Top 5 Acting Classes

Is your secret dream to kiss Romeo on your balcony, become the new head of the Corleone family, or maybe come back to the future with your own kick-ass Delorean?

If your lingering itch to become an actor has just gotten too irritating while you are spending your year abroad in Argentina, or if you want to enhance your travel experience by exploring the creative world of performing arts, here’s a run-down of the best acting classes in Buenos Aires.

Be it film acting or clowning, Buenos Aires has a surprisingly high number of acting schools and offers a variety of unusual classes. Our Top 5 will introduce you to the most popular and creative of those, giving you a chance to jump on the stage and explore Argentina’s artistic expertise yourself:

Film Acting – Emiliano Romero

This film acting class gets you some hands-on experience in acting for the camera. With quirky exercises and profound insights into film techniques, director Emiliano brings his experience from the set straight into the classroom, preparing you for what the film industry expects from you.

The objective of the seminar is to take full awareness of how an actor works with the camera and uses the limits of cinema to his advantage. Scenes from various films by renowned directors are reshot, giving you a truthful film acting experience. From reading the script, through the preparation of the character, preproduction, shooting and post-production, Emiliano shows you how it’s done. Every two months, a DVD with the exercises is distributed to the students. A short film including all the students is produced at the end of the course.

Emiliano Romero is an Argentine film director. In 2003, he graduated in Film Direction at the Universidad del Cine in Buenos Aires. Since then he has directed short films, fiction programs for TV, TV commercials and music clips. At the age of 31, Emiliano has won 22 awards for his films and was finalist of the pre-selection for the Academy Oscars. He has been invited to film festivals in New York, