Film And TV
an article by
Jeremy Whelan

The excitement that goes with the desire to act is so brilliant that it can blind a new actor to the reality that it takes work. Unfortunately it's all too easy to lie to yourself and think your a good actor. Many beginning actors waste a lot of time living that lie. Students of other art forms are immediately humbled by the technical demands of those art forms. If you can't stand on your toes yet, it would be hard to convince yourself that you're a ballerina. If you pull at the strings of a guitar and what comes out is garbage, you're not going to kid yourself into thinking you know how to play. Acting is different, you get on a stage, say a few words and convince yourself that you know what you're doing. I'm a natural you say, I don't need to do all that dumb hard work. Maybe one in a million can say that and be right, the rest of us have to do the work. Sooner or later, probably sooner, you're going to learn the truth, you suck. Sorry, I'm going into this because I really don't want you wasting career time, it is all you have. An actor is an amazing creature, nobody will give you a part, nobody will hire you and you walk around convinced that everybody is blind to your genius. They are all jealous of you, only your girlfriend knows, and she doesn't really know how great you are. Get off it, give it up, let it go and you will work. Do the work, get down and get a good teacher, do your home work and whatever talent you have will start to grow. When you start to taste what it's really like to be an actor, you will look back at that early arrogance of yours and blush. When you hear some other arrogant actor talking about being a natural and not needing to train, your just going to shake your head, maybe you'll say something maybe you won't. Imagine a young boxer saying, I don't need to train, I'm a natural. Where's Mike Tyson, I want a piece of him. Arrogance in acting won't get every bone in your face and body bleeding and broken like that guy, but it is a definite turn off. It could keep you on the bench for a long time. Ask me how I know?

Don't get me wrong, you have to be confident that you can be a great actor. It may work out that some days all you'll get to eat is a confidence sandwich. Confidence is what keeps you going, it's what makes you get out of bed in the morning. At times, confidence may be your only friend. Learn the difference between confidence and arrogance. Arrogance is unjustified belief in yourself, confidence is something you know you've earned, because you worked for it.

There are many books and other resourses that deal with things like pictures and resume's, how to get an agent etc., for now at least, I'm not going to go there. I want to focus on your creative developement. Knowing how to sell won't do you any good unless you have a product. I'm going to show you how to take the natural talent you have and develope it to the fullest.

Anyone can be an actor. You may never be a good one, but if you say you're an actor you are one. The only reason you wouldn't be a good actor is because you're lazy or arrogant, or lazy and arrogant. The first thing you have to understand is that it takes work and study to be a good actor. To tell they truth, in thirty five years, I've never heard anyone say they wanted to be a mediocre actor. So I'll assume you want to be a good one, and that begins with study. Understand this, much of what you must learn falls into the category of actors homework. There are many things that you can only teach yourself. Many New School Acting techniques are designed to lead you through those self teach processes. In other words, you can go a long way toward developing your most important acting skills at home, however at some point you will want a teacher.

HOW TO PICK AN ACTING TEACHER

THE FIRST AND IN MANY WAYS THE MOST IMPORTANT DECISION YOU WILL EVER MAKE IN YOUR ACTING CAREER IS WHO YOU PICK AS YOUR TEACHER

Things you should know:

1. NOT ALL ACTING TEACHERS ARE EQUAL.

Some great acting teachers are out there but you may have to work to find them.

Some acting teachers you meet might be adequate, meaning they haven't got much to offer, however they won't damage your instrument. They will however waste your time and you really can't permit that. Once career time is lost you can never get it back.

But you have to known that there is also the danger of getting ripped off or abused because:

Some people who claim to be acting teachers are out and out crooks, far too many.

Some acting teachers are pure idiots who think they know what they're talking about.

Some acting teachers are just directors masquerading as teachers to make a buck.

Teaching acting is not regulated by any authority, educational or governmental.

Therefore there is no system by which to judge an acting teachers ability or ethics. This means anybody in the world can call themselves an acting teacher, put an ad in the paper and charge you money to teach you something they know absolutely nothing about.

2. PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE IS NOT A WAY TO JUDGE

The greatest actor in the world could be the worst acting teacher in the world. A long list of Broadway and Hollywood credits as an actor doesn't qualify anybody to teach acting. Teaching is an art in and of itself. You should know that and respect it. You are looking for a teacher, not signing up for a fan club. Don't make the mistake of confusing some one's ability to do something with their ability to teach it. How do you tell the difference when you don't know anything about the subject? Well, except for the very young , we have all been students most of our lives - we have had many teachers - from first grade and before. You remember your favorite teachers, the ones you really learned something from, think of them. What qualities did they have in common, what made them a good teacher for you? Acting may be new to you but, I hope having a good teacher is not. Hold acting teachers to the highest standard of any teacher you ever had anywhere.

3. BECAUSE A TEACHER WAS GOOD FOR ANOTHER ACTOR

DOES NOT MEAN THEY WILL BE THE BEST FOR YOU.

There is a lot to go into here, but I think the first thing is that, in my opinion, anybody who would say, "I taught Marlon Brando or Lawrence Olivier to act," is lying to you or to themselves. Some people have a gift so large that a teacher can only hope to guide it and keep it from going off track. So I don't care what stars they taught, that does not mean they are the teacher for you.

I do feel that anyone with a sincere desire to act can be taught how. How far they take it and how good they become will be dictated by how hard they work and the size of their natural gift for the subject. The seed of creativity that is necessary for acting is born in every human being.

4. SOME PEOPLE ARE GREAT NATURAL TEACHERS,

BUT THEY COMMIT THAT ABILITY TO A BAD OR OUTMODED IDEA.

Many of us have been excited by and learned perfectly what a great teacher taught us, only to find out later they were wrong, or that their ideas might have worked in the past but are useless now and in the future. Imagine spending all that time and effort to learn a style of painting that nobody liked anymore. Being a great teacher does not in anyway make you the smartest person. It just means you're a great teacher.

You have to do your homework. You must not be fooled, or be foolish in deciding who you will call teacher. Your subject is acting. Martial Arts is a good analogy here. There are many, many schools/types of martial arts. Not everyone that becomes interested in martial arts is looking for one that will teach them to kill someone in the quickest possible time. So they check out all the different types and pick the one most in line with what they want to learn.

Even within the kill in the quickest time idea, many schools claim to do that, which one is right? You have to answer that question as best as you can. How do you do that?

HOW ARE YOU GOING TO CHOOSE YOUR ACTING TEACHER?

Pick the one closest to your house?

Pick the one recommended by some other person. They tell you Joe's a good teacher?

Pick a teacher that helped some other actor in the past?

Pick the cheapest one?

Pick the cutest one?

Read one magazine article on acting schools?

Don't allow anyone to influence your acting just because 'that's who teaches acting at your school." If you care about how well and how quickly your acting ability develops, you should either change schools or get your acting lessons outside of that school.

Picking the wrong teacher has a real big impact on your career. You really have to dig into your subject, do a really serious investigation about all the different schools and make a very intelligent decision based on many facts, and a large volume of research. You have to think about it hard and long. You must realize how important this choice is. It is going to cost you money, but if you make the wrong choice it will cost you much more. It could cost you years of your career. No actor can afford wasting years of a career.

SO YOU MUST ASK THESE QUESTIONS

BEFORE YOU START YOUR ACTING STUDIES.

1. Is the teacher really on top of the craft? Is what they are teaching the best style of/the best approach to acting available to actors today?

2. Is the teacher a really good teacher? Often you can sit in on a class. You can talk to a lot of other students of this teacher.

3. Beware the teacher who is really a director, there are far too many of these. They don't know how to teach; they don't have a system. They direct you. These are the hardest for the beginning actor to weed out, because you get a cheap sort of instant gratification out of what they give you.

They watch you work; they come up and give you a piece of information/direction; you try it again and it is better. It feels better, everybody says it was better and you think you've learned something.

Guess what? It may have been "better" but it was not your better, it was his better. How do you make it "Better" when he's not there to tell you how to make it better? Are you going to carry him around to all your auditions and rehearsals?

To be a good actor you need technique! Actors have tools just like carpenters, we call those tools techniques. They are tangible, hands on things that we can take out and use every time we have a problem. If you're not learning technique - you're not learning acting and if your learning bad technique, you will pay a big price.

BEWARE THE DIRECTOR MASQUERADING AS A TEACHER,

FORGET THE CHEAP THRILLS

DON'T BE SEDUCED - LEARN YOUR CRAFT.

Sometimes you have to act just to get the chance to act. You have to act as if you're a "Method" actor, as if your a "Meisner actor", an "Adler Actor" - whatever - because that is what the director knows and uses. This does not mean you have to waste years of your life learning that stuff. It does mean you have to be conversant with it, you have to know the vocabulary those styles use so that you can interpret what the director is asking you for. You can do that by reading one book on it and maybe spending a little time talking to somebody that works that way, more than that is a pure waste of your time.

I know that many of you may have trained or are training in one of the styles I mentioned above and got a knee jerk reaction. Before you condemn me, it would be more intelligent to find out why I say that these styles are outdated. It is natural to want to protect your teacher, but your biggest obligation is to your talent, and you are not serving it with old school techniques.

Stanislavski and all who follow him, including the people mentioned above, and most other acting teachers, are all tied at the root to what I call old school acting. While great for it's time, old school is woefully out touch with contemporary society. It doesn't work for an actor approaching the millennium. Just as important, it does not work for an audience approaching the millennium. Don't confuse what I'm saying about these approaches with the ideas that any system of acting must incorporate, those ideas which come from the history and heart of the craft. There is a very sharp, clear distinction between old school and new school and it has nothing to do with given circumstances or any of the intrinsic aspects of the craft, it has to do with the philosophy of the old school approach. If you want to understand that difference read, The New Audience and the Ensemble and Learning Styles and Acting.

I've written books which deal with that subject, check out New School Acting II. If I have encouraged you (actors) to make picking a good teacher, or evaluating a current teacher, the most important thing you do, you will at some point, come across my ideas. Judge for yourself, above all, question the approach of any teacher you talk to, question what your being taught right now and always, know what's best and DEMAND IT.

Download and try the techniques of New School Acting. To those who realize the value of the advice this article offers, I'm at least a stop on your research road anyhow.

Emotions Are To Actors What Colors Are to Painters
Since you are already a student of acting, has anybody ever explained this vital aspect of your craft to you?

EMPATHY + ACTING = ENSEMBLE

"Emotions are to Actors What Colors are to Painters"

Empathy Is Of Utmost Importance In Any Contemporary Actors Career. Without A High Degree Of Empathy, True Ensemble Acting Is Impossible.

