February 25, 2010

Welcome to ACTORS LAB!

After a decade of teaching actors Peter Feeney is relaunching his SCENE GROUP for 2010 as ACTORS LAB. He’s offering a greater menu of courses with a stronger industry emphasis and more guest tutors: working professionals of the highest calibre who don’t teach regular classes, but are fine teachers. This year too for the first time he’s hosting overseas practitioners. First up will be renowned Australia based Casting Director Tom McSweeney to run a weekend workshop in June.

Happily the emphasis continues to be working in a practical fashion to improve skills, with an eye to maximising employability; work, in the end, is the best teacher. We still aim to attract professional actors and keep fees low to make their regular attendance easier. Less experienced actors are welcome too but classes are carefully streamed. This helps create a strong ensemble in every group with the right mix of challenge and support.

We’re not signed up to any one technique but we do offer in initial workshops a simple and straight-forward intention based technique of scene analysis. Group numbers are kept small so that each actor gets a good acting workout each session. We identify areas where the actor needs to work and give them ideas on how to do it; where needed other reputable voice, acting or accent coaches are recommended. Finally we provide support and encouragement for participants to form their own scene groups independent of our workshops.

We hope we will become in time THE one stop Auckland shop for all professional and serious prospective actors to tune up, be refocused and re-inspired.

For more info on upcoming workshops call or email Peter Feeney on 021 455 652/ mrfeeney@slingshot.co.nz or visit the website www.pfeeney.com

A download of the latest ACTORS LAB brochure can be found at: http://feeneymcsweeney.com/downloads/Acting-Brochure-2010%20Terms-1-2.pdf  

“Peter is a very gifted young actor who will always be genuinely interested in exploring his work and finding new approaches to it, and opening this out to his fellow actors.” – Cicely Berry, Voice Director, Royal Shakespeare Company.