Christopher Niess

Essence to Action: an Actor's Developmental Journey into Process Christopher Niess

Graduate and professional actor training provide countless hours in exercises designed to improve acting skill. However an artist?s education seeks to accumulate a personal definition of what exactly it is that we do onstage as actors, and by what individual process we arrive at a performance. Essence to Action chronicles the development of an actor?s process through three roles, and finishes with the discovery in rehearsal and in performance of the all-important dynamic between an ensemble and the individual performer. Within this monograph the transformation is documented that takes place on the way to performance and examines how resolving issues of trust and control are essential to that transformation.