New School Acting provides the tools necessary to get back the skill of empathy, a skill which has been mainly lost in a Freudian fog for the last 100 years.

It is imperative, if actors are going to keep up with those whom they wish to be their audience, that they become more empathetic. The actors world has become so insular/isolated that we actors have lost touch with our audience. As long as we continue to ignore their needs all the cries of audience erosion will fall on deaf ears. We have to see that the audience is much more tuned than we are to the world outside, not in some socio-political way, not in some psycho-intellectual way, but in the most basic of all ways, the ways of the emotions.

While some people are naturally empathetic, most are not. Empathy, in most cases has to be taught, relearned is probably a better way to say it. With the accent on the psycho-intellectual nature of humanity being obsessively pursued for the last hundred years, the natural empathetic nature of man has suffered a damaging amount of atrophy. As the basis of New School Acting is empathy, it was necessary to create or find exercises and techniques that would help train the actor to relocate this innate human capacity. It is not necessary for empathy to be positive. One may empathize with the intent of deception. Such a case as recognizing someone's vulnerability and using that to manipulate them is as valid as commiseration over the loss of a loved one to an actor.

Empathy simply means the ability to recognize and respond to a heartfelt emotional state in another human being.

Ensemble acting is usually considered the most artful form of acting and generally the most enjoyable for actors and audiences alike. In the past small groups of gifted actors could pull this off on occasion. The limitations of psycho-intellectual old school acting made ensemble impossible except for the gifted, those who could rise above old school limitations. NSA makes this higher level of acting available to every actor, from beginner to advanced.

In New School Acting, the goal is that every performance will be, by nature, ensemble. Ensemble is in fact built into the mechanics of NSA techniques and at the heart of NSA Philosophy. Ensemble demands a higher degree of empathy from its actors than most people possess.

Empathetic Nature Of New School Acting Techniques

Emotionology, the study of emotions, is a cornerstone of NSA and is the

Intro to Empathy in New School Acting studies. Using the 900 word Dictionary of the Emotions and its companion 86 page workbook, the Thesaurus of the Emotions as well as other auxiliary techniques, actors are taught to understand emotions in a universal-abstract manner. These emotions studies allow actors to let the character have an emotional life of his/her own. Actors are not forced to use their own emotions. Emotions which they have stained or decorated by their own life experiences with those emotions. Actors imposing their own emotions onto a character should recognize that activity as inappropriate to the character and often very dangerous to themselves. In the end, emotional recall is nothing more than flagilation/masterbation. In the extreme, whether the actor learns emotional recall from a teacher or director, emotional recall is emotional rape, a violent form of self abuse. Any actor who is subjected to, or who subjects himself to emotional recall is taking unnessacary risks with their emotional health. There is a safer and more creative way of bringing strong emotion into your acting.

Emotionology is certainly an intense, continuous, and vigorous step toward reawakening in the actor an ingrained human ability. The study of emotions is imperative if the actor is to achieve empathy, a most vital dimension in his/her personality/performance and the only true road to ensemble

There are other more subtle exercises in NSA II that help actors develop empathy. An example would be, Gibberish. For those unfamiliar, basically gibberish is a non-language language. I tell actors, OK, now we're going to create our own language. I didn't create Gibberish, I got it from Spolin, who got it from Neva Boyd, who got it from who knows where, probably the Greeks did it. I have refined Gibberish and created an easy way for actors to learn it. Gibberish can be very hard for some actors to break through to and when I first tried to learn it in the sixties, the teacher did it in your face for a minute then said, now you do it. It could drive an actor crazy. Gibberish Ball is a fun exercise and an easy way to learn it. If you're unfamiliar with Gibberish you really should learn/teach it, it is an extremely powerful rehearsal tool.

Gibberish could be called, Intro to Vocal Empathy. Recognize the distinction between Vocal and Verbal. Although Gibberish goes much deeper, is much more involved/sustained, GETS CLOSER TO THE HEART OF VOCAL EMPATHY, there are many simple examples of Vocal Empathy in our daily lives. Some examples of this vocal empathy would be: when a group of people spontaneously gasp at the site of an accident, ooh and aah at fireworks, sigh in unison at a funeral, or for that matter, yawn at bad acting.

Another NSA exercise that teaches Empathy is the Mirror exercise. Again, I didn't create this exercise, the path went to me via Viola via Neva etc. I have however adapted the mirror exercise in many very useful ways.

Mirrors could be called Intro to Non-Vocal Empathy. While perhaps this may not be as obvious as Gibberish, one need only see actors in perfect synch, flowing effortlessly through a mirror exercise, reading each other on such a high level that they anticipate without any conscious effort on some primal level, each others movements. Moving as one person, truly achieving the object of the exercise as it is reflected in the name, Mirrors. If you are unfamiliar with Mirror exercises, you may e-mail me for instructions. I will also send you the many ways that I have adapted the basic mirror exercise to New School Acting Techniques.

The Whelan Tape Technique is entirely empathy based, that is why, by it's very nature it demands ensemble performances. The WTT could be called

Intro to Integrated Empathy.

Many people praise the WTT because of the great natural physical expression it brings out in actors. They are missing the point. They somehow divide emotional truth from physical expression. They fail to see that natural physical expression can only come out of emotional truth and that emotional truth can only exist in empathy. In other words, you can only respond naturally (physically) to emotional truth if you can recognize it. Recognizing emotional truth is the very definition of Empathy.

These are a few examples of ways NSA helps get your Empathy quotient up to a level where you can access the tremendous creative satisfaction of being part of a truly ensemble performance.

NEGATIVE EMPATHY

Another aspect of empathy which is of great importance to the actor is what I call Negative Empathy, Stanislavski called it unnecessary realism. I can, in this case use a few examples from my own career.

I once did a play where I was a bad guy. At one point I was supposed to get slapped in the face by an actress. I (my character) was really a villain, and the audience hated me. It was a thrust stage, and the audience was close enough to lick me on three sides. Sometimes I heard them say things like, ``They ought to kill that S.O.B.'' So they wanted to see me get slapped. The problem was that the actress would sometimes get carried away with her part. She would slap me so hard that there was a big hand print on my face. I told her one night, ``Honey, If you break my jaw, there is no second act.''

All actors have to be ready to take a slap or get pushed around a little. We're not made of glass, and certain parts call for some spills. The problem comes when the audience, instead of saying ``Good, she slapped that bastard,'' says, ``My god, that poor actor. Look, his face is swelling up.''

At that point it has turned to negative empathy, and the play is hurt. It's good that her emotions, her creative side was working so strongly, but when you forget that it's a play, you lose the audience, and keeping them is the reason you're there.

In my first acting class I did Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and at one point I took a swing at Maggie with my crutch. I got so worked up I caught her in the side of the head. She was good. She finished the scene from the floor, but it was definitely negative empathy.

.TWO-EYED THEORY Or HOW THE EMOTIONAL TRUTH OF THE CHARACTER & The Technical Demands On The Actor Co-Exist

One eye is creative and emotionally sensitive (the left one, if you're interested), and the other is practical and logical (the right). I read somewhere that in the early 1900s when troupes of actors would go from town to town, the actors could do King Lear's ``Blow, winds, blow'' and count the members of the audience at the same time. They had to, because they were splitting the house, and the promoters would cheat them if they didn't.

Left brain, right brain is a fact, this idea has been in the news long enough that most should be familiar with it. The left eye is controlled by the right brain. It is the part of the brain that deals with the creative/emotional side of our nature. The right eye is controlled by the left side of the brain, which deals with logic, numbers and the more practical side of our natures. Most people are left-or right-brain dominant. There are many books which explain this, one such is, Whole Brain Thinking. An actor must be able to access both sides of his brain while acting. He can't get excited and stab somebody. It's only a play. In the sword fight in Hamlet, an actor I was working with got his ear cut. Blood was flowing down the side of his head. When he came offstage, he was angry because it was his upstage ear. It seemed funny to me at the time, but the blood was real. If he had left his ear out there, it wouldn't have been funny at all.

This is a grand and irreconcilable paradox of acting. You forget who you are and become the character. At the same time, remember who you are, and be professional and technically correct. It seems impossible, but good actors do it every day.

Suppose you're doing a scene where your mother is dying. She means everything to you. You hold her and cry. Then something clicks: You realize you've had your back to the audience for too long. You gently shift dear old Mom's head around so your face is out to the audience. The tears never stop, and the pain is constant.

Generally, in the properly trained or intuitively brilliant actor, these adjustments are very infrequently needed and come and go with lightning like speed so that the suspension of disbelief in the audience is never disturbed.

If you're interested in knowing more about NSA and you can attend classes in LA or NYC, you're in for a fabulous creative experience. If you can't get to the classes, New School Acting II - A Practical Manual is available. This book combines revised editions of my previous books with many new chapters. It guides actors, teachers and directors in a step by step, class by class, rehearsal by rehearsal manner, into the exciting and creatively superior world of New School Acting.

DIRECTORS AND THE WHELAN TAPE TECHNIQUE

Unless you are just beginning your career, New School Acting techniques and especially the Whelan Tape Technique are going to seem very alien to you. Your teachers and past experience, for the most part, have you conditioned to look at the actor-director relationship in a certain way. A way which, like the covered wagon and the lawnmower you pushed, served their purposes well at that time in history. Research and Technology came along and replaced them, advanced them. The same thing has happened in the area of directing actors. What I'm offering directors is a way to use modern educational research and technology to get better performances from actors, while challenging their creativity on a much higher level. Your attitude will be your greatest ally in this adventure. I'd like to tell you a story about how one director's attitude helped shape my entire creative life.

Many years ago, as a young actor, I was doing a show called Wanted at Judson Poets Theater in New York. Larry Cornfeld was my director, and Al Carmines wrote, played and conducted the music. Between those two artists they have a wall filled with Tonys. I played Jesse James, a kind of composite father of the revolution. It was a very meaty role, all the opportunity in the world for an actor to chew up the scenery (overact).

I was ranting and raving from day one. Larry left me alone. After about three days of this, I walked up to him and said, ``Larry, I'm getting a little self-conscious about all this yelling.'' There came a sparkle into his eyes as he twirled one point on his finely waxed mustache. With a soft smile, he said, ``That's nice'' and walked away.

I'm sure Larry has no idea how much that directorial patience has affected my acting and directing career. He trusted me. He could have told me the first or surely the second day. He could have walked up to me and said, ``All that yelling is too much. It won't work.'' He would have been right, and I would have hated him, thinking all through the rehearsals and the run that this stupid director had robbed me of my brilliant conception of character. As it was, he gave me a chance to find it, and I did. Give your actors that trust. Using the Whelan Tape Technique the director takes a minimal role early in the work. I can tell you from my own experience that that trust can have a profound and lasting effect on a young artist.

