listening’ skills. To be able to actively listen in a real and lifelike way is the foundation on which great performances are built. This workshop has a deep and powerful understanding of how our listening actually works and builds techniques that you will use in a variety of different ways throughout your career.
Richard believes this common sense and practical approach to this most basic of acting skills is unique to classes at The Rehearsal Room. It not only trains actors to make practical choices that will drive their listening in an active way but it will also enable them to monitor how their listening skills are working throughout their career.
Listening is the bedrock on which acting skill is built.
Learn skills you will use throughout your career. Learn to be real, to be versatile, to be a great listener and to be skilled in auditions. The Advanced Workshop will make you the director’s best friend.
By Richard Sarell | Acting Classes & Workshops
Dates:
Duration:
Times:
Tutors:
Full Fee:
Deposit:
Wednesdays 30 Jan – 3 April
10 weeks
7.00pm to 9.30pm
Richard Sarell
Kyahl Anderson
$615.00
$61.50
This is a workshop for experienced actors. You will learn the broad array of sophisticated techniques that have been developed at The Rehearsal Room. Making powerful decisions that engage an audience, balancing the character against the action, managing performance intensity and character complexity will all become effectively within your control.
I have observed leading teacher directors in the US and UK and Richard shares with them that facility to guide actors through the guff to the heart of the scene.
Put yourself in charge of a new terminology that is totally focused on practical outcomes. The understanding you will achieve of how your acting techniques empower and activate your choices will liberate you.
These techniques will enable you to stand tall in any professional discussion about character or story and the best ways to deliver them.
Actors frequently make predictable choices without even knowing it. The Rehearsal Room techniques will teach you how to avoid the obvious cliché. They will also teach you how to make the obvious choice richly complex and potently real.
There is much taught about analyzing the text but the majority of that instruction is based on a ‘literary model’. Refine your understanding of story and how the writer creates the script. Put yourself in charge of the interpretation of that script with common sense and powerful techniques that are practical for the actor. This is the powerhouse of the actor’s decision-making process.
Physical action and the purpose of the conversation are inextricably linked. In life they are united. It must be the same for the actor.
Actors frequently make decisions that they ‘feel’ are right but can’t explain with clarity. They can’t explain them because often they don’t actually make sense. Understanding how the mind makes decisions is very useful for the actor.
The major element that excites Richard about The Rehearsal Room acting process is that for thirty years it has continued to evolve. It has never lost any of its original goals but more and more practical ways of fulfilling those goals have continually emerged.
Richard makes sure that there are simple rules that assess the quality and practicality of new understandings. Those rules include...
· is the new concept simple and active
· does the new concept reflect life
· can the whole concept be clearly defined in a very short sentence
· can you do it
· does it produce an instant result.
It’s the possibility of a new discovery that gets Richard out of bed each morning with enthusiasm for the day ahead. The discoveries might come from finding a new perspective on how our minds make decisions in a psychology book. Or it might be some buried ingredient in one of the standard acting texts. But discoveries often come from an actor in a class. Because actors are empowered by The Rehearsal Room process to think about the practicalities of their choices sometimes they have sudden realizations about a new concept. And new techniques often emerge when Richard is trying to find another way to explain an existing concept.
Because the foundations of this process are so strong the new concepts always conform to the original overall goals. But Richard finds it exciting, even inspiring, to see what emerges next. You will find it exciting too. And you will also be inspired to continue the quest for further understanding.
Learn skills you will use throughout your career. Learn to be real, to be versatile, to be a great listener and to be skilled in auditions. The Advanced Workshop will make you the director’s best friend.
By Richard Sarell | Acting Classes & Workshops
Dates:
Duration:
Times:
Tutor:
Full Fee:
Deposit:
Tuesdays 29 Jan – 2 April
10 weeks
7.00pm to 9.30pm
Richard Sarell
$615.00
$61.50
Expand the effectiveness of your skills to a highly professional level. Refine your techniques and practice very effective, uniquely practical add-ons. Directors will love your ability to interpret their notes. In the final session be directed by a guest director.
If you haven't previously studied here you can still audition for a place in the MASTER CLASS
I have observed leading teacher directors in the US and UK and Richard shares with them that facility to guide actors through the guff to the heart of the scene.
The character’s emotions are directly connected to the success or failure they experience at achieving their goals. These techniques teach actors to get the emotional balance right.
Delivering the story is the actor’s primary focus. You will be empowered to engage your audience with the real drama in a very real way.
Creating real character’s that function beautifully in different relationships is the pinnacle of the actor’s craft. These simple and logical techniques create richly textured characters in a profoundly simple way.
The Rehearsal Room process will enable you to dissect Directors and Casting Directors intentions. Often you will be able to interpret their goals into actor friendly concepts better than they can. You will be empowered to share in the responsibility of finding both story and character choices.
Being given a task at short notice will no longer frighten you. You will practice being empowered to prepare in either seconds or weeks with techniques that are appropriate and effective. They are proven to work.
You will practice techniques that are so logical and so practical that the mumbo-jumbo of many of the acting myths will no longer befuddle your mind and confuse your choices.
Richard loves conducting the MASTER CLASS sessions. It is in these sessions that new articulations of this acting process will emerge. It is here that the learning is shared between the actors and the teacher. Although actors may still be clarifying their understanding of the detail of The Rehearsal Room process in these sessions they are now ready for big challenges and strong critiques. Because we are all measuring performances from the same set of values the discussions are exciting and frank.
As actors negotiate their choices before starting a scene it is very rewarding for Richard to listen to the practical nature of the discussions. It gives him immense satisfaction to hear actors identifying problem areas ahead of time. He often says, “When I hear actors analyzing the potential problems in a scene and sharing a range of simple solutions my spirits instantly rise. One of the main values of this process is to empower actors to see the possible outcomes of their choices while they are still in the preparation stage. It has always been my view,” he says, “that a professional can always fix a problem when it arises. The next step in professionalism is when the actor can anticipate the problem before it arises. I see actors at The Rehearsal Room doing that all the time.”
Richard always remembers the actor who said, “Not only can I make clear choices now; but I can also guess the outcome those choices will generate AND I’m also instantly ready to change them if they don’t work.”
Richard believes those are the professional skills that all actors should be able to deliver with ease
Learn skills you will use throughout your career. Learn to be real, to be versatile, to be a great listener and to be skilled in auditions. The Advanced Workshop will make you the director’s best friend.
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By Richard Sarell | Acting Classes & Workshops
Dates:
From Wednesday 30 Jan 2018
Duration
Ongoing Weekly
Times
10am to 1pm
Tutor
Richard Sarell
Variable Fee:
$25 per hr to participate in the class (for as long as you stay)
$20 to audit full length class
The ultimate ‘Drop-In Workshop”. You can DROP-IN and do a scene or just DROP-IN and watch.
To work on your scene with another actor you pay $25 an hour. You buy either 4 hours of class time for $100 (Package 1) or 9 hours of class time for $200 (Package 2). Use your time in hourly blocks any day that suits you until the end of the year.
Or to watch just pay $20 (on the day). Stay as long as you like.
IT IS A GOOD IDEA TO BOOK YOUR SPOT …
Email your plans to attend to richard@rehearsalroom.com
I was able to quickly overcome my long held misconceptions about what acting is and was ushered into a place of freedom, spontaneity and freedom with the scene.
If you are working on a scene the direction will be tailored to your personal needs. You don’t need to have trained here – Richard will adapt the acting process to support you..
This is a great way to try out The Rehearsal Room acting process. You can discover whether this approach makes sense for you. Ask questions and try the techniques one step at a time.
If you are already familiar with these techniques then this is a simple way to expand them further. There is so much information available here that the learning is never ending. Actors just keep growing and growing.
Many actors have noticed that if the training isn’t regular the skills do drop off. This is the perfect way to keep your skills strong and active.
Enjoy the convivial atmosphere of these classes while you continue to explore the wondrous world of acting. You can make these sessions as challenging or relaxing as you like.
Actors who keep returning to The Rehearsal Room just see there skills get better and better.
Richard finds every workshop provides the opportunity not only for actors to grow more but also for the collective understanding of technique to grow more. The exciting element of these classes is that they train actors to think in a productive way about the practicalities of acting. The discussions are stimulating, purposeful and highly productive. Richard is always on the look out for the new view that he will learn from the next class. Some thought you philosophize about today might well be an exciting basis for tomorrow’s class.
Richard often says, “I get out of bed each day excited by the prospect of an unexpected new discovery.”
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Learn skills you will use throughout your career. Learn to be real, to be versatile, to be a great listener and to be skilled in auditions. At the Wednesday Drop-In you will learn a remarkable variety of skills.