Acting Skills 1
Acting Skills 1 -TEA1005 consists of 3 subject areas: Acting, Movement, and Voice. These are entirely practical subjects. Students learn an integrated acting process and how to activate their imagination both psychologically and physically through acting, movement, and voice.
Acting has improvisation classes to develop acting skills and creative potential, and text classes to develop interpretive acting techniques.
Movement and Voice classes develop the functional and expressive use of body and voice for acting and performance.
Acting
Acting Skills 1 -TEA1005 consists of a combination of 3 subject areas: Acting, Movement and Voice. These are entirely practical subjects where all lessons are based upon the students working practically and learning by doing. Students learn an integrated acting process and how to activate their imagination both psychologically and physically through acting, movement, and voice.
Acting has improvisation classes to develop acting skills and creative potential, and text classes to develop interpretive acting techniques.
Movement and Voice classes develop the functional and expressive use of body and voice for acting and performance.
Acting
Acting focuses on: play, improvisation, collaborative ensemble work, experimentation, curiosity and receptivity, motivation and action, together with text, context, and subtext.
Through improvisation, students learn how to cultivate a state of play with availability and playfulness as the vital elements of performance. This work enables students to create imaginatively, spontaneously, and intuitively through action and collaborative play.
In ensemble work, students learn to propose and collaborate in response to their peers' propositions within acting and devising. They actively engage in listening to feedback and guidance for their own work and the work of their fellow students, while connecting it to their individual experiences. This approach fosters a dynamic of group learning, shared experience, and reflection.
The subject fosters experimentation driven by curiosity, courage, and humour. Experimentation encourages students to try out ideas and to accept both success and failure as part of the learning process. Students learn to overcome their fear of failure, which can hinder play and experimentation both in devising and acting.
Work on developing curiosity and receptivity explores the possibility of finding a starting point that allows the students to receive, to feel, and to react uninhibited in fresh and diverse ways. Receptivity leads to work with identification as an acting process that creates physical, vocal, and psychological transformation in acting. Identification and transformation enrich the student's expressive possibilities, extending the student's range as a performer.
The course investigates the motivation of action - what is at stake for people in a given situation? What do they desire? What do they need? And, ultimately, how do they behave? This work increases the actor’s ability to interact with their surroundings in a specific way. The actor’s behaviour is shaped and coloured by a specific personal motivation. This develops the actor’s ability to develop a scene in improvisational work, and understand the underlying forces that shape a text.
In work on text, context, and subtext, students learn to interpret and embody words within a physical, social, and psychological context. They learn how to work from the literal surface of the text and find ways of imagining what lies beneath the words and how what is unspoken drives and defines what is spoken.
Movement
Movement develops the students' ability to create play and meaning through movement. The course covers both Functional Movement and Expressive Movement.
Functional Movement teaches the students an understanding of how the body works and how to move safely, efficiently and optimally. The students learn basic skills in acrobatics and stage combat. Students gain an awareness of their physical potential and learn to sense and make sense of their bodies proprioceptively. Habitual tensions, limitations and blocks are explored and released in order to allow further possibilities of movement to be developed.
Expressive Movement teaches movement through imaginative embodiment of actions, elements and materials to increase the range and quality of the student’s physical expression.
Voice
The functional and expressive resources of the voice are explored and developed. The course examines how sound is produced by physical, mental, and emotional factors - intention, thought, feeling, anatomy, breath, resonance, vowels, consonants, words, phrases, and texts.
The expressive range of the voice is developed in terms of dynamics of resonance, timbre, rhythm, pitch, articulation, volume, and breathing. The connection between the voice, mind, body, and feeling is worked on through explorations of texts and improvisations.
The voice is continuously explored as an essential part of acting and play. The materiality and quality of sound are explored to create a sensory and emotional connection with sound and words, and to build awareness of how the voice is rooted in the body and mind as an integrated whole.
Knowledge
The student:
- Has a basic understanding of acting as an embodied process.
- Has experience and finer awareness of how movement and body language creates dramatic play.
- Has a basic understanding of how to play with space, time, relation, action, reaction, rhythm, timing, scales, balance, and imbalance.
