Acting is Telling Stories

Instructor: Leone Fogle-Hechler

Acting is telling stories.  All stories have the power to be transformative, and there is some special magic that transpires when a story is personally given from storyteller to listener.  The body of the story-giver loses its defensive posture, the voice falls to a timber that’s more natural.  And the listener is transformed, because the experience that the performer acts out is subsumed effortlessly into the experience-digester of the person who hears it.  There was a focus on self-discovery that transformed American acting from the 1930s through the 1970s, and in this class we will get to the bottom of it.  Classes will consist of basic acting exercises, a handful of theatre games, some big scary text that turns out not to be so scary, and a lot of real talking about stories that mean something to us.  There will be some reading, but not too much.  There might be some too-amazing-to-be-ordinary films, too!  This class is intended to be for young adults 14-18 years of age.

Leone Fogle-Hechler is a writer who lives in Seattle.  She toured with the National Shakespeare Theatre in 1987, and acted in numerous workshop and off-off-off Broadway productions in New York City.   She studied acting with Stella Adler and lots of other terrific people.