Presented by Brian Mulligan –
Held online:
This is an intensive 3-session, 3-week workshop on Uta Hagen’s Exercises from A Challenge for the Actor, taught online by Brian Mulligan, who studied with Uta Hagen and Carol Rosenfeld.
“You change your sense of self a hundred times a day as you are influenced by circumstances, your relationships to others, the nature of the event, and your clothing.” – Uta Hagen
“I don’t know what is better than the work that is given to the actor—to teach the human heart the knowledge of itself.” – Sir Laurence Olivier
“Words are the messengers of our wishes.” – Herbert Berghof
Uta Hagen’s lifelong curiosity, explorations, and innovations in the craft of acting – and their codification in her momentous books A CHALLENGE FOR THE ACTOR and RESPECT FOR ACTING – continue to influence actors around the globe who seek to infuse the characters they play with truth, beauty, and the entire range of behaviors and emotions within every human being.
At the heart of Hagen’s books is her enduring legacy – The Exercises – through which you, the actor, observe and explore your own behaviors under life’s ordinary and extraordinary circumstances, repeat them as if they are happening for the first time, and present them in two to three rehearsed minutes of your life lived in front of your teacher and peers in the acting studio.
In Hagen’s class, actors worked on the Exercises and scenes concurrently, so that their simultaneous explorations of character and self would allow them to achieve what Hagen demanded of herself when acting: “I must find myself in the role!”
When actor training moved online in 2020, Hagen’s Exercises proved to be most adaptable to the virtual acting studio. Brian Mulligan, like many other teachers of Hagen’s approach, discovered unexpected advantages to working with actors Zooming in from their home ‘studios’. Thankfully, in-person actor training has resumed, while the benefits of the online training experience have provided actors and teachers with the opportunity to continue to connect with one another across great distances.
Calling upon his personal experiences in Uta Hagen’s and Carol Rosenfeld’s classes and his 30+ years teaching actors, Mulligan developed this workshop to guide you through Hagen’s Exercises in A Challenge for the Actor and their direct application to work on characters in scenes and monologues. The goal of the workshop is to add skills and techniques to your actor’s ‘toolbox’, so that you can call upon the hundreds of distinct ‘selves’ within to select the alive, truthful, human behavior required to breathe life into the many characters you will play on the stage, the set, and the soundstage.
Required Reading:
A CHALLENGE FOR THE ACTOR by Uta Hagen
Recommended Reading:
ACTING AND LIVING IN DISCOVERY by Carol Rosenfeld