Meditation for Actors
Essential Inner Tools
About the Course
Drawing from the meditative tradition, this program is for actors who want to break through to a new level of emotive availability and personal truth. In this weekend intensive, you'll practice a variety of approachable yet potent techniques that will help you access and release your creative energy, find fluidity when feeling blocked or nervous, and audition and perform with freedom and confidence.
Meditation practice helps us become centered, connecting us to our heart and to the present moment. We become familiar and comfortable with the huge range of emotions within us so that we can access them fully, freely, and spontaneously. The basis of this program is the practice of mindfulness and awareness meditation. With that foundation, you’ll engage in a variety of unique exercises you won’t find in other actor training. You’ll cultivate bodily, spatial, and
energetic awareness, working with the intense energy that arises in performance and strengthening your presence and ability to take the stage and fully inhabit the space. You’ll also learn a powerful antidote to audition nerves and stage fright: a simple on-the-spot practice that connects you to an inner source of genuine confidence. At its heart, this work is about connecting with yourself. The deeper you go within, the more you can bring forth what is already inside you.
Whether you have years of experience or are new to meditation—or even if you’ve thought you “can’t meditate”—this two-day workshop will provide practical tools that support and enhance your work as an actor.
Questions? Go to meditationforactors.com or write medforactors@gmail.com.
About the Teacher
Parlan McGaw (AEA SAG-AFTRA) has been helping others to explore the creative interplay between acting and meditation since 2005, when he codirected the first of two weeklong retreats for actors with master teacher Michael Howard at Karme Choling Meditation Center in Vermont. He has since taught Meditation for Actors at Villanova University, the Michael Chekhov Acting Studio in New York, and the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival, Shantigar Foundation, and the Michael Howard Studios in New York. A meditation instructor in the Shambhala tradition, Parlan has acted with the New York Shakespeare Festival, the Old Globe Theatre, Virginia Stage Company, and other theatres in New York and regionally, and he made his film debut back in 1991 with Todd Haynes’s "Poison."