2025
II. Creating Character: Build Your Acting Muscle
Level: committed actors who have completed Core Technique
location: Welserstr. 5-7, Berlin-Schöneberg
FEE: €350
Fall/winter session: Mondays 19:30 - 22:00, NOVEMBER 3 - DECEMBER 15
(THIS session IS FULL. PLEASE SIGN UP FOR THE WAITING LIST or for the winter session.)
winter session: Tuesdays 19:30 - 22:00, January 6 - March 3, 2026
Develop the tools that bring characters to life. In Creating Character, you’ll explore the craft of creating believably human performances rooted in the universe of the play. You’ll sharpen your ability to interpret given circumstances, define objectives and obstacles, and make bold choices that ignite dramatic conflict. You’ll learn how internal obstacles inform your physical and vocal choices, giving your characters depth and authenticity. Through advanced techniques in vocal production, articulation, and physical characterization, you’ll broaden your imaginative range and open new pathways to emotional truth and theatrical ingenuity.
Working on scenes from contemporary English-language theater gives you the opportunity to explore tone and style, tackling challenges like comedy and heightened language. Spatial-awareness and sensory exercises complement your scene work, helping you integrate analytical discoveries with imaginative choices to bring subtlety, richness, and theatrical inventiveness to your characters. Intensive collaboration and structured guidance reinforce your ability to navigate a dramatic text intuitively while making grounded yet adventurous acting choices.
Exploration of character relationships, physicality, vocal quality, and linguistic specificity provides you with a versatile toolkit you can apply across genres. You’ll train in a rehearsal-like, collaborative environment, breaking down scenes moment by moment and responding to directorial feedback. By the end of the course, you’ll bring a fully realized character to life in a performance-ready scene, providing a clear pathway into advanced scene study or ensemble work.
This course is designed for students who have completed Core Technique; actors with previous training may enter by interview.
“I went to a drama school that had a very naturalistic approach, so we always focused a lot on intention but not so much on the words themselves. Adam showed me that words—their sounds, their meaning—can already carry so much and it can be so delicious to explore that for a stage character.”
“Having felt so inspired and reconnected by the Core course, I went on to the Character course, where the scene and character study was even more intensive and focused, bringing out powerful performances from each of us. One of my favorite things about these courses is that they are kept to small groups at a time so that each of us received time and attention to work on developing our characters and thoroughly examining the plays our scenes were drawn from. ”
Specific exercises and activities will include:
-Advanced voice, speech, and movement technique.
-Rigorous and personalized warmup routine.
-Intensive exercises to deepen physical and vocal characterization.
-Spacial and sensory exploration to establish and deepen the physical universe of the play.
-Paired work on scripted scenes from contemporary American plays.
-Rigorous application of script analysis to break down and understand scenes.
-Individualized feedback to strengthen performance skills in a friendly, supportive environment.
To enable all participants to work intensively during each class, enrollment is limited to a maximum of ten students. Students should expect to work at least two hours per week outside of class on readings and assigned scenes.
Instructors: Adam Ludwig, Stephanie LeBolt