The Grad Acting Program is a rich tapestry that weaves together many diverse strands of training, presentation, production, professionalism, and evaluation.
The arc of training at Grad Acting is a constantly evolving, but fully integrated, series of classes, based on the respective disciplines of Acting, Voice and Speech, and Movement. On any given day, students will experience all three disciplines and over the course of three years, students will have many of the same teachers, who are constantly ratcheting up the stakes and increasing the skill level demanded of their students. So, the arc of training provides an energetic balance between continuity and surprise, between assurance and obstacle, between confidence and challenge.
The training not only provides for the students to learn from the teachers, but for the teachers to learn from their students. Every year, feedback from our students is incorporated into the evolution of our training.
The specific classes for each year are described further by their individual instructors.
Classes
Actor's World
Alexander Technique
Combat
Crew
Games
Movement I
Movement & Mask
Physical Actioning
Scene Study
Shakespeare
Shakespeare's Clowns
Singing
Speech I
Text
The Now of Then
Toolbox 1: Observation and Physicality
Voice I
Classes
Alexander Technique
Combat
Dance
Embodying the Real
Grad Film Collaboration
Movement & Mask
Movement II
QiGong Yoga
Scene Study
Singing
Speech II
Techniques of Voice and Text
The Moving Frame
The Now of Then
Toolbox 2: Bartok
Voice II
Classes
Acting for Auditions (On-Camera & Theatre)
Alexander Technique
Career
Clowns
Dance
Krakower Technique
Musical Theatre
Public Theater Collaboration
Scene Study
Speech III
Techniques of Voice and Text
Voice III
The arc of production at the Grad Acting Program is organized over three years in a variety of projects and productions selected specifically for each cohort of actors that expand your ability to work with different texts, and collaborators on an evolutionary route towards entering the professional arena as an actor prepared--and open to--any eventuality and experience. Faculty members support these productions with their involvement in your progress at rehearsals; they will both work with you directly on these productions and/or support the other professionals who come to work at Grad Acting.
The first year concentrates on a variety of projects performed in the classroom:
Ensemble Project: You are thrown headfirst into an ensemble project designed to establish a foundation of collaboration and curiosity in your cohort. Focusing on adapted literature, this project explores continual response to prompts and shared devising rather than leading towards a final product.
Rehearsal Into Production: This project begins to take the tools learned in your first semester and put them into practice working together as a cohort on a single text.
Shakespeare Projects: The year ends with the cohort split into two groups working on a pair of Shakespeare plays. You strive to apply a range of tools introduced in Year 1 over the arc of a play and within the demands of Shakespeare’s heightened text.
The second year builds on these ideas in fully realized productions in our smaller performance spaces. The arc of these projects seeks to bring elements of your classwork to bear on the demands of a role in full production. The class is usually split into two separate, concurrent productions, which helps provide an equity of roles for everyone in the ensemble.
Realism: You begin with a realism project. These plays are selected with your specific cohort in mind and meant to bridge from your classwork into material that directly connects closely to the kind of demands explored in Scene Study classes.
Cabaret: Directed by your singing teacher, Deb Lapidus; this allows you to communicate thoughts and feelings via song - asking each actor to work from a place of expansive truth and courage, no matter your previous singing experience..
Project/Project: Everyone works together on an ambitious yearly project that splits the ensemble into two separate productions played concurrently in two connected spaces. Built in collaboration with a guest writer, these are often explorations of themes and a collage of material and sources. The project demands students find ways to take their training and apply a sense of truth and integrity within the work to material and production demands that are often highly technical and non-realistic.
Heightened Text: Finally, the company splits into two separate productions that focus on heightened language. Again chosen with the specific cohort in mind, these plays ask you to take the newly honed skills from year 2 and deploy them in projects that demand greater dexterity with language and ideas than the rest of the projects that year.
The third year productions move you towards your professional career. Your season is performed in our state-of-the-art theatres at The Paulson Center. The season itself reflects a varied repertory: classical plays (often including Shakespeare), contemporary plays, and recent successes from Broadway or off-Broadway. All of these productions are directed by artists who are faculty and other working professionals, with a wide range of experience and expertise. An important aspect of your final year is "Freeplay" which allows you to conceive, produce, write and/or act in your own performance piece; we regularly have a festival of over a dozen such projects for each Freeplay season. Your production year culminates in your showcase presentations, which give you the opportunity to present your talents live in New York and digitally to professional agents, casting directors and producers.
An innovative segment where every aspect of the student's curriculum includes an investigation about working in and the aesthetics of film.
Grad Acting is fortunate to be housed along with one of the great films schools in the country. Each year our graduating students collabortate with the next generation of artists on short films that feature and are often written specifically for our actors.
In Year 3, Grad Acting students work with Public Theater Artistic Director Oskar Eustis and Master Writer Chair Suzan-Lori Parks in a collaboration class with NYU Graduate Dramatic Writing and Design Students along with emerging professional directors. This class focuses on the collaborative process of developing new work and the way great collaboration can lead to better scripts.
Your very first project as a class immediately throws you headfirst into a world that generates a deeply connected and communicative ensemble while working outside everyone's area of familiarity in some form.
NYU Grad Acting is at the epicenter of the greatest and most vibrant campus in the world: New York City. From an observational point of view, the city provides so much life for our students: the greatest and most diverse variety of people in this country.
From a cultural point of view, New York City is unparalleled. Our students regularly attend productions on Broadway, off-Broadway, off-off-Broadway and the latest Hollywood and independent films.In addition, the world’s greatest museums, galleries, restaurants, and libraries are used for research and field trips; they are only a brief walk or a subway ride away.
We pride ourselves on making major artists accessible to our students. Every year, guest speakers give special talks to our students. These artists have included our finest actors: James Earl Jones, Meryl Streep, Philip Seymour Hoffman, John Lithgow, Nathan Lane, Audra McDonald, Rosemary Harris, John Turturro, Diane Wiest, Patti LuPone, William Jackson Harper, Arian Moayed, Nikiya Mathis, April Matthis, Miriam Silverman, Anne Kauffman, and Andre Braugher as well as visiting artists from around the world: Alan Rickman, Ian McKellen, John Kani and Winston Ntshona, Hugo Weaving and many more. Major directors such as Kenny Leon, Declan Donnellan, and Richard Eyre have come to speak, as well as playwrights such as Suzan-Lori Parks and Tony Kushner. Special workshops, unique to our students, have been offered by actors and directors such as Liev Schreiber and Maria Aitken. No other school can offer such a dazzling array of visiting artists, and on such an intimate and tactile level.