- Has a basic understanding of anatomy and functionality in voice and movement, and an awareness of their personal strengths and weaknesses.
- Has a basic understanding of how to actively research and imaginatively engage in methods of acting, alone and in groups.
- Has a basic understanding how to work collaboratively in exploring the subject of acting.
- Understands how openness, curiosity and courage facilitates learning and quality in acting work.
Skills
The student:
- Can play intuitively and truthfully on stage both alone and with others.
- Can use non-verbal communication, movement, and voice to interact with space and other partners in improvised and text play.
- Can play with neutral, larval, and expressive masks.
- Can play with objects in physical storytelling.
- Can use observation and imaginative identification with animals, elements, materials, and colours as an acting process.
- Can develop a character from diverse sources: movement, text, psychology and identification with elements, materials, and animals.
- Can use acting, movement, and vocal skills in acting and physical storytelling.
- Can improvise and explore imagined situations individually and with others.
- Can embody thoughts, feeling and intentions physically and vocally.
- Can place their voice (breath support).
- Can connect to text as part of an imagined situation.
- Can move efficiently and safely.
- Can use articulate movements and play with dynamics of moment.
- Can do basic acrobatics and stage combat.
- Can release unnecessary tension in movement and vocal work.
General competence
The student:
- Knows how to prepare mentally, vocally, and physically to be ready to improvise, devise, rehearse or perform.
- Knows how to sustain a level of awareness and listening to work effectively.
- Knows how to work as part of a group in exploring a theme through improvisation
- Knows how to begin exploring a text and imagine its given circumstances.
- Can create a character from movement, text, psychology and identification with elements, materials, and animals.
- Knows how to develop skeletal alignment for efficiency in movement and voice.
All teaching takes place at the campus. The work is carried out as a whole class, in groups, and individually.
The instruction is organised in regular weekly work sessions and extended work sessions in connection with presentations. Periods of work outside of the scheduled times must be anticipated in specific periods.
The learning approach uses an inductive/problem-solving method. All tasks begin with a challenge, provocation, or foundational material, and it is the students' responsibility to find a coherence in the form of a scenic presentation based on the frameworks, constraints, and materials that have been agreed upon.
Teaching Methods
Movement:
- Regular instruction where students explore and develop the body's relationship to space, imagination, and interaction.
- Conducted through provided exercises, techniques, and assignments.
Acting Skills:
- Regular instruction where students explore and develop skills in acting and stage art production within specific themes.
- Classes focus on improvisation, stylistic analysis, and assigned tasks.
Voice:
- Regular instruction where students explore and develop the use of voice in relation to space, imagination, interaction, and text usage.
- Includes various exercises, techniques, and assigned tasks.
Assignments
- Presentation and staged performance of work with accompanying feedback and reflection.
- Task solving and skill training without guidance.
Mandatory Attendance
The work in the subject primarily takes place with the entire class or in groups where everyone's participation and contribution are essential to the development of each individual. For this reason, the subject has mandatory attendance.
Nord University works continuously to improve the quality of its studies. In this work, we work closely with the students: in that the students participate in the evaluation of both the individual courses and the study as a whole. Evaluation in each course will take place by:
- At the start of a course: clarification of expectations between lecturer and students
- Continual evaluation throughout the semester
- Final evaluation
Comprehensive evaluation of the study takes place at regular meetings between representatives for the students and study leaders at Nord University. Students are also encouraged to participate in the central quality surveys.
Composite Assessment - all components must be approved/passed to receive a grade in the course.
Mandatory Attendance (OD): Mandatory attendance in teaching and agreed student-led activities is assessed as approved/not approved. A minimum of 90% attendance is required. Counts for 0/100 of the final grade.
Work Requirements (AK): 25 practical work requirements. Stage presentations are work requirements during the academic year. Assessed as approved/not approved. Counts for 0/100 of the final grade.
1st Semester:
Practical Exam (PE): Common exam for the entire class (stage performance). Duration of up to six hours. Grading scale: pass/fail. Counts for 50/100 of the final grade.
2nd Semester:
Practical Exam (PE): Group exam (stage performance). Duration up to six hours. Grading scale: pass/fail. Counts for 50/100 of the final grade.
All
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