Two and a half weeks of our program have now passed. This week we started our in depth Acting/Directing course work. GITIS has a very unique course offering in which Acting and Directing students work together in one class with one professor guiding both types of students in work that allows each individual to grow as the type of theatre artist that they are as well as take an in depth look at the work of each other. The students apply their work together in each class to create etudes, improvs and even do scene work together.
Naturally, we jumped on the opportunity of this course offering for our program. Our students will be studying this way for nine of the eleven weeks of the course with three different Directing Department Faculty members leading the course. This unique curriculum design not only allows the acting and directing students to form a very tight ensemble, but also allows them to stretch and grow by studying intensively with a few different masters over the course of the semester.
We started this process with directing master Natalia Alexievna Zvereva who is an expert in the teachings of Mikhail Chekhov and was, in fact, the student of a student of his. She has been a member of the directing department faculty at GITIS for many years in addition to working internationally.
For her section of the course she chose to focus on Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull. Her class is divided into multiple sections. First students work through etudes, improvs and exercises of the Stanislavisky System. The class then transitions to script analysis and history before moving into scene work from the chosen text. Over the course of the week students applied all principles from each section of the class to the work in every section creating new art and interpretations of the text every day. We will continue to update you on the work that our students are doing with Zvereva and the other Directing Faculty over the course of the semester.