I told this story because it underlines a very important part of your initial work as a New School Director.

IT IS VERY IMPORTANT FOR ACTORS TO REALIZE THAT *NOTHING HAS TO HAPPEN*

This is so important that it has to be gone into in some detail. Actors are severely tempted to ACT, even in a first rehearsal. In some actors it comes from fear of looking bad or untalented, in others it's the arrogance of thinking they can know a character immediately. Whatever the reason, acting at this point must not be allowed. It is probably best to clarify what I mean by acting. I am not talking about a genuine intuitive insight to character that manifests in the actors voice and/or demeanor at certain moments in the course of this first rehearsal. I am talking about the attempt by an actor to impose some hastily established intellectual conception of how the character talks/does things and then to steadfastly hold onto it, working only to polish a shallow first choice. Some actors give a good reading at the audition, but if you give them the part, whatever you saw at the reading is what you will see opening night. Hopefully you don't have any of those around.

There is another category and that is the majority, actors who feel that it is expected of them, To Do Something. Patience is the first virtue of the new school actor and director. We learn never to force anything, we have the courage to wait for character to develop out of a series of well orchestrated sequential explorations. New School Actors are not fools either, and we have high regard for the innate creativity of our instruments. If we get a genuine creative impulse, we never deny it's expression, regardless of how ridiculous it might seem if analyzed. But we are not so egotistical that we believe that those moments come back to back, seamless from the start. We never take the position that we "know the character", we are always open to and work for new discoveries. Not those little discoveries that come when an actor has a preconceived idea about the character and adjusts any insight to fit that mold. We are wide open all the time and major insights occur all the time. Just like somebody discovering themselves every second in life. That's what New School Actors know.

Directors when you work New School Acting style, you're in for a shock. You are going to have to give actors complete artistic autonomy for much of the early rehearsal period. You have an important but minimal role in the early stages of the work. Not Directing will seem like it's going to kill you, it won't. In the end you will be happy to have a new and more creative way to work. Stick with it.

This is something you should know. Regardless of the creative morality of it, as the director, you are the authority figure and as such you must, from the first minute of rehearsal, create an atmosphere of trust. The actors must quickly feel that they have landed in actor heaven; a totally non-judgmental, creatively open environment where they are free to explore and fail and recover and fail again, until it all comes together. In short, a place where

"NOTHING HAS TO HAPPEN."

A Caution To Directors

Giving actors absolute artistic freedom and responsibility is a wonderful and creatively powerful way to work, but, you have to stay on top of actors to make sure that they accept all of that responsibility. I recently read a book review of a book by a conservative feminist. She said that it was not the fact that woman weren't getting their freedom. She said they were, but that being unaccustomed to it, they had trouble using it fully. I make no judgment on that statement, but find it a handy reference to the point I'm trying to make. I think that some slaves may have been confounded when one morning their owner walked out and said, "You're free, go do whatever you want." Actors, have been conditioned to being director dependent for almost 150 years are in the same position. By all means, give them their freedom but insist that they take it. Check to make sure that they do. New School Acting II, throughout the 18 rehearsal plans section provides you with guide lines on how to make sure actors are doing their homework.

from NEW SCHOOL ACTING - TAKING IT TO THE NEXT LEVEL (1996)

CHAPTER V

A SHORT HISTORY OF AMERICAN ACTING

(BTW, someone on the web thought I was being xenophobic by speaking about the history of American acting. NSA is hardly limited to American actors, it's a universal acting system and is being used in many countries, from Denmark to Argentina and in places such as Australia, London, Canada and many others.)

To date, I think that American acting is an oxymoron. We have Americans that act, but there has never been an American style of acting. That said, I will use the term American acting for the sake of ease.

American acting is now entering its third stage and in that stage we will find a style that can truly be said to be American. Something that combines the rugged individualism that we are noted for and the high degree of teamwork that we are capable of when the situation demands it. By looking at the first two stages it will be easier to see how this third stage is a natural evolution of them.

.THE BIRTH OF AMERICAN ACTING

STAGE I

A DIRECT IMPORTATION OF THE EUROPEAN SCHOOL

The British school in particular. This was a very natural occurrence since that was where most new Americans came from. The vast majority of those who came here were English and some of them were actors. So why should it occur to these actors that simply because they were in another country, they should change the way they acted? Weren’t their audiences the same audiences that they had played to at home? Some of the material changed but the style stayed the same.

This was a literary oriented style in which the idea was for the actor to get directly in the audiences face and say the text, which was usually in verse or some other elevated form of speech, loudly and clearly, accompanied by broad physical gestures on almost every line, to make sure that the audience didn't miss the point. If the dialogue said, "This round earth." After the actor says that line, he or she will make a big circle with their hands. Some actors preferred to do it during the line. Timing of this ritual was to taste, of course. This was also the style in France and in other parts of Europe. Nothing unusual there either; troupes of actors moved around the continent and influenced each other. The British actor David Garrick had brought some token of naturalism to the English stage, but declamation still ruled. That overblown type of acting remained the mainstay of American acting until the "naturalistic" revolution in Europe. When it reached into Russia and Stanislavski made his debut on the world stage in the late 1900's;, his ideas followed almost immediately after, onto the American stage. It was toward the end of this period or the reason for the end of that period in American acting that we see the emergence of the director. This was the last major change in acting style and it happened over a hundred and thirty years ago; it was brought about by the invention of a new player in the history of acting, the director. A player whose role is about to change again and once more the history of acting will change as that role does. The revolution, which could and should be looked at as evolution, was brought about by the creation of the job we now call the director. Where did these people come from, what are they doing here, will they ever go away? Those answers can all be found by examining what follows.

THE BIRTH OF THE DIRECTOR 1864

It is interesting to note that the “director” as such did not enter the theatrical scene until 1864. That happened at ThePrince of Wales Theatre, London, in the person of Mr. T.W. Robertson.

I will come back to that, but I think it is important to understand why the post of director was invented. Two major historical events laid the groundwork; The Industrial Revolution, which occurred around the late 18TH and early 19th century, and The French Revolution in 1789. This period saw many improvements in medicine, agriculture, sanitation etc. These and other connected factors were the reason for a population explosion, one which saw Great Britain go from 7 million people in 1750 to over 20 million in 1850.

I'm going to paint this in very broad strokes, because this is an acting book not a history book, but some history is called for. Prior to those two world shaking events, people were either very rich or very poor; there was a very small middle class. As a result of those two events there was an explosion of the middle class. Large population shifts occurred as people went from the fields to the factory and from the farm to the city. Basically what happened was that, all of a sudden, we had large groups of people in central locations. They had money and they were looking for something to do. The high brow theatre of the very rich and the low brow burlesque of the very poor did not suit the entertainment needs of this newly large and powerful group. A new form of theatre had to be fashioned to take advantage of this potentially extremely lucrative market. This period provided many opportunities to entrepreneurs of every kind. Seeing a virtual vacuum in the area of middle class theatre, these entrepreneurs went to work. Management structures built up around theaters, with the intent of providing the type of plays suited to this audience.

Prior to this time, due to the lack of a large scale audience, the economic advantages of exploiting theatre were not recognized as being worth the trouble, and actors ruled the day. The actors strutted and posed in the grandest of fashions, delivering speeches directly to the audience. The text were in verse or in a very elevated style of speech, such as would appeal to the aristocrats and upper class members of this type of theatre audience. As writers started to respond to the financial and social realities of the rapidly growing middle class, scripts took on a more naturalistic speech and acting had to adjust to meet the needs of the new plays. The birth of this new acting style saw many arguments about how it should be accomplished, but one factor was clear; actors had to be broken of the old habits. They had been kings and they were being told that they had to stop being kings; it was a major revolution in acting. In world revolutions, such as the French and Russian, the crowd simply took the King and Czar, and their families out and killed them. I'm sure many of this new group know as directors would love to have done the same with actors, but that was not practical; at that time there weren't that many actors and demand for shows was big and growing. As Management installed itself, certain aspects of the actors anarchistic artistry had to change. It had to be stopped, and so management stepped in to do it, they created the director. A kind of shop floor management position with artistic control. Since art can not be managed, the position was born in conflict.

How powerfully money affected actors and acting and brought about the creation of the director is made, in a way that can't be argued, by this letter sent to the Times of London in 1869 by the management of the Drury Lane Theatre, one of the most important and largest theatres of the day. It announced it's coming attraction, Formosa; or The Railroad To Ruin., " I am neither a literary missionary nor a martyr" explained F.B.Chatterton, "I am simply the manager of a theatre, a vender of intellectual entertainment to the London public and I found that Shakespeare spelt ruin.... In the extremity to which I was lead by my faith in the fine taste of the upper classes for the poetic drama, I turned to the dramatist who has made the fortune of more than one manager in London. I need not say with what result....the amount taken daily at my box office before the doors open....to see Formosa exceeds the gross contents of my theatre to see Macbeth." Formosa as you might guess was a spectacle meant for the middle classes.

The problem of getting old school actors to adjust to this new style of acting was not going to be easy. Since up to that time it was the actors themselves that had made the choices as to just how they were going to do a part, it was felt they could not be counted on to change this on their own. The director was invented to serve that purpose; to break actors. Acting had become big business.

So let us get back to our first director. T.W. Robertson, who joined the new owner of the Prince of Wales Theatre, Marie Wilton and her soon to be husband Squire Bancroft and together they brought " Fifteen years of unparalleled prosperity ..." to the theatre. Robertson stated, "I don't want actors; I want people who will do just what I tell them." I think if we looked real close, we could find that phrase tattooed on some body part, not normally seen, of most directors from then until now.

I believe it was no quaint coincidence that the first play presented at the Prince of Wales, written and directed, by Robertson, was a play called "Society". A play about a woman who's advising her daughter to marry a very rich man, because " Money can do everything." Slightly after this idea of a director with complete creative control began in England, The Duke of Sax Meiningen began Prussianizing the theatre in his country. The Duke exercised complete control of actors performances, he was absolutely dictatorial. The Dukes autocratic style of controlling every aspect of production and every aspect of actors performances was to make quite an impression on Stanislavski, who saw every performance of the Dukes company when it appeared in a Moscow in 1990.

Whether the director was born out of artistic or economical reasons is not the concern, how the role developed and ultimately how it affected acting in America is our next step. To understand that we have to look at what brought about, the root of, the second stage of American acting.

STAGE II

A DIRECT IMPORTATION OF THE RUSSIAN SCHOOL

Stanislavski is certainly one of the most important names in acting history and it was he who, more than anyone, managed to solidify this new trend in acting and make it a movement.

