No Way as Way

“No way as way, no limitation as limitation”
-- Bruce Lee

In art there is no method, no system, and without them there is nothing to teach. There is only art. Great acting is clearly identifiable. The challenge of training is in getting the student functioning the same way as great actors and not as slaves to some method or technique.

We teach one exercise that builds habits out of the fundamentals of good acting.
Those habits, repeated meaningfully over time, become second nature in the student. Before we ever begin to work on scenes the student will have already mastered the fundamentals of great acting.

Once this way of functioning is imbued in our students, all of their responses are free, truthful, emotional, and motivated only by the other actors' behavior. With nothing planned out or figured out in advance actors who work this way are able to function like any other artist, out of their talent and imagination.

Painters may intend to paint a picture of a mountain and may even have an idea of the feeling that this picture must get across -- they don’t know how they’re going to paint the picture until they are actually painting it and then the process is in constant adjustment until the desired feeling is unmistakable.

Old-fashioned acting, (pretending, indicating, forcing, faking, stylized oratory, etc.) is pre-planned, anticipated, and the results of intellectualization, and as such has nothing to do with genuine human experience, or with art.

Our approach to training for the actor is a process of self-discovery.

The only limitation in our approach is that there are infinite possibilities in the way the artist responds, so many in fact, that responses cannot be planned out in advance but must be left to the actors’ instincts. When the actor is functioning out of who he is as a human being he doesn’t have to think about anything when he responds. In reality we don’t have to think about how we’re supposed to feel when someone hurts our feelings, angers or saddens us, and the same is true of all great acting.