Embodied Practices

Physical expression, physical imagination, and physical action are gateways for creative interrogations of the worlds in which we live. Memory, identity, and history are stored, transmitted, and transformed physically even as ideas erupt into words.

Our subjects in acting, dance, and drawing develop embodied ways of knowing and teach students to draw on physical experience as raw material for artistic expression.

Introduction to Acting explores the actor’s instincts in body, voice, imagination, language, and action. A character’s motivation is always expressed physically and through these physical actions, emotion blooms. In Physical Improvisation: Bodies in Motion and Talking and Dancing, taught by Dan Safer and Janessa Clark, the expressive realities of the body are extended, and the spatial characteristics of a composition are explored. Gravity, momentum, positive and negative space, and the line between dance and theater and music theater is forever blurred—generating text from movement and movement from text.

Voice and Speech for the Actor, taught by renowned Linklater voice specialist, Keely Eastley, frees the natural voice first as a human instrument before it becomes the springboard for an actor’s leap. Students train, develop, and build capacity for breath and release sometimes long-held habits that sometimes keep people from being heard.

Drawing for Designers, too, engages a physical encounter between eye, hand, and paper, sharpening the observational acuity that every embodied practice depends on. We learn to see more, notice more, and sense more.

Felt, carried, and moved: the body is the real work—an instrument of awareness within which every other discipline might better tune itself.