Instructor: Janice Orlandi –
Held in-person:
Winter 2025: The Lost Art of Letters
Creating Character Portraits through their Letters
This workshop lays the foundation for performers to create, write, self direct and incubate a Character Solo Performance through the exploration and dramatic form of letters.
The epistolary form adds a confessional reality to a story and demonstrates differing points of view and dramatic content. Actors will explore and research powerfully inspired and passionate letters of love, celebration, joy, grief, forgiveness, compassion, anger, despair, romance, friendship, and more. Inspired by Michael Chekhov’s Character Portraits exercises, we will incorporate character transformation and embodiment, physical dramaturgy, historic research, costume elements, props, set, sound and music, to fully realize solo moments and performances presented as choreographed portraits through letters.
You will create a character and their environment through exploring: archetypes, atmospheres, inner objects or centers, imaginary body transformations, movement and vocal qualities, animals, objects, age, status, historical period style and physical states or conditions. We will utilize character development tools for transformation including exercises and approaches developed by Michael Chekhov, Stanislavski, Uta Hagen, and Loyd Williamson.
Letters will be drawn from many sources, including letters to and from; artists, historic personages, the press, family, lovers, poets, actors of cinema and theater, leaders, prisoners of war, letters from the front, and others. The possibilities may include for example, letters to and from: Frida Kahlo & Diego Rivera, Isadora Duncan, Ida B. Wells, Georgia O’Keeffe, Oscar Wilde, Ira Aldridge, Rudyard Kipling, Anton Chekhov, Marilyn Monroe, Tennessee Williams, Zora Neal Hurston, Ernest Hemingway, Lorraine Hansberry, Lillian Hellman, Anne Sexton, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Queen Elizabeth I, Mozart, Nicholas Romanoff, Pushkin, Vincent Van Gogh, Anne Frank, Florence Nightingale, Abraham Lincoln, Dorothy Parker, Michelangelo, Chief Seattle of the Duwamish Tribe, and others discovered through research and personal connection.
“How can you buy or sell the sky –the warmth of the land? The idea is strange to us. Yet we do not own the freshness of the air or the sparkle of the water. How can you buy them from us? We will decide in our time. Every part of this earth is sacred to my people.” – Chief Seattle of the Duwamish Tribe, 1855
Fall 2024: Movement Marathon Cross Training
A rigorous exploration of Movement Techniques for the Actor & Ensemble-Devised Compositions
A Movement practice that integrates “cross training” in the guiding principles and affinities between Michael Chekhov, Williamson’s Physical Process of Acting, Viewpoints and Rasaboxes.
The Chekhov approach brings the psychology of the character into the body through movement and gesture, creating an enriched and active inner life, making the creation of a character an imaginative, organic and playful process. Imaging exercises, creative visualization, and incorporation are explored towards the goal of developing an honest and complete physical character. The class will cover the basic concepts which form the foundation of Michael Chekhov’s approach, awakening the connection between the actor’s inner life and expressive body, and how to develop character. We will explore exercises outlined in Michael Chekhov’s book “To the Actor” the Guiding principles and concepts of the Chekhov Technique.
We will also explore the Viewpoints and Composition Devising as developed by Mary Overlie. SYSTEMS is a mnemonic device for the Six Elements of The Viewpoints: Space, Shape, Time, Emotion, Movement, and Story. You will work as an ensemble with the Six Viewpoints and Nine variations with reference to the practice of presence work with kinesthetic and sensory awareness through both Chekhov and Viewpoints practices.
Williamson Technique is a psychophysical technique designed to explore, develop, and expand the actor’s process oriented “Tool Kit.” We apply Williamson Technique to Uta Hagen’s Character Conditions exercise, focusing on how the body processes experience through the five senses into sensation and behavior, while you are involved in the circumstances and relationships of the imaginary world or the event. We explore the physical process of creating a character with “conditions” such as cold, hot or sleepy, and “Altered States” or impediments such as drunk or drugged. With applications to dramatic texts from theater or film that require or imply a character with a physical condition, impediment or altered state, we explore archetypal essences, qualities and atmospheres for activating the body in space.
Rasaboxes are exercises exploring the 8 Rasa Emotions in Indian Drama. These exercises explore the embodiment of emotion in the actors voice, mask, posture and breathing patterns, as applied to character and text.
HB Studio offers both online classes and in-person classes at the Studio. Before your first class, please review the information outlined on the relevant page(s). Class titles below indicate which are running online vs. in person.
Most classes run for 10 weeks. Some classes are offered in two 5-week parts (Part A & Part B), and you can sign up for either part independently or register for both parts for $15 off. You can register for Part B without taking Part A: