TEACHING STATEMENT

My goal is to empower artists to be able to answer questions within a piece of dialogue, song or dance on their own and to not look at performing it as a nebulous, unattainable task, but rather, an objective situation that can be solved with various practices. I teach students under the mission of helping them embrace their uniqueness, to inspire others with their passion and commitment, and to leave a meaningful impact on the world by sharing their gifts. I do this by helping them channel an artist’s passion and energy into a performance where they have a fully realized creative experience. This starts with a strong technical acting foundation that I have developed as a road map for students to “think” and “do” on their own. My hope is that my students will be strong enough in this work that they will no longer need me!

I consider myself an acting teacher, who can help students express themselves as actors through all three mediums of musical theatre performance. In order to build students’ acting foundations, I work with students on inciting incidents, getting to the tone and essence of a piece, combined with strong actions, reactions, and objectives. All of this is done by engaging the student’s life experience without having them re-experience past traumas to get an emotional response.

Using some Meisner techniques, I encourage my students to always think about what change they’re trying to create in whomever they’re speaking to; this applies whether monologues are danced, spoken, or sung. I also bring a solid technical foundation in ballet, jazz, tap, and modern which has been influenced by studying under Randy Skinner, Baayork Lee, Josh Bergasse, Andy Blankenbueller, and Susan Stroman, among others. Drawing from my own experience in professional musical theatre, I am able to teach students using a holistic approach. Rather than thinking of acting, singing, and dancing as three separate skill sets, I encourage them to think of them all as means of communication. I work with many acting students who at first think dance is something they can’t or won’t do; by getting out of the headspace that dance is a seemingly unattainable skill, I’m able to teach them how to embrace singing, dancing and acting as a form of physical storytelling.