25/02/2019
“I did not create this technique; I watched it emerge. The route that led me to this method of training actors’ bodies has been very personal. Because I did not study in a conservatory environment, I never had the broad education in international styles of bodywork and in vigorous vocal study that accompanies many acting classes. My personal approach to physical technique came from New York City acting training in the 1960’s and 1970’s, when study of the various versions of American Method preceded all other forms of study. In fact, for many of us in New York training schools, the acting was (and is) everything. All other study was peripheral, even haphazard. In the classroom, Harold Clurman often bemoaned the lack of work in voice, carriage, and diction in our New York actors.
Anna Sokolow, the original movement teacher for the Actor’s Studio, the Lincoln Center School, and the Julliard Theater School, was a mentor, who, to this day, remains the mother of my artistic soul. From my work in Dramatic Movement for Actors with Anna, I discovered the aesthetics of movement, the expressive beauty of another art. For Anna, movement must grow from an actor’s inner experience. She taught actors how to awaken that inner experience by listening with their entire bodies to other artists: musicians, composers, poets (and for me, painters, singers and dancers).
The relationship of the body to acting and dance guided me to one concept: The actor’s body, his sensory contacts with other actors in his imaginary world, his connections and expressions, his experiences and behavior, are all part of one self-contained instrument. There should be no separations of any of its parts.
Sensory contact, experience, and behavior are all parts of one event occuring in one indivisible place, the actor’s body.”
-Loyd Williamson
Part Five, “Movement for Actors”, Nicole Potter, editor. 2002 Allworth Press NY, NY.
