The acting approach

 

 

The very basis of the Actors Workshop Vienna is the work of Eric Morris.

• Any training unit starts with relaxation and Being Exercises.
  Being means to express what you feel from moment to moment, no less and no more, here and now. Literally hundreds of instrumental exercises help the actors to eliminate personal obstacles and to reach a point of truly expressing their feelings.

• From this state of being the actors can work for a stimulus out of their own life, to really experience the emotional life of the scene. Anything and anyone in your life can be a choice to create the emotions of the character in the play.

• To make the stimuli from their lifes real the students learn concrete, crystalclear techniques. The senses are used to create objects with emotional impact. A valid sense memory training becomes a cornerstone of the craft of acting. And other approaches like imaginary monologues, evocative words, externals, sensory suggestion or believability, to name just a few. The students learn how to master the different circumstances in the medias film and stage.

• The actor becomes a master experiencer of life instead of a master of fakery. And he shares his real emotions with the audience. But at the same time, he is able to meet all obligations of the character. He fulfills and enriches the original visions of the author, experiences the emotions through a solid craft process. So the audience become witnesses of a story happening here and now, right before their eyes.

• This work is rooted deeply in the work of Stanislavsky and Strasberg, both great pioneers of theatre work. And it seems to me a step of equal importance, from Stanislavsky´s "System" to Strasbergs "Method", as from the Method to the work of Eric Morris. The instrumental work, the text analysis and the craft techniques are enriched, developed and added with revolutionary new effective tools for the actor.
  Hollywoods leading actors like Jack Nicholson, Harry Dean Stanton, Melanie Griffith, Tery Garr or Priscilla Barnes used this approach as a valid basis of succeeding in the art of acting.

• In regular weekly classes the students learn a clear process. Any 6 weeks an intensive seminar gets one theme of the work focused in 30 hours during three days.

  

  
  Edgar Fell is the instructor of the seminars in Vienna. Beside his career as an actor and opera singer in films and on stage, he has founded the Actors Workshop Vienna to establish this work in Europe.

  Eric Morris says about Edgar Fell: "I would not hesitate to recommend him as an actor or as a teacher of the work. He is wonderful in both areas. He has my full endorsement to teach my work anywhere."

  Eric Morris, Los Angeles