Glasgow Acting Hotbed
For the longest time, I’ve been reticent to use the blog to advertise my acting studio. I’ve always considered the blog a helpful guide for actors all over the world and not a marketing tool for the studio.
However, recently, I’ve thought it was important to share the very special thing we have in our Glasgow acting studio, it’s a hotbed, with highly effective techniques for transforming actors at all stages of their career into actors of a professional standard through intensive study.
Down a dirty looking alleyway, up an ancient staircase (avoiding a heart attack – it’s the top floor!) is a small, poorly painted acting studio in Glasgow. It is our home, our studio, our hotbed.
Here we train actors in a unique and powerful approach to acting that has grown from the days I trained in Practical Aesthetics in New York City’s Atlantic Theater Company’s Acting School – to today when the technique has grown into its own form, that I think of as just ‘common sense’. It is a living technique, organic and constantly developing to meet the needs of the actors we train and the work they do.
In our acting hotbed, we spend time only on those activities that actually make the actor better. We do nothing ‘because we’re meant to’, because it’s ‘expected’, and we couldn’t care less what other schools, colleges and studios believe is essential to the training of an actor, we are only interested in preparing them for work.
We have always courted controversy, we don’t care for the emotional excesses of the Method, nor do we think that the contemporary actor should focus purely on theatre – although theatre acting teaches one to deliver consistently (not consistency), whereas film and television are pieced together in the editing room.
Our glasgow acting hotbed, ACS Studio is special, not only in Scotland, but in the UK, and when students realises they are onto something special at ACS, they stick around. The technique builds from simple and basic tuition right through to an industry showcase, but it is the heart of training that sets us apart.
Here are a few of our principles:
No pretending. As Meisner said, the foundation of acting is the reality of doing.
Performance is the end result and not the objective.
The more acting you are doing, the more the audience have to pretend you aren’t.
Character is an illusion that we create with a complicit audience.
If you don’t understand the dramatic purpose of the scene, you don’t understand the scene.
The lines are fuel for the scene, not meaning to be communicated.
Your scene partner is fuel, work off them.
Understand through doing, not understand now and do later.
Want to join us? We have Step 1 on Mondays, Thursdays and Saturdays in Glasgow, and we’ll have acting classes in Edinburgh starting soon too.