In 1897 with the birth of the Moscow art theatre, and the rise of Stanislavski and Freud at almost the same time, the position of Director/teacher took an even more autocratic turn. Saxe Meiningan had a great influence on Stanislavski. The Meininger company played Moscow in 1885 and 1890. Stanislavski attended every performance of the 1890 season. The Moscow Art Theatre was born eight years latter with Stanislavski as Herr Director. The obvious fact that Stanislavski was also heavily influenced by Sigmond Freud shows itself in his approach to actors training and the results gotten by actors who use his Method. The book, Freud and Stanislavski, states that case in every detail. Stanislavski took his autocratic tactics from the Duke and his psychological approach to character from Freud. The director was god and the actors were the directors psychologically controlled and manipulated puppets.

It was post revolutionary Russia and Freud had created the mass merchandising of the mind and what might actually be called the culture of the mind. The rise of the Russian school coincided with the ascension of Freud. Stanislavski, having been born seven years before Freud, was well aware of the psychoanalyst work and corresponded with him. Stanislavski was influenced by these new ideas as he formulated his Method. This “Method “ came to America starting in the early 1920's. Principally through the influence of Lee Strasberg and Stella Adler at The Group Theatre.

The Russian School was dominated by a psychological and intellectual orientation. This approach gave a naturalistic air to actors performance as compared with the older declamatory style, which it replaced as the leading American approach. This Russian Method school has dominated American acting for over seventy years. This is a simple statement of fact that can be verified by even a casual survey of how acting is taught in American high schools, colleges and private professional schools. It is overwhelmingly Stanislavski based; regardless of the wrinkle that has been put on it or the new name it received in the process. A book called The New Acting Teachers came out a few years ago and although I don’t remember the exact numbers, something like 17 out of 20 interviewed had a Method base. When an artistic style has become so completely institutionalized, it has lost its vitality. The signs of deterioration of creative thrust are evident in all areas of acting; in this case, it has gone on for so long, the art form itself is seriously threatened.

Stanislavski and that school of acting were born in that old white intellectual European environment and have all of the values of it built in, so it is not unusual that it is old world elitist by nature, meaning that the director became even more firmly entrenched.

Stanislavski made order out of the chaos of actors training and rehearsal procedures, but as William Bourroughs would say, "The rubes are wise;. " That bag of tricks is used up, outta gas, seen too often. Actors are losing their audience. The finger gets pointed in many directions but the truth is that the actor must point it at himself. He/she must realize that the old training does not provide the tools to satisfy the needs of contemporary audiences; they must seek out a fresh new approach that is in tune with the needs of contemporary audiences.

It’s already to the point where most would rather see a traffic accident live on the news than a well written drama, and that is because the acting is so out of synch. The young would rather watch cartoons or play video games, at least the characters there are not pretending to be real. Acting is a very important aspect of world communication and it will demand imagination to take it to the next level. We won’t do it with an elitist clique leading it down the path of their own cultural bias.

History has changed the world once again and every other art form went with that change, staying vital and interesting in the process. Acting alone marches to that antiquated pre-revolutionary Russian drum. This has resulted in the stultification of the actor. The tradition of psycho-Intellectual influence on acting is one of elitism. Elitism of position and power was the name of the game when Kings and Czars and that monarchistic tradition, the divine right of the king, ruled the world; that was a time when the world consisted of rich and poor and the middle class was tiny and powerless. History has changed all that; look around, do you see that many kings and queens, yet the power structure that maintained it still exists in acting; and director kings and queens rule with the same authority.

A major problems of old school is that power structure it, the dictatorial power of the director. The psychological approach used by old school directors is an intellectual approach to understanding human behavior, which having an emotional base, is unintelligible from that perspective; well it was for awhile, but not any more. It's like this; when Freud mass marketed the cult of the mind, and everybody agreed to play that game, human behavior was able to be interpreted from that perspective. Directors could take the rules of that game and apply them to creative ventures, and so, even though you can't, with any yardstick, intellectualize creativity, creative decisions came down to, whoever had the power was the most creative. Unfortunately for the actor stuck in that system, the audience, the real rulers, have quit that silly game and moved on to a more 1990's mind set; an INTERNET mind set, a talk show mind set, a news show mind set. Contemporary audiences are keying to their emotions and reality is where they are finding that emotional food. The Psycho-Intellectual Age is dead; we are moving very quickly into the Age of Emotionalism and audiences aren't going to pay to see intellectual acting. When audiences won't pay to see something, producers won't pay to produce it. This is where we are today. The evolution that felled the actor ruled acting is about to fell the director ruled acting. New school acting is a collaboration based on an expanded awareness of the emotional needs of the audience, executed by emotionally literate actors in cooperation with an emotionally aware consultant (formally known as the director). I detest the word director and all its dictatorial implications, a new name must be found that more suits the duties.

The director came to an historic zenith with Stanislavski and continued that march all the way to the current day “Autour ”; which is a word meant to imply that everything about a particular work was the product of this one persons genius, omnipotent and infallible.

By the time of Stanislavski, management was completely ingrained in the theatre. The link of power between management and the product produced by actors was the director. Today many middle management levels are being wiped out in industry because of the intelligent use of technology, in acting the gap has been filled by the low tech-high impact, Whelan Tape Technique, while not replacing acting's middle manager, the director, it modifies significantly the job he or she does. I will go into more detail on that technique below.

American business is discovering what the Japanese and many Europeans already know, that empowerment of workers increases productivity and the quality of product. Empowerment of actors; increases creativity, i.e. quality of product. The truth is that management styles are changing for only one reason, American Companies are getting beaten by countries that have already adopted that style. If it wasn’t for dollars out of pocket, top management would have never given up its privileged plateau and middle management would still be draining profits from American corporations. Employers in all fields are becoming aware of the under utilization of assets. Actors are certainly underutilized assets and producers, out of need, are going to demand the most from their product. Actors are Maseraties being driven at twenty miles an hour and New School Acting lets them take the breaks off. When allowed more creative freedom, actors will generate the kind of excitement that will bring audiences back to theatres, movie houses and back from the talk show, reality show syndrome. If the old school directors would see and appreciate the resultant creativity that comes from playing the role of co-creator-consultant, they will be a valuable member of the team.

New school directors know how to let the actor run. They find the role of team player very exciting and rewarding. Some old school directors would have loved to give the actor that much room, however, after 130 years of being beaten down, actors had forgotten how to run. Generally, directors are trained in this country, both on the professional and academic level to be autocratic and actors to be subservient. Let me first finish this section by saying, the Russian school has dominated American acting since the 1920's. It must have been good to have lasted that long, however Stanislavski is dead, that era is dead. It was a natural and healthy death. " Thank you, next !"

STAGE III

SPOLIN AND THE BREAK WITH DIRECTOR DEPENDENCE

The emergence of the new school of American acting finds its seeds in the work of Viola Spolin (19 06-1994), even though her “Theatre Games” found inspiration in the Commedia Del Arte of the Italian school. She truly went much further and ultimately gave birth to the hundreds of improvisational companies which now proliferate the American theatre scene. She did not create improvisation, nor did she create many of the games she used in her system. Never the less, she was the most important person in contemporary American theatre. She set in motion the will to freedom in the actor. She developed the means and then sold actors on the idea that they could make a multitude of creative decisions all by themselves, without a director. She broke the chain of director dependence which had enslaved actors for over a hundred years. The genius of Spolin and her contribution has never been fully recognized. Hopefully this work will help to bring her more of the credit she deserves.

Despite her work, which started to break the strangle hold of so called Russian realism, a truly American approach to acting never developed until recently.

THE PROBLEM WITH THE SPOLIN APPROACH

Improvisation for improvisations sake was not capable of penetrating the overwhelming script oriented world of film, TV or commercial theatre. Even so, many of her " Games " have usefulness as part of the rehearsal process and are invaluable in actors training. Mike Leigh, the British director, has improvised all his movies but it will be many years, if ever, that Hollywood, Broadway or network TV take a full scale improvisational approach to programming.

However, building on the sense of play that Theatre Games inspire, and the demand the games make on actors to take responsibility for moment to moment creative decisions, opened the door to spontaneous, often emotional, choices that the actor made without the help of a director. The chain of director dependence was broken and the actor experienced a sense of freedom and power, which until Viola Spolin and the publication of her book, IMPROVISATION FOR THE THEATRE , (1963) was hardly a broad based movement. While Spolin and game training have had a heavy influence on many contemporary actors, the Method still rules and actors are still relegated to the position of second class artist.

This quick overview of American acting, from it's roots in England and Russia to the genius of Spolin, brings us up to the recent present and the work I presented publicly in my first book, THE ABC'S OF ACTING (1990, Gray Heron). I had actually created the WTT and started teaching Emotionology in my private classes as early as 1986. The ABC's was seminal in that it is where I introduce, in very rudimentary fashion, both the Whelan Tape Technique and the demand for actors to become emotionally literate. Both of those subjects expanded in my two books which followed and found full expression in my fourth and latest book,

NEW SCHOOL ACTING II (1998).

This section is actually two essay's which I've combined to adaquately cover this important topic. This may cause reduncancies in some places, please think of them as reiterations of important points.

Part One

Learning Styles and Acting

an Essay by Jeremy Whelan

We must recognize that regardless of all the romance and creative mystique wrapped around it, acting is a field of study the same as math, history, or language. Student actors are just that, students. They are not exempt from practical pedagogical principles. Any advance in teaching styles applies to them as much as it does to any science major.

Powerful advances have been made, they are called Leaning Styles. Unfortunately for students, these wonderful scientific advances in education are not being applied in the classroom with the zeal they deserve. In fact,

these advances are patently ignored by far too many educators in general. In the area of acting instruction they seem to be completely disregarded. Hopefully what follows will help create a dialogue on this extremely important subject.

Everyone in education should know of the tremendous advantages to students that have come out of learning styles research. It would be nice to think that all teachers are trying, in some way, to apply those discoveries to practical classroom procedures. Any that have, have seen powerful positive results. Learning Styles, has replaced old out moded teaching procedures and shaken the< very roots of pedagogical thinking. In many cases it has penetrated every level of education and every subject, except acting; the very root of the theatrical experience.

THE SCIENTIFIC BASIS OF NEW SCHOOL ACTING
I went to see a play last week, it was an Equity production. It could have been any play really, but it was a case study in everything wrong with acting today. I went to a party with the cast afterward and was as kind as I could

be. I talked to many of the cast and asked each what their background was, training etc. They were, as most casts are today, from many different schools, Stanislavski, Meisner, Spolin, Susuki, Strasberg etc. and it showed. It was wretcHed from beginning to end. It was as if they were all from different countries with different languages, and had been forced to speak in a language truly familiar to only one of them. I don't know if the horribly stagy (over)direction was an attempt to deal with that situation, but somehow I doubt it.

