LibGuides: Acting & Performance: Media

Featured Steaming Media

Try these videos to get started. Must access on campus or login with your COM account for off campus access.

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Acting through Life: Insights from Working Actors (33:47) Although most actors dream of celebrity, many find satisfaction in modest film and television roles, commercials, and regional theater. This program shows students that side of the profession, interviewing several accomplished performers who—although they are far from being household names—have found steady work on the stage and in Hollywood. They share their practical yet inspiring views on auditioning, insecurity, disillusionment, aging, and the viability of acting as a career option today.
Expressive Actor—Expressive Action (01:08:49) “The study of acting should begin with physical action—a specialized, structured, flexible and adaptable physical action that is enlisted in the direct service of the expression of thought and feeling. I call this integrated physical action an expressive action.”--Michael Lugering. A group of actors work through a series of carefully structured exercises and improvisations that unlock the physical, raw materials that make human expression possible. Whether the actor is expressing love, loss, rage or joy, unlocking these universal will provide the building blocks for captivating and dynamic acting.
Expressive Actor—Improvisation (55:24) A group of actors demonstrate a variety of improvisatory techniques and exercises designed to expand the actor’s imagination and expressive power. Rooted in impulse, spontaneity, and creativity, the improvisations will lead you to new and unfamiliar methods of expression never thought possible and many of which you have never experienced in your personal life. These basic exercises can easily be modified and adapted for on-going growth and development. All the while, your acting repertoire increases and becomes more nuanced and sophisticated.
Onstage (120:00) Although staging a play requires extensive preparation, its ultimate success depends upon the energy of the performers and their ability to engage a live audience. This program focuses on what makes that interaction successful, featuring segments on character interpretation, timing, underplaying, movement, positioning, dialects and accents, portraying pain and drunkenness, and other principles and elements of acting.
Series: Stanislavsky from the Outside In: React and Act This revolutionary eight-part teaching series totally changes how students look at the acting strategies that were pioneered by world-renowned Russian actor and theater director Constantin Stanislavsky. Coaching from Hollywood acting teacher and director Timothy Craig will help students employ helpful acting techniques. Students will embrace and project Stanislavsky’s theories from their inner selves as they observe, react, and immediately apply them to their acting, directing, and writing. 8-part series, 9–20 minutes each.
The Shakespeare Sessions (56:51) This fascinating program brings viewers into a workshop run by John Barton, cofounder of the Royal Shakespeare Company, that demonstrates how vividly accessible Shakespeare’s language can be when it is heard rather than read. Barton explains that Shakespeare’s text gives subtle cues to actors about how a scene should be played, and that audiences can become immersed in the action by a verbal invitation to the imagination (“Think, when we talk of horses, that you see them…”). With commentary and rehearsal footage that features Kevin Kline, Patrick Stewart, Cynthia Nixon, Charles S. Dutton, Dustin Hoffman, Sir Peter Hall, and others, the film includes some of Shakespeare’s most famous scenes in compelling new interpretations.
Towards the Limelight: Mastering Skills and Techniques (40:25) This documentary, filmed in a cinema verité style at the National Theatre Conservatory, follows eight student-actors through their first year of the master’s degree program, an intensive daily regimen of voice, dance, elocution, and acting instruction. Initially uncomfortable with the strangeness of acting together and with some of the classes, such as trapeze work, the students begin to gel as a group and demonstrate why they were selected out of hundreds for this prestigious program.

Performances

Try these videos to get started. Must access on campus or login with your COM account for off campus access.

Want more on finding media? Try Articles & Media.