The Student News Site of Harvard-Westlake School

The Harvard-Westlake Chronicle

The Student News Site of Harvard-Westlake School

The Harvard-Westlake Chronicle

The Student News Site of Harvard-Westlake School

The Harvard-Westlake Chronicle

Actors teach drama workshops

The Actor and the Stage classes were taught by a guest teacher last week, and are being taught by another artist who is visiting the class this week.

Last week, each section of The Actor and the Stage had three classes taught by actor Stephen Kearin, who is one of the inventors of the Simlish language for the “Sims” computer game series, and is one of the voice actors in those games.

The workshop was titled “Spacework and Movement,” and students performed a number of different activities in order to work on these skills.

Acting teacher Michele Spears said that activities included actors pretending to drink from a cup, and acting as though they received a gift, and their classmates had to guess what the gift was by the nature of their actions and facial expressions.

Spears said that the goal of the exercise was for students to learn “how specificity and detail starts to tell stories before they even start to speak.”

The classes are also supposed to prepare students for one of their major assignments for the coming year, the observation exercise, where students have to observe three stranger and then choose one and to choose one to present to the class.

For the presentation, students will act as that stranger in a silent scene.

The second set which wil take place this week, is the “Neutral Mask Workshop” classes taught by Bob Beuth, who has appeared in “Monk” and “Fun with Dick and Jane.”

In this workshop, students will learn what Spears called an “old acting technique,” where actors wear a mask with a neutral expression and act out scenes.

“You learn how the body communicates without relying on just facial features,” Spears said.

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Actors teach drama workshops