Two Year Acting Program | Finding Meaning and Truth | Maggie Flanigan Studio
http://www.maggieflaniganstudio.com/twoyearactingprogramnyc/ The Maggie Flanigan Studio is a two year acting program in New York City that instills in the actor a craft and a solid work ethic for a long acting career. Gerard Joseph from Queens originally. My family’s from Dominica in the West Indies. I’m first generation and I just graduated about a month ago. I wanted to be the best at what I do and I was new to acting. I hadn't done acting my whole life and I conferred with a few people about who was the best and who was the most respected and the most well-known. Not known so much, but like active and involved in the students’ lives and everybody pointed me to Maggie's. Maggie's and like two other people, but Maggie was just the name that just kept echoing, and echoing, and echoing so I had to check it out. Transformed. She always said, the whole time when we were in the process, that people have their revelations, and their breakdowns, and their different things at different times in the process over the two years and I don't think I had mine till the very end. So it's been a lot of processing and realizing the changes that I've made and understanding my new self. They see me as more grounded, they see me as more relatable. I find it myself that I'm much more- much less drama in my life. I can't quite correlate it directly, but I know it's because I'm expressing and I'm getting a lot of things out that I probably expressed unhealthily in the past. I don't know what I was doing before, basically. Everything is different. Everything is deeper, everything is more meaningful, everything is personal. I was going out there and playing an idea before without anything being truly connected to my soul and now everything is different. I approach a character and trying to find the aspects of him that relate to me and that I can really dive into and absorb. I looked for meaning, and meaning, and more meaning. Before it was so shallow, so that's the difference. One thing that jumps out right now is being open and available while reading it, while really discovering a character sitting down in a place that I allow myself to let those words affect me in a way that is just not a mental thing, that I'm emotionally involved from the jump and taking the time to carve out line, by line, by line, what it is that's happening for that person and then relating it to myself. So it's painstaking now, but I wouldn't want it any other way. I don't know if I would have gotten where I am without Voice and Speech. I was blocking things with my voice I didn't realize. I had a tension in my chest and in my jaw that wouldn't allow, when I became alive and emotional, wouldn't allow those things to come through. I was tense and she pointed out these things to me and allowed me to be aware such that now I can release those points of tension and really feel better than I was able to feel before. So I don't know if the work in Maggie's would have been as effective without those tools from Voice and Speech. First year is just an explosion. I would describe it as a volcano like all these things are just pummeling out of you at different speeds, at different paces, in different forms and then second year is, I guess, cleaning up the mess in a way, learning how to organize the ash from the lava, from the rocks and just knowing what goes where. It's a process of relating another being or another person's experience to myself and coming to understand it through my prism and it doesn't cut me off. That’s what's beautiful about it for me. It allows me to be me in my fullest sense and apply it and shift it through this person, through this character. The people, yes, the energy. Like I said earlier, I wanted the best. I was looking for the best and I feel like a lot of the people here are seeking the same thing and that energy and that synergy that's created in a room of people who want the best gives me chills. It's giving me chills now. I've never felt that anywhere else. In the next video Meredith Howard talks about how she changed during the two year acting program at the studio: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cuFI54ZNzfY To see more alumni interviews about the training program at the studio vis this channel: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL1840F48B25411AA2 Maggie Flanigan Studio 153 W 27th St #803 New York, New York 10001 (917) 789-1599 http://www.maggieflaniganstudio.com/ https://goo.gl/maps/JTA9n7oHbNT2
via YouTube https://youtu.be/jE4C1r48Tys
No comments:
Post a Comment