Dramatic Arts Atelier
Ongoing Weekly In-Person Class, Sundays 3-6pm at Alchemical Studios, 50 West 17th St 12 Floor, $315 per month.
This class is a space for actors, directors, and performers to train in the pure craft of acting, to learn to work with each other, and develop their personal creative processes.
Dramatic Arts Atelier is founded for two reasons:
To train in acting as a pure art-craft, incorporating scene-work from plays and films, to develop and strengthen the body-mind connection in the artist, and to use specific details and form to create a lived experience.
To overcome the modern split between actors, directors, and writers, and to examine the way performing arts develop into performance.
In the ancient roots of drama, the creator, performer and writer were one – Sophocles performed his own plays. Today though, actors, directors, and writers work together, albeit from different perspectives and training. Thus, knowing and understanding the process of the other artist allows the work to be more organic, alive, and original. Focusing on the dynamics among artistic precision, each individual’s creative nature, and the unique vision of each artist, participants will develop their technique and creative process, working to uncover their own natural unique creative talent.
As a group of open-minded, curious, adventurous, and creatively mad artists, we will explore the following:
How each individual artist can build and develop their own unique creative process.
How the director’s intuitive perception can stimulate the actor’s creative energy in order to embody the director’s vision.
How the actor can absorb, translate, and digest the director’s vision into their own creative process.
Through working on performance pieces as individuals or in groups, the class will explore acting techniques, rehearsal techniques, text development and analysis, internal actions, kinetic expressiveness, rhythm, and space composition. Each participant is to be a creator is his, her, or their own right – not just a student – and will build a professional vision for how to grow and shape a full performance.
Participants will work on performance pieces on their own – in groups of actors/performers, director, and perhaps writer if the piece is original. This ongoing class is for any kind of performance artist – actor, director, filmmaker, screenwriter, playwright, clown, mover/dancer, choreographer, puppeteer – you name it. These pieces can be anything performative – scenes from plays, films, original works of theater or film, movement pieces, clown pieces, and so on. Film Directors are welcome to bring a camera and explore how to work with actors while filming. Developed pieces may certainly perform as an advanced work-in-progress for an audience.
The class structure begins with kinetic exercises that strengthen the access to deeper intuition and creative freedom, followed by working on pieces. Participants will practice and learn the principles of Polina’s methodology, Kinetic Mind, as a way to keep the work grounded, meaningful, and alive.
There is no linear or logical process for either the actor or director; nobody has to do well – they can explore, learn, and do what they love with a group of fellow passionate artists.
Class takes place on Sundays at Alchemical Studios, 3-6pm, for $315 per month. Please contact us about your interest in the class and resume in order to schedule an interview with Polina.