Possibly the director was from a school foreign to all the actors. It simply compounded the problem. I have to credit the author, because the play itself still managed to get through all that smoke, but only in places. It really did deserve a much better production.

Anyhow, the whole experience was an exclamation mark on the most serious problem in acting today. In any discussion of acting, in which one person propounds to have "the way", it causes many to jump up and down, vociferously

demanding that this is false, that there is no one way to teach - study - do acting. What is truly ironic is that most are Stanislavski actors or some derivative of that approach. When Stanislavski entered the arena, acting was in complete disarray and there was no standard to which anyone could repair.

Acting as a business hadn't been around that long and it had not as yet found

it's stride so to speak. Stanislavski, with the support of the state, wealthy parents, and his own considerable talent, managed to create such a standard. Stanislavski's greatest contribution to acting was that he managed to get everybody to approach it from one way, his way. He homogenized acting. He established a new "Language of Acting" and all leaned to speak it. This homogeneity was the source of greatness in any production that came out of that style. It allowed for a true team effort; ensemble was possible within those parameters. He was able to do this because he established that Language of Acting from the core of a Strong Central Idea. The most powerful idea born in Stanislavski's time was the work of Freud and many others working in the

field of Psychoanalysis. Being as bright as he was Stanislavski immediately incorporated it into the acting process. It was that Strong Central Idea which served as the basis of his initial work and it is what gave it veracity and authority.

Over time that cohesiveness started to crumble. In fact, it was Stanislavski himself that created the first true fissure when in latter life he switched to

the Theory of Actions. This degeneration of the Strong Central Idea was occurring inside and outside of acting. As the power of those early
psychoanalytical theories started to weaken, so did the harmonious language of

acting created by Stanislavski. Derivative after derivative, crack after crack, this general breakdown started to eat away at the core of the acting experience. Many languages started to appear on the theatrical landscape and soon communication became labored and lost. Today acting is at the end of that road. It is torn into many pieces ,terribly tattered and badly in need of a rallying point. It needs a new Strong Central Idea from which to launch an assault on the steep wall of progress. It is time to take acting to its next

level of evolution and we are lucky to have such a Strong Central Idea upon

which to base this attack. Learning Styles is that Strong Central Idea. The massive research and experimentation into how we learn has yielded a bumper crop of techniques/tools that we can apply to the task at hand. We can not, with out the risk of killing the muse, continue to ignore the scientific and empirical proof of the efficacy of that work.

The challenge before us is in finding all the ways that this knowledge can be applied to our art and craft. Starting from that Strong Central Idea, we must create a new Language of Acting, one that we can all speak fluidity. When that occurs on a large scale, we will have reached the next level and we will be giving birth to an age where ensemble is the norm and not the exception. It was to that end that I founded The Academy of New School Acting and wrote the books, NEW SCHOOL ACTING - TAKING IT TO THE NEXT LEVEL (1996) and the just published NEW SCHOOL ACTING II - A PRACTICAL MANUAL. (1998)

I use the term New School Acting as a sort of line in the sand. A statement that we had reached a point in time where we recognized that a need for change was crucial, and we also recognized that a powerful, intelligent, means for change was available.

I had, for at least fifteen years, intuitively paralleled the work of the learning styles researchers. The Whelan Tape Technique is an almost perfect whole brain teaching tool. Any who have worked with it, in the manner that established, will undoubtedly verify that statement. Many professionals, teachers and students have taken the time to write me to that effect. Should you doubt that, I've quoted quite a few of them on my home page. These are your peers, co-workers and fellow students who are speaking. I receive such letters almost everyday from around the world. New School Acting is not a fad, it is in fact a growing movement. It is a first attempt to apply the brilliant discoveries of Learning Styles research to the art and craft of acting. Myself

and others using these tools are getting the same high level results as teachers in other disciplines using a Learning Styles paradigm. When I discovered Learning Styles about four years ago and started digging into it, I recognized immediately the tremendous power behind that idea and started to look for other ways to apply it to the study of acting. I took old school ideas and upgraded them. Allowing them to have the same value for people with learning modalities different than the one favored by the old school teaching style. I created new techniques to serve people regardless of their preferred learning modality. Although I spent the first twenty years of my career as a professional actor-director, for the most part of the last fifteen years teaching and writing on acting have been center stage. My work is only a beginning, many more people are going to make valuable contributions. I do feel pride in that I have created a new and vital acting system utilizing and incorporating the advances in education in general. I am also proud that for the first time I've been able to organize all the elements of that system into one book. I was able to do this by combining two previous books and incorporating newer writings.

NEW SCHOOL ACTING II - A PRACTICAL MANUAL (1998) makes this powerful new approach to acting accessible to any teacher, director, actor or student of the art and craft. I am also very tired, and will welcome with open arms those who may use that book as a base to grow this work.

PART TWO

i.Learning Styles & Left Brain Right Brain Theory

Applied To New School Acting

A slow evolution in teaching styles

It is interesting to note that educational institutions, which must teach how corporations can avoid catastrophic loss of market share by being aware of trends in their industry, breed their own destruction by not adapting superior, scientifically proven teaching techniques.

The American Auto Industry is a prime example of myopic management. It was devastated for years by not seeing and accepting the coming popularity of smaller cars. The Japanese and the Germans virtually took over car sales in this country. Old school auto executives wrapped themselves in flags and pleaded with the public to Buy American. It didn't work because the people wanted better, smaller cars; they bought Japanese and German. Today the people want a better education for themselves and their children and they are rejecting out moded teaching styles. Students and their parents are proactive in knowing what is being taught and how it is being taught.

They know about Learning Styles and options like Charter Schools and they are taking those options.

Some schools are like restaurants. They get a great reputation for excellence and then gradually the excellence leaves but the reputation stays long after it is gone. Students shouldn't trust their education to anyone without personally investigating any school they favor. It's a bit harder to sniff out an outdated Theatre Dept. than it is to recognize a weak Computer Dept. The hardware is there or it isn't. It's running the absolute cutting edge programs or it's not. Theatre, because of it's talent, can put on the face of new without ever actually wearing it.

The problem with acting programs is that drama is a niche kind of subject, its departments are insular, not out in the open like primary subjects. The reform team may take awhile to penetrate the drama department. Old tenured Profs. barricaded against the march of time, will hold down that Russian fort until the last paycheck can be squeezed out of it. Stanislavski was good enough for his great granddaddy, and his granddaddy and it's good enough for him. Maybe so, but it is something else to the student, and the motivated student will search hard for the best educational opportunities.

Most institutions, busy looking after their computer science programs and their engineering programs, will not discover that their theatre departments have been losing significant market share until long after the new revolution in education is well entrenched.

• It is no secret that Stanislavski rules Academia and American actors' training in general, as well as in many other countries around the world. I received an e-mail from an actress in Denmark thanking me for an exciting and powerful new way to approach acting. I asked her what they had been using and she said, Stanislavski.

• It is also a fact that Learning Styles are scientifically proven to be a major advance over traditional teaching styles.

• The point is that Stanislavski died thirty years before Learning Styles research began.

He did not have the advantage that modern teachers have when he formulated the dated ideas that are still ruling the education of an overwhelming number of actors.

Those that followed Stanislavski have shown the same attitude that old school teachers everywhere show to new ideas. They just don't get it. The fact is that you can not divorce a teaching style from the historic context of the period in which it was created, or the student base it was meant to serve. This is not the 1920's and the students in theatre depts. today generally aren't all wealthy white kids. We've learned too much to ignore the obvious. Just look on the internet, the signs of a rapidly changing world are everywhere.

Left Brain - Right Brain

Decades of brain research have proven that we have two spheres of influence. These were once called the left brain and right brain, though they are now referred to as the left and right hemispheres. Very basically, left hemisphere rules business type functions and controls the right side of the face, ears etc. Right hemisphere rules creative type functions and the left side of the face, ears, etc. It was funny to watch actors, who learned about this, as they jockeyed to get the left side of their faces into camera or downstage.

Most people have heard about the idea of our having a left brain and a right brain, and that they have different responsibilities relating to how we approach life on a day to day basis. Education has forever taught to the left or practical side of our brains. The fact is that some people have a stronger right brain and some have a stronger left brain; so that old teaching style basically left right brain creative types out in the cold. So what's this got to do with acting? Well, actors have to learn parts, they have to learn the craft, they have to learn the art. Actors are students for life. If you know how you learn best (your preferred learning modality) and your teachers use that knowledge to teach you, you'll learn anything quicker and better. I have many reasons for wanting you to understand your learning process. One is so that you recognize the limitations of instruction you may have already received, or instruction you might be considering, and the value of the one I am offering you.

If you spent time in old school, it wasn't wasted.

I recognize and teach that it is important for actors to be familiar with all styles of acting, since they may someday work with a director who came out of one of those schools. A director will feel more comfortable hiring an actor if she knows that they have some knowledge of the approach she uses when working with actors. It doesn't mean one has to be a devotee of that school, it just means that one has to be familiar with the vocabulary which that type of director uses (his preferred learning modality). A director doesn't want to feel she is going to have to learn a new language to get what she wants from you. Actors can translate that old school vernacular to new school, but they can't do that unless they know both languages. There is an ease of communication that people who speak the same language; find when working together, and an actor must always remember, he is the one looking for a job.

There are many theories of Learning Styles, but the one thing that's obvious is that humans definitely learn in different ways. You should understand that Methods of instruction which are older, and this of course includes approaches to acting, did not recognize that difference. In other words, those styles were prejudiced to the intellectual (left) side of your brain and as actors our most important tool, the emotions, are located in the other side of the brain (right).

One of the advantages of knowing we have a split brain is that we can now work to create whole brain functioning. Knowing we have preferred learning modalities, we can work toward a balance where all learning modalities function harmoniously and effectively in unison. BUT, we must also realize that the centuries of bias toward the left brain have made it imperative that we concentrate on strengthening the right brain, so that a balance can be achieved. In other words, we have to indulge our creativity and revel in our emotions until they feel natural again. It is wildly paradoxical that we have to start this party in our brains.

In new school education this right brain function is being opened up early instead of being crushed early. This is happening in many ways world wide, but a sure sign that it is happening in the US is the fantastic growth of a movement in education called Charter Schools.

