Entering my seventh month with the studio, I no longer feel like a fish out of water one hundred percent of the time. I'm still very much a beginner, but this next class would be a refreshing one as my new instructor would be challenged with similar obstacles, beginning something new. Jonathan Lipnicki is not only my new teacher but a new member of the GRAS team as a whole. His excitement with this new direction in life had an immediate impact on the class, and everyone was motivated to learn.
Jonathan has a fantastic approach to teaching acting as he wants to know where each student feels they have the most to learn and will approach his feedback from that perspective. I, for example, explained how I would like to get better at reaching emotional flexibility within a scene. The change in a character's emotional state over the course of a few lines can be quite dramatic, and I want to do my best to avoid being one note through a performance.
We were all a bit surprised at how many people had similar goals, which I think is a testament to his approach. Now, knowing similar themes between students, he can pick material going forward that will challenge us to achieve our desired results.
Something I personally found interesting about Jonathan's teaching methods was his approach to the first readthrough for each student. His philosophy is to read the scene once through as dry as possible. Don't put any emotion or spin on it, just read the lines back and forth with him. He explains that many actors rehearse a scene so much that they go into an audition with the entire performance memorized. This in itself is not bad, but what happens if the director asks you to read the scene with an entirely different emotion or context in mind? You spent so much time doing the performance one way that you can't adjust on the fly. This could potentially kill an audition.
So, the idea behind his dry read is to get rid of a rehearsed performance and just understand the scene. Then, when you actually perform, he can jump in with advice, and you will be able to adjust your performance accordingly. This may sound simple to some, but this absolutely blew me away during class. I barely realized how often I did this in class. I would do my best to analyze the scene and practice, but in hindsight, I was just memorizing one version of the performance, which is utterly limiting. Without knowing it, I was actively hindering myself by forcing my performance into a box.
This eureka moment can then allow for another element of Jonathan's teachings: be specific but make big swings. He would rather tell a student to reign in a performance than have to force one out of you. Classes like the ones at GRAS are a safe place to experiment, and we have to make the most of that. Starting out, it is difficult not to be in your head all of the time, but it is in those