A four-day international Masterclass on Casting, Directing and Working with Actors:
The Actor in Dialogue with the Camera
Artistic Director: Greta Amend
The intimate and subtle work with the camera as a medium serves to create transparency of our current artistic personality. It transports immediate clarity about our potential craftsmanship and provides an insight into mental landscapes and the innermost being of acting. It detects our energy, enthusiasm, strength, sensitivity, humor, inner glow, sensuality and human depth beyond the separation of theatre and film. Every close-up conveys bags of information about the actors´ screen presence.
The nature of our work is to search, find, select, reject, fail, risk, search anew, and start all over again - exactly like the written characters, we strive to bring alive. Given these preconditions the actors sojourn includes not only the belief in own talent, but also trust in the path pursued, honesty towards oneself and others, joy in being thrown into the game, intent to understand human behaviour, and a healthy appetite for risk.
This master class lead by Greta Amend includes her practical hands-on training for film- and theatre actors, which is accompanied by specific camera-work. It offers scenework and -analysis, improvisations, lectures and roundtable discussions, and is an invitation to emphasize the dialogue between the participating artists at eye level. It will provide access to innovative forms of expression, learning and working methods, which will entail fresh impulses to future own work and enhance the actors´ personal work ethic.
The actors will also gain: A selection of highly sophisticated skills for the casting as well as pre-set and on-set situations, along with stagecraft and cold and warm reading techniques, complemented by elaborate ensemble training. The education will pay attention to the actors task of being the responsible creator of his performance. In 1-to-1 interviews and additional camera exercises, participants will learn how to put their best foot forward in meetings, interviews, auditions and shootings. They will improve their artistic expressiveness and consciousness to develop a more nuanced and energetic way of acting, with humour and grace in a free atmosphere.
As a casting director Greta will provide an insider view of the casting process as well as artist advice and further business knowledge for actors, who want to work on an international level.
Greta Amend studied drama at the Hannover College for Music and Theatre from 1983 to 1987, graduating in 1987 by writing & directing her first medium-long film "Full House - House of Fools". She subsequently continued her studies with Anatolij Vasil`jev at the Theatre of Dramatic Arts in Moscow. With the International Theatre Centre Akt-Zent and the GITIS Academy Moscow she studied in the Masterclass "Acting and Directing", including most techniques based on the Russian school. Her teachers were Prof. Vassili Skorik, Prof. Jurij Alschitz and Prof. Sergej Issayev.
Gretas substancial education as artist is enriched by her participation in the international theatre and film directing workshops of Künstlerhaus Bethanien which enjoyed cult status in the Berlin of the early 90´s. There Greta studied with directors Krzysztof Kieślowski, Peter Palitzsch, Thomas Schulte-Michels, Ruth Zapora, Sergej Ashkenasy, Yoshi Oida and Wojiech Marczewski. Additional private lessons involved extensive repertoire work with actors from Peter Stein´s former ensemble of Schaubühne Berlin. Amongst her film training teachers were danish director Henning Carlsen and Rae Allen.
Greta has been pursuing her acting career by working extensively in theatre productions with numerous foreign and local companies in Europe for 25 years. She´d been working project-based as a director for theatre and film, and has been forwarding her broad knowledge regularly as a guest-lecturer at various film and theatre ¬schools, like the German Film Academy Berlin, dffb. As a casting director her credits encompass the serial casting of Europe’s most popular daily soap opera "Gute Zeiten/Schlechte Zeiten“, more than 40 productions from short-films and feature films to the 700-hour screen epic „Dau“ by Ilya Khrzhanovsky, the biggest russian-european co-production to this day, where she was responsible for the casting process in Europe and North America.
Periodically she is participating in the "International Directors´ and Trainers´ Colloqiums" of the European Association for Theatre Culture, Akt-Zent Berlin, Research Centre of the International Theatre Institute ITI, focusing on new training methods and theatre ethics.
Throughout her career she has compiled an own set of exercises designed to prepare the modern actor and director for the work on stage and on-camera. These exercises have become the cornerstone of her practice-oriented method, which she has been teaching throughout Europe. This series of exercises focuses on refining of new and already existing acting techniques and on optimizing the artists´ abilities beyond classical techniques and terms.
