Acting Is Failing
ACTING IS FAILING or HOW TO ACT LIKE MERYL
Acting is both easy and impossible. At its core, acting is simply doing the thing every child knows how to do: playing pretend. But you get into trouble when you try to act too well. To attempt a polished and predictable performance is to deliver a lifeless, boring recitation. Acting demands that we embrace failure. A very famous American movie star is rumored to say “pray for mistakes,” because mistakes allow spontaneity and specificity to crash through the well-choreographed artifice.
In this two-day acting workshop, we will employ exercises from the worlds of clowning and improv in order to give award-worthy performances of contemporary theatrical texts. But we will fail! And we will revel in our failure!
No prior acting experience is necessary. But Academy Award Winners are also welcome! Everyone will have fun. Even if you never act again, the joy of failure you’ll discover in this class will enrich your daily life.
Caps at 12 participants.
Dates/Times: Saturday and Sunday May 2 and 3 from 10am-3pm with a noon-1pm lunch break
Cost: $100-$300 sliding scale (A sliding scale payment structure is offered as a tool for economic justice. Please pay an amount that honestly reflects your current economic reality.) A portion of the proceeds from this workshop will help fund the work of the new theater company, "Failure Theater."
Sallie Merkel is an actor, writer and teacher who goes by “Merkel,” a name she inherited from her con-artist grandfather. She holds an MFA in Acting from California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) and has appeared as a performer with theater companies such as The Living Theatre, Irondale Ensemble Project (Brooklyn), and The Speakeasy Society (LA), and at venues such as RedCat (LA), Machine Project (LA), The Bootleg Theater (LA), Venue 13 (Edinburgh International Festival Fringe). She stars in and is the co-creator of the series “The Commons,” now streaming on Open Television (weareo.tv). Her newly founded theater company, "Failure Theater" will have a workshop presentation of its first piece, "Understudy Vanya" in late May.