-COURSE PROPOSALS-
PRIVATE OR IN CLASS EDUCATION
ACTING FOR BEGINNERS:
This introduction to acting course is based on fundamental conservatory training. It is arranged to introduce acting to beginners. Throughout this course students will not only improve their observation and persuasion skills; but they will also learn to create empathy with other subjects and objects around them. They will also use their bodies their facial expressions, and their voices in a broader sense to tell their stories. Monologues and scene studies will help them learn how to approach a text. With writing exercises they will learn to understand playwrights, and with group exercises they will learn the importance of collaborating on stage.
The number of students should not exceed 10. There will
be 21 classes every semester. The complete syllabus is available upon request.
ACTING THROUGH HISTORY:
This is a supportive acting course that can be taken by actors who are interested in combining their theoretical and practical knowledge of theater through a historical journey. Why is a theater text written? What is the writer trying to say with it? What elements do we need to consider while expressing it? What are the images, the music, the philosophy of the time in which the text is written? These are but some of the questions theater artists might ask. The focus of this course will however be to enable the actor to gain a broader understanding of the necessary acting style for each kind of text and to perform it in a way that is appropriate to that specific genre’s mission. Through these sessions the actors will not only learn the history of theater and improve their understanding of the directorial approaches for each genre but also have the chance to practice it.
As a theater-ist, I give great importance to the body and its expressive power. I believe only through the earthy expressions of the bodies that provoke primal inert knowledge of life, theater can survive. However, I am also attached to poetry, so much so that I do not want to be detached from the literary ground of theater. Thus, I have been exploring new ways to hold on to both without being enslaved by one or the other. As it fits my background geographically, I think there are ways to unite oral and literary cultures of the east and the west. SPLIT AND UNITE is a technique I have been developing. It is inspired by both the physical expressions of words, and the verbal expressions of the body; and created to trigger the sensory connotations of words and stimulate the bodies to respond to them freely; to create awareness about the interaction, integration, interjection, intersection, introspection and interruption between the physical and the verbal, while they separately but simultaneously express similar or different responses to sensory stimulants. Through this practice, performers split and unite the physical and the verbal, create a sensory language, and re-form words through gesticulations in response to a new found rhythm, pitch or various phonetic possibilities.
I use this technique during the rehearsal and workshop process of Katharsis Performance Project and Modern Mythologies Project.
Copyright © 2008-2009 by Fulya Peker