Charter Schools, Learning Styles & New School Acting

If you haven't heard of Charter Schools yet, you will very soon. It is the most explosive movement in the history of education. Public schools have been one of the last great state monopolies. Charter schools are, in one sense, the deregulating of education; the field is now open to all. They are alternative schools which can be started by just about anyone. Accountability is high but these schools are free of virtually all rules and regulations which govern ordinary public schools. Generally, they are started by teachers, parents, and students who are disgusted with the low level of education in the Public School System. They are proven to give a higher level of education than conventional public schools. They have to, it's part of their charter. Students scores must go up or the school goes down. Students are flocking to them because of the advanced educational philosophy and teaching techniques they embody and employ. Some of the existing charter schools have waiting lists of over five hundred students. The independence of Charter Schools from the rigid bureaucracy which has made a shambles of the public school system in America inspires teachers and students alike. How popular are they? A few statistics relating to their astounding growth should shake the dust off of even the most addled brain. I think, as a quick lead in to those numbers, it's interesting to look at how people inside this movement saw it a few years ago. I picked this up on the net, while dated, it certainly bears out the author's prediction.

(Nov. 15, 1996) Jeanne Allen, president of the Center for Education Reform, today announced the release of the Third Edition of the Center's National Charter School Directory, the nation's only comprehensive listing of America's charter schools. Six additional states are included in the third edition of the directory: Alaska, Delaware, Florida, Illinois, Louisiana and Texas, all of which opened schools during 1996.

"It's been a challenge to keep up with the growth of charter schools," Allen continued, "which is a real indication of the strength of the move toward charter schools as an education reform option. In 1996 alone, 214 schools have opened in nine states, and with new charter school laws having been adopted in five states and the District of Columbia (DC) since the beginning of the year, an ever-growing number of children can look forward to having the opportunity to learn in charter schools." (During 1996, Connecticut, Illinois, New Jersey, North Carolina, South Carolina and DC enacted charter school legislation.)

Since that information was released it's been a straight up rocket. These numbers are from the US Department of Education's National Charter School Study.

In 1993 there was one Charter School in Minnesota.

In 1995 there were 93 Charter Schools operating in 5 states.

In 1996 there were 214 charter Schools operating in 10 states.

In 1997 there were over 800 Charter Schools operating in 29 states.

Mid 1998, there are over 1129 in 33 states and many more are soon to open.

This last data was provided to me by Asst. Director Gail Meister of Drexel U. Foundation for Technical Assistance to Public Charter Schools. These are spectacular numbers and it should be a wake up call to the government and public education that something is wrong with the old school style of teaching. This is only the beginning of this movement. It will grow at an even more phenomenal rate as parents, teachers, and students realize that they don't have to put up with second rate education from the public school system. You will note that the number of states involved virtually tripled last year alone. Adding 19 States in one year has to be an indication of how popular this new approach to teaching is becoming. They could not do that if they weren't getting the results. The kids scores are up! That is the bottom line in education, the students are learning more as a result of superior teaching techniques.

Where did this idea of Charter Schools come from?

What caused this full scale revolt against a seemingly unchallengeable foe? The seeds were planted over four decades ago, when some very astute educators started to question why so many kids were slipping through the cracks in an aging and outdated educational system. They didn't take the easy way, the one still used by old school defenders, blaming the parents, blaming the kids. Nor did they blame the teachers, who are also fingered as the villain by a worn out, out dated system trying to mask its own culpability. A system that is so desperate to preserve its privilege that it looks anywhere to put the blame, anywhere but at the bankrupt state of its own condition. There is a lot of money at stake as I will point out in a minute.

Learning Styles

These researchers didn't take the easy way, these pioneers of Learning Styles went looking for root causes and they came up with answers. They went to brain science and they went to the most basic pedagogical assumptions. They labored for decades. The intensive scientific research and testing of theories coming out of that research started to yield some very startling results. The problem was indeed at the root. A root that was at least a century and a half years old, in actuality it goes back much farther than that. The problem stemmed from the fact that the style which teaching had always used made the information much less accessible to large numbers of students.

Researchers discovered that different students preferred to access information in different ways. They named these "ways" Learning Modalities and the over all study of these ways, Learning Styles. In any new field of endeavor, opinions of those involved are bound to vary, but it is essentially agreed by many in the field that there are three basic learning modalities. Extensive experimentation showed that certain students/humans learned best when the material to be learned was presented in an auditory fashion. Others when material was presented visually and the rest when the learning situation had a tactile/kinesthetic dimension, in short, hearing, seeing, or by touching/moving around.

Many other factors were seen to have an effect on learning. One of the most obvious was the learning environment itself. Modern classrooms don't look anything like they did when I was in school. The rows and rows of neatly aligned desks, with the teachers big desk in the front, are gone. They have been replaced by various arrangements. Some are modular spaces where various learning activities take place, a variation is the group table shared by small numbers of students. The permutations are as varied as the imagination of the teacher and the students.

When progressive teachers started to bring Learning Styles into the classroom, they ran into a stone wall. I can just hear some principal saying, "What the hell do you think you're doing." The teachers saw a better way to teach but were being constantly rebuffed by administrations who could only mumble, the curriculum, the curriculum, we can't fit that into the curriculum. The kids were the ones paying the price and teachers of conscience walked out and now Charter Schools are springing up like the flowers in a garden.

I was curious as to how many Charter Schools were actually using a Learning Styles paradigm in formulating their curriculum. I called various state Charter School organizations and was told those figures were not known to them. More than a few times, I was told to contact Dr. Joe Nathan. He is the Director of the Center for School Change at the U. of Minnesota's Hubert H. Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs and a pioneer in this field. He has authored many books and papers on this subject. I posed that question to him in a phone conversation recently. He said that exact figures weren't available, so I asked him his personal opinion and he said, " Wise Charter Schools will use Learning Styles research because it is a powerful and effective tool to aid student achievement."

Learning Styles is having its greatest success in the K-8 area of education. Though we can see in the rapidly increasing numbers of Charter Schools for jr. high and high school students, the growing dissatisfaction of teachers, parents and students at this level. They are fed up with the government and old school bureaucracy failing to bring these improved techniques into the class room.

Many of us already possess a major key to understanding the value of this new approach. Talk about left brain/right brain has been in the popular press long enough that most people have heard of the idea. However, for centuries nobody even thought about the fact that we might not all learn the same way. Teachers just taught one way and it was up to the students to learn as best they could. Today, with scientific proof in place, we know that the old style of teaching favored one particular group of learners and made life more difficult for all the other students. Learning Styles research went deeper, focusing on the specific needs of students in the learning environment. I was very pleased a few years ago to discover that there were so many intelligent and productive people working in this area of educational research. As it turns out, a path I had been intuitively following for fifteen years was also being very precisely noted, evaluated, and number crunched by many individuals and various groups of people concerned with teaching. Learning Styles when applied in the classroom yielded positive results so startling, so incontestable that now this movement can't be stopped. Education is in the process of being overhauled from top to bottom, and it is going in a new and very clear and positive direction.

Using the knowledge gained in brain science and Learning Styles research, techniques were designed so that material would be presented in each of these basic learning modalities. The results were eye popping, test scores of certain groups of previously under achieving students went up 50 to 75 percent. A child once though "slow" turned out to be one of the brightest when approached from his favorite way of learning. The goal of Learning Styles is to teach students through the use of their primary learning modality, how to use all three of them simultaneously. When that is accomplished, the student is a whole brain learner. The ability to learn is more than tripled due to the symbiotic relationship that occurs under those circumstances.

After years of teachers insisting that a child change her inborn genetic nature and learn the way *they taught*, forward looking educators realized a change was in order. They decided that if it they were going to do their job, they would have to approach it from the standpoint of how the student learned best. As Drs. Rita and Ken Dunn, of St. Johns U. in New York, pioneers of Learning Styles since the early sixties said, "If students cannot learn the way we teach them, then we must teach them the way they learn."

Learning Styles has been a benefit to hundreds of thousands of students, a well known fact among progressive teachers and researchers alike. Many millions could have gained better grades, learned more, if their teachers had cared enough to find out about and use superior teaching techniques. The fact that the educational system has worked hard to retard the advance of these exciting discoveries is not surprising.

This new approach to teaching had to fight long and hard to gain any acceptance, even though the scientific proof of its value was overwhelming. There are many reasons that new ideas have to climb high and steep walls before they are generally accepted. None of those reasons compliments the people in charge, who refuse to except such important advances. I was immediately interested when I saw this article. It is somewhat dated, but the information is as true today as it was then.

In the February 19th, 1996 NEWSWEEK , the cover story was, "Your Child's Brain." In one article on the topic, Sharon Begley says" ... at school, there's what's obvious and there's tradition. Why is this body of research rarely used in American classrooms?" She then cites Linda Darling Hammond, professor of education at Columbia University's Teachers College, who feels not many administrators or school board members know it exists. "In most states, neither teachers nor administrators are required to know much about how children learn to be certified. Our school system was invented in the 1800's, and little has changed." In an accompanying article, " Why Do Schools Flunk Biology?" LynNell Hancock states "Biology is a staple at most American high schools. Yet when it comes to biology of the students themselves-how their brains develop and retain knowledge - school officials would rather not pay attention to the lessons... Biologists have some important evidence to offer. But not only are they ignored, their findings are often turned upside down. Force of habit rules the hallways and classrooms. Neither brain science nor education research has been able to free the majority of American schools from their 19th-century roots." She quotes Frank Vellutino, a professor of educational psychology at State University of New York as saying, " We do more education research than anyone else in the world and we ignore more as well."

Quoted with permission of NEWSWEEK.

Many educators are upset that this ignorance is being perpetuated, but until major adjustments are made in the hierarchy of the American school system, it will continue. Why?

Outdated approaches to education in general, and in relation to acting, survive for four reasons. It seems to me these people must ask themselves one or a combination of these questions.

Egoism: If whoever thought of this isn't dead or me, how could it be that good an idea?

Fear: Can I grasp these new ideas?

Laziness: I get by OK on what I know and I just don't want to bother learning something new. Why should I have to?

Stupidity: Learn something new? Don't they understand, I don't even know what I’m supposed to in order to have this job?

Actually there is one more reason and it is sinister, it is called vested interest. Many have created a very nice cash flow for themselves teaching old school ideas in an old school manner. Changing over could cause a disruption of that cash flow, so they adopt a philosophy of milk it for all it's worth. Stonewall the innovators and maybe I can make it through to retirement.

A deeper look at that way of thinking is warranted.

I believe that this foot dragging will change in large part due to the heat of competition Charter Schools are providing. There is a side of education that many will be surprised to discover.

