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THE PROFESSIONAL ACTORS LAB

The Professional Actors Lab is Canada's largest independent training studio for professional actors and is located at 72 Stafford, in the Niagara neighborhood  of Toronto. Founded in 2003 by Artistic Director David Rotenberg The Lab has branches in Stratford Ontario, Vancouver BC and Los Angeles, California and provides training for actors focused on working in film, television and the theater. It is best known for refining and teaching the "Rotenberg System" a unique approach developed by David Rotenberg. At The Lab, actors work together to develop their skills in a private environment where they can take risks as performers without the pressure of industry expectations.

HISTORY

Founded in 2003 by Artistic Director David Rotenberg, The Professional Actors Lab concepts and exercises Originated at Equity's Showcase Theatre's Acting For On Camera Class in the early 1990's and eventually evolved into an on camera intensive program held at the St Anne's Parrish Hall in Toronto's west end.

DAVID ROTENBERG, Artistic Director

David Rotenberg has been master acting teacher for over 25 years and has directed on Broadway, in major regional theaters, and for television. Born and raised in Toronto, he started out as a director after earning a masters in directing from the Yale School of Drama and returned to the city in 1987 after living in the United States for the better part of sixteen years. He set up the acting program at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia and taught there before returning to Toronto to teach in the Graduate Acting program at York University where he began to implement the concepts and techniques that are central to the training at The Professional Actors Lab.

CONCEPTS CENTRAL TO THE UNIQUE TRAINING AT THE PRO ACTORS LAB:

1 The ultimate need to be present in order to act at all

2 The use of primary states of being vs secondary states of being

3 The concept of "swing"

4 Icons and their use

5 Character Modifiers

6 Action Modifiers

7 The use of "drivers" vs "stakes play"

8 Drone notes

9 Crie de coeur

10 Keying - states of being, places, people, concrete nouns

11 The Division of States Of Being from Actions

12 Leading Actor modifiers

13 Use of behavior in playing seconds and thirds

14 The primacy of being compelling in all acting choices rather than being "right" without the need to be eccentric

15 Acting is about selecting not pretending

PHILOSOPHY:

The Professional Actor’s Lab philosophical approach to training actors is most accurately expressed and most easily recognized as "cinematic naturalism". Borrowing heavily from Emile Zola's earliest influence on silent films and on the literary term August Strindberg defines in the foreword to "Miss Julie", Naturalism is “a style of acting that attempts to recreate the impression of reality by seeking complete identification with the role”. As advocated by Stanislavsky, naturalistic role play, from a working actor's perspective, is used within performance to reveal to the audience how an event would be experienced in real life. In order to achieve this "complete identification", actors at the Lab are encouraged to identify and excavate authentic material from their own experience through exercises based on the techniques and terminology developed over the past two decades by David Rotenberg.

NOTABLE ALUMNI:

The list of successful working film, television and theatre actors who have trained at the Lab is easily the longest, most extensive in Canada and includes Rachel Macadams, Scott Speedman, Tatania Maslany, Kristian Braun, Erin Karpaluk, Jonas Cherniak, James McGowan, David Hirsch, Amanda Tapping, Mike Filipiwhich, Polly Shannon, Sarah Gordon, Shawn Doyle, Demore Barnes, Carrie-Lynn Neales, Ennis Esmer, K'Naan,