Education Is Big Business

While many teachers recognize the need for change, most of those lack the power to act, and those with the power are lacking the will to act. American educational institutions are downsizing like all corporations of our day. Teachers live in fear of losing their jobs and nobody wants to appear a troublemaker, some fool who wants to improve the efficiency of education. School districts will get grants to send teachers to workshops on the new teaching techniques. Schools will snap up a grant like an alcoholic snatching a drink, but when it comes to implementing whatever might have been learned, that's a different story. The administration says, "Tomorrow we shall use these better ideas." It too reminds me of that phrase of Camus', " The future is the only thing the master willingly bequeaths the slave."

Education is changing in the same way that all businesses are changing as they jockey for position in the international marketplace. If you somehow missed the fact that education is big business, you have never looked at the numbers. According to Dr. Vance Grant, a specialist in educational statistics with the Dept. of Education in Washington DC., American Colleges and Universities took in 189 Billion 121 Million dollars in fiscal year 1994 -95. On the American high school and elementary school level the total revenues for the same period were 273 Billion, 138 Million dollars. It does, as they say, start to add up to real money. The total being 462 Billion, 259 million dollars. That's over six times the 71.2 Billion dollars that IBM made world wide that year and almost two and a half times the 168 Billion, 826 Million that General Motors made world wide during the same period.

This should give you an idea of just how big the business of education really is and the problems that bigness poses for change. The University system in the United States is a much larger business than IBM, however, it has the disadvantage of not being one big company, a company which can establish a single policy for all its units to follow overnight. There are over thirty five hundred Universities and Colleges in the US and many are privately run. While this makes any sort of uniform adaptation of advanced teaching techniques a nightmare, there is hope, that for business reasons, these techniques will find their way into all of these schools, without too great a time lag. Education is a very competitive business and the hustle to attract students is endless. Advertising budgets for schools are way up, universities are advertising with the zeal of used car dealers.

Re-tooling Education

In order to stay competitive, educational institutions must adapt to the advances in its industry and the changing needs of its customers. Like any other business, Education hates to re-tool. Re-tooling is an expensive and time consuming process. The American car industry almost went under because it failed to recognize the trend toward smaller cars. It did not want to have to spend all that money setting up new factories and re-tooling older factories as well as retraining its work force to build smaller cars. By the time they realized that they were going to have to do that to stay in business, they had already lost massive amounts of market share to the Japanese and the Germans.

Educational institutions hate to change for that same reason. They don’t want to have to re-tool their faculty, and for the most part, that faculty has no desire to be re-tooled. They have settled in long ago to their teaching style and life style. They do not want it interrupted by anything as mundane as keeping up with contemporary educational discoveries. They resist with all of their strength and the university faced with this inertia is caught in a classic Labor-Management dispute.

The Changing Face Of The Student Base

Students are looking for the most progressive learning institutions and they and their money will flow in that direction. The student dollars will go to the quality end product. One strong indication that students are shopping smarter these days can be found in the host of new companies which make money by doing that shopping for the students. Educational Consultants are making big bucks. Students today are not going to go to Mom's or Dad's school unless they make the cut.

These firms have massive data bases on schools. They look at all aspects of the educational institutions competing in the marketplace and guide students to the best all around choice available. Price is a consideration, but the quality of education is a priority.

Today's educational market is extremely different from even ten years ago. This shift will no doubt continue to spiral. One large part of this equation is the student base. Increasingly international and non-traditional in make up, this student base is a driving force in the change in the American educational system. Educational institutions must find out how to treat all these new customers/consumers of American education. They must also deal with the changing attitudes of the traditional student base, an attitude which is causing educational institutions to realize that some accommodation is going to be necessary. I also asked Dr. Grant about the statistics regarding this changing non traditional student base and his choice of word to describe it was "Phenomenal". I asked for the growth over the last 5 and 10 years. The numbers go like this:

1986 - White non Hispanic students composed 79.3 % of the student base

1991 - White non Hispanic students composed 76.5 % of the student base

1996 - White non Hispanic students composed 71.4 % of the student base

That is a jump of 7.9 % in ten years. To put that in perspective, from 1976 to 1986 the change was 3.3%. 1976 was the first year that these numbers started being tracked, but Dr. Grant said that the percentage for the 10 years before that would surely have shown a smaller percentage of growth than 3.3%. We can expect to see this unprecedented growth continue.

The recognition of alternate learning modality's necessitated the development of new techniques to take advantage of each modalities unique teaching requirement. Adapting curricula to utilize these new techniques takes more time. This is only happening on certain campuses and only to the degree thought necessary to keep the money rolling in. The auto industry tried to do it that piece meal way and lost. I hope that the education industry in America is a little quicker on the pick-up or the University of Korea could be the next Harvard.

A very big question must be asked. What happens when all these kids raised in a progressive educational environment since kindergarten, hit the higher level institutions and find them belly up in the dead sea of antiquated, archaic teaching styles. When the first waves of these educationally advanced students started to come out of the elementary school level, they ignited the explosion of Charter Jr. High and High Schools. Charter Colleges can't be far behind. They will spring up everywhere and the visionless administrators of those dead old school educational institutions will be sitting there scratching their heads and wondering where it all went. It went where they wouldn't, into the present!

Everyone gains from recognizing the different needs of students. Each Learning Modality has intelligence of value, but the audio learners have been favored by the educational system forever. New class room procedures and design are, wherever they are utilized, bringing equal opportunity to those visual and tactile/kinesthetic learners. The positive dynamic that evolves in the classroom, when all students have the opportunity to be fully involved in the learning experience, creates an excitement that was never before possible. It's an intangible of unlimited value. It seems very odd to me that anyone could still think that standing up in front of a bunch of kids and talking for hours and then giving a test, is the way to teach. These kids have been bombarded with tens of thousands of pieces of visual information a second, coming off a TV screen, since they were born. The audio approach of lecture - test is radio format, while still useful, it should hardly be as dominant as it is, and never again as exclusive as it was for centuries.

One of those learning modalities is your favorite way to learn and if you are taught by a teacher who uses that approach, you will get much higher grades/learn more than you did before.

Good teachers, realizing that a class is composed of people from each of these groups, will try to use each modality at some point in every lesson they present. One thing for sure, before this work when we were all taught the same way, some of us got the feeling that maybe we weren't as bright as those other kids. This was only because traditional educational practices were teaching right into one particular group of kid's strength, letting everybody else sink or swim. Learning Styles research and experiments boot that old idea of who's bright right out the window. When scores on tests jump up, often 50 % or higher just because a teacher changed his approach, we have to feel some regret that we didn't know about learning styles long ago. All those kids that got beat up by a misguided system is something we can't do anything about, but we can make sure that the tools we now have are used.

If we think about the classes we most enjoyed and the times we had the most fun learning something, we can probably figure out which one of these learning modalities works best for us. Knowing something is different from just letting things happen. I mean, if you know your best way to learn something, and somebody is giving you information in some other modality, you can translate it and make it easier to understand. In the process of doing that translation you are also increasing your understanding of that other learning modality thereby strengthening your ability to learn that way too. You get much closer to the ideal of whole brain learning.

Learning Styles Resources

Some of the learning styles proponents advocate that there are six modalities, some say there are eight, whatever makes the most sense to you is what you use. Here are the names of some leaders in this movement; you can check them out for yourselves. Rita Dunn; is a important name here. She started doing this work in the 1960's, and with Kenneth Dunn, they created The Learning Styles Inventory. She is at Learning Styles Network, St. Johns U. in Jamaica, NY.

Bernice McCarthy ;created the 4-MAT System. She puts out four types of learners. She has a company called Excel in Barrington, IL. Meyers-Briggs created the Meyers-Briggs Type Indicator. They break it into introverts and extroverts and then into Sensing, Intuitive, Thinking, Feeling, Judging and Perceptive types. You can get more on that from The Center for Applications of Psychological Type in Gainesville, Fl. Then we have the Gregorc Mindstyles, which also has four learning types: concrete sequential, abstract sequential, abstract random, concrete random. For more on that: The Learners Dimension in Columbia, CT. You might also check out Gardner's Theory of Multiple Intelligence's. A simple net search for Learning Styles will yield a vast amount of information as many sites are dedicated to this work. A search for Charter Schools will also yield rich results.

c.Learning Styles Are Reflected In New School Acting

Many of the techniques I created for New School Acting have a Learning Styles paradigm. As Thomas Klocke, Arts In Education Coordinator, Kansas Arts Commission put it: "I believe that Whelan's actor training method, as described, is excellent. It incorporates the three basic learning domains of all students, visual in reading scripts and watching the other learners and actors, auditory in hearing the recorded script, and most importantly kinesthetic in moving the body as a learning technique. Whelan's method actually gets the actor's bodies to learn the roles they are performing"

Some of my techniques were created intuitively before I became aware of Learning Styles. Others were created, modified or expanded to incorporate the advantages of that approach once I became aware of them. It seems obvious that it was the tactile/ kinesthetic learners who were most neglected in the old school teaching style. Many have commented on the advantages of that aspect of one of my techniques, the one I named the Whelan Tape Technique, or WTT for short. Here are a few of those comments. I quoted this article from the British theatre journal Total Theatre when talking about how they used Emotionology in rehearsal. Here is a comment on using the WTT in Rehearsal. The complete article can be found on my homepage.

"What is remarkable about this process (WTT) is that by the time you come to do the lines you virtually know them. Quite often you find yourself not knowing what the text is but your body remembers to turn to look at someone at a certain point which prompts your memory... We use this technique for every scene in the play. " Danny Scheinmann, Actor, The English Shakespeare Company, London, UK

Here is another educator commenting on the physical (tactile/kinesthetic) aspect of this work.

"Thank you for the wonderful rehearsal account. It's inspiring to read about this work. I would also add that I am familiar with your books and I have employed the tape techniques in my studio classes. I consider the tape work a wonderful innovation. The physical work of our actors has never been better.

Your heretical work on emotions is also appreciated. In my case it has crystallized my problems with method approaches, and shown me a way out of that particular dilemma." Marc Diamond, Professor of Theatre, School for the Contemporary Arts, Simon Fraser U., Canada

Professor Diamond's last comment relates to what I've since named Emotionology. Emotionology is a cornerstone of New School Acting, but as it does not relate in an obvious and direct fashion to Learning Styles, I won't go into it here.

I will offer one more quote as a way of launching into a more detailed description on the subject of Learning Styles and New School Acting.

" The Whelan Tape Technique gets to the core of the creative process in record time." Robert Yowell, Chair Of Theatre, California State University

The technique does get to the core of the creative process in record time and for very good reason. The reason stated by the gentleman from Kansas at the beginning of this section. It is what can be described as a whole language/whole brain teaching tool. All three learning modalities are employed simultaneously. They are built directly into the mechanics of the technique and as such, the symbiotic effect I mentioned earlier takes place, more than tripling the speed of the learning process.

Another way in which New School Acting takes advantage of the Learning Styles paradigm can be found in the way I adapted the old standby of the acting profession know as the Bio. The character biography has long been a staple of the profession, but as it was done in an essay form, it only utilized one learning modality. To take advantage of all three learning modalities, I have actors create a ScrapBook for their character. The ScrapBook technique incorporates all learning modalities and works much better as a creative stimulant. If you're skipping around the book and want to know how it works, go to PLAN 14

These are just a few ways that Learning Styles can be incorporated into the teaching of acting. There are others and many more will be created as soon as teachers seize on the obvious advantages of the discoveries which came out of this research. Perhaps for some teachers, directors and actors that work will start here today.

I truly believe that the most exciting results that will come out of this work will be the integrating into acting of all those talented people who previously found the door closed. People who approached acting with great anticipation but found that the limited and prejudiced one learning modality approach of old school was essentially De Facto Segregation. This is not the fault of those who came before, they did the very best they could with the tools available to them. Today we have powerful new tools to work with and we can take acting to the next level. Tools that are scientifically proven to work. Tools validated to work by over four decades of research. It is a travesty to ignore them. It is a violation of all the ethics of the teaching profession to fail to give today's students today's tools. Any student who accepts less has no one but themselves to blame. Any artist who does not use every tool at his disposal to create the highest level of work he is capable of is unworthy of the name.

New School Acting uses those tools at every turn, which is why when speaking of it, we are not talking about revolution, it is truly an evolutionary approach. New School Acting opens the door to all. The influx of new and more intelligently trained talent will soon bring an energy and excitement to acting that it has not seen in a very long time.

Dear Producer,

NSA offers you a way to cut cost and get a better show/movie. One way you'll save money is that rehearsal time can be cut by 30% to 50% when directors are skilled at using New School Acting's rehearsal techniques. You could use that money to add production values in other areas, or for publicity. With the time you save on rehearsals you could mount more productions and add to your case flow that way. The added creative value NSA brings to productions will increase audience enthusiasm and raise attendance. You will want directors who know how to work in the style of New School Acting.

The director is at a cross roads in the history of that job. The actor- director relationship is greatly changed in New School Acting. Much of the creative responsibility once controlled by the director is now the responsibility of the actor. Directors did many things that NSA's actors are quite capable of accomplishing on their own. When directors are freed of those obligations, they will be able to focus their talent on more important matters related to the production. Some directors thrill at the results they get when working the NSA way, others see it as a threat to their power.

For some directors, giving up any power will be resented. It's only partly about art or the quality of performance for these types, it's also about ego. It's the power and control that gives them their kick. Few have ever relinquished privilege gracefully. As Camus said, "The future is the only thing the master willingly bequeaths the slave."

So, why would directors give up some of their power. That answer is simple, and in many cases it won't be for the joy of experiencing greater creativity. It comes from the fact that directors don't generally hire themselves. They are hired by a producer. Producers in 1999 and in the future are in the same position as management in all industries around the world. They have to cut cost, they have to put out better product for less money. American industry in particular is being forced to streamline in every way possible. Look at GM, IBM, all levels and all types of business are tightening the belt, cutting cost and, in general, saving money wherever possible. At the same time they have to meet the requirement for higher quality goods demanded by the most educated consumers the world has ever known. Rehearsal is an expensive proposition. Being able to cut rehearsal time by 30%-50% and increasing quality, producers will be following the pattern of all American and global industry over the last few years. Everyone in business is searching desperately for cost-cutting methods. So, it is only natural that producers will welcome the Techniques of New School Acting with open arms. At which point, directors will embrace them or not get hired. That is why people give up privilege; they are forced to. While strength may be necessary to get people to change old habits, in the end the director will come to enjoy his/her new position. They too will have an opportunity to express a greater creativity.

The actors will welcome the techniques of New School Acting because they let them work harder, smarter and more creatively. Very few businesses are so blessed that the work-force looks at working harder as an opportunity. You will increase moral and attract the most creative actors in your area to your productions. You will also see talent where you hadn't seen it before. Old school acting, because it focused on a single learning modality, was a kind of de facto segregation which locked out or drove many talented people from following their ambition to act or direct. If you are not already aware of how powerful a Learning Styles approach to teaching is, you should read the essay Learning Styles and Acting. I'm sure you will see how when those ideas are applied to acting, everyone connected to the process will benefit. Some of you are going to need a strong hand to bring those you work with into the Twenty-First Century. The transition could be disruptive in the early stages, but you should build support quickly. Once the change-over is effected, you and all those you work with will reap the rewards for many years. It's basically a do it now or do it later situation, but why take the chance that the competition might get there first. The difference in the quality of productions is significant and you are deal;ing with the most sophisticated audience in history. Another giant advantage of this work will be, that once your productions start using modern acting techniques, you will see a younger audience starting to show an interest in seeing them. These millennium kids are not tuned to an acting style that developed at the beginning of the last millennium. They are most definitely marching to the beat of a different drum there. Don't worry that you might lose the blue haired faithful, NSA style acting will appeal to them too.

Everyone knows that the producer is THE PRODUCER. All productions start with you. Take the responsibility that you owe your audiences and your company. Those who seriously resist modernizing are probably dead weight anyhow. Fresh energy, progressive energetic new people will fill the place of anyone who can't or just doesn't want to move forward.

Good Luck

I feel that teachers will know what I'm talking about more readily than any other group. I don't know how to address your problems because I don't think you will have any. I will be happy to answer any questions you might have through e-mail. I do feel that by printing the section of How To Use This Book for teachers from NSA II would present you with an overall view of how that book can help you cover this work. I know that this might look like a attempt to promote this book, it looks like that because it is. I am very proud of the book, it represents my life's work and is the first time that that work has been so well organized. The 55 lesson plans present a solid roadmap which any teacher can follow.

for teachers:

I felt that with all the different possible class lengths and class sizes, trying to break up lessons into the lowest common time frame would make it easier on all. I know that one hour is all many teachers get so I've tried to keep all lesson plans at or as close as possible to one hour. These 55 lessons can easily be expanded to a much larger number and there are short cuts you can take if necessary.

The pre-class reading for the teacher is necessary to establish an understanding of certain procedures which are constants in the training. The set up to some of these exercises is lengthy and I didn't want to take up space by putting the description in the front of the book where you would have to leaf through it every time, so I put them in the Appendix (page 122) . You will probably only need to read them once to understand and be able to use them.

A NOTE ON THE TEACHERS PRE-CLASS STUDY

This work is new and the approach is radically different from any other ever attempted. In order to be comfortable teaching it, some of you will require a basic knowledge of the theory behind the strategy and tactics of New School Acting. As I said above, I don't want the book to be slowed down by going into theory as we encounter each new point along the way. I will present some of the exercises which may need some explanation and some theory in the Appendix (page 122). While you may not have to read the theory, you will need to know how the techniques contained in the Appendix work. You should read those before the first day of class.

Reading theory is work that some people really don't have to do. Some will say, "Of course, that makes sense, let's do it." Reading fifteen or twenty pages on the theory of why it makes sense is not their style. Others will need a very detailed explanation and want to give it serious thought before they are comfortable with teaching it to their students, actors or themselves. Even others will need to test the techniques from a hands on perspective. They will need to set up and experiment with the techniques. Perhaps even working with actors at different levels of development, to prove that the work is valuable to each, before putting the ideas to work in the classroom or in a rehearsal. These people will devise a variety of other practical tests regarding the viability of the over all approach. None of these different groups is smarter than the other, just different. Humans can be divided into the style of learning that best suits their personal temperament.

A Few Quick Words On Learning Styles

Some of you will already know that I have basically just provided a rough definition of the scientific educational discipline know as Learning Styles. Learning Styles is itself a rather broad generic term which covers at least forty years of research into how all people learn. While specific approaches to Learning Styles my differ from point to point, the evidence from this massive and intense research is overwhelming; different people learn in different ways. Some researchers have defined the learning process in humans to have six, eight, ten or more facets. It is however generally agreed throughout the scientific/educational community involved in this study, that three basic learning modalities exist. It has been proven beyond any possibility of doubt, that the basic learning modalities place people into the category of, Visual learner, Audial learner or Tactile/Kinesthetic learner.

That fact, though it might seem obvious to some, was ignored throughout history until recently. The theory section goes into that area. I will say right now then when the Learning Styles model was applied to class room work, grades of students whose learning modalities had been previously ignored, improved dramatically. In many cases grades were up from fifty to seventy-five percent above what they had been prior to the application of teaching techniques developed from Learning Styles research. As fantastic as those numbers may sound, it is proven and documented scientific fact. When you read that section you will find book, Journal, and article references that will bear out that statement. The tools/techniques of New School Acting are in line with all the principles of Learning Styles.

I know that many of you are already aware of and applying learning styles in your classrooms. This will be like preaching to the choir, but I would like you to also read that section. As many schools as there are that fall under the umbrella of Learning Styles, it's possible that I make a point you hadn't considered, or you may offer me one that I missed.

I did a straw poll on the internet of what teachers wanted in a text. Someone said that he thought the teachers book should be separate because he didn't want students to know what was coming. I thought about that a lot, my conclusion is, so what if they know? That's not to be flip, I like to think of my students and me as partners in the learning process. I've gotten some truly major insights from my students. So I feel strongly that the more they know about the work we are doing, the better. In the end, it's not concept, it's execution.

The one hour framework I tried to keep to is something you can adjust to whatever class length you must deal with. Certain techniques/exercises are used at the beginning of every class, and others are repeated every class up to a point were they are integrated with the actor's instrument and can then be thought of as learned. Learned to the point where you can have confidence that actors are at a level of proficiency with each technique that they own them for life. Actors will gain additional ability with the techniques through applying them as they move from part to part throughout their careers.

While a semantic difference exists between the words technique and exercise, student and actor, for the purpose of simplicity, these terms may be used interchangeably throughout this book. All techniques will be fully explained the first time they are used after which simple abbreviations may be used. Two major examples of this expedient are the use of WTT for the Whelan Tape Technique and NSA for New School Acting. Mini or mini's will be used to replace mini-cassette recorder. You may find others.

The following Course Plan is one which was developed over a period of many years and I have found it to be highly effective. Some teachers will follow it to the letter, at least the first time, others may adapt it in pieces to their existing approach. Whichever you do, I would ask you to read the Course Plan all the way through once, because certain techniques are designed to follow or be used in conjunction with others. There is a planned learning impact to the sequence presented here, point A does lead to point B. Experienced teachers will see that and draw the necessary conclusions regarding why that is so. Beginning teachers will get a feel for how that works as they move from point A to point B. I will try to show the reasons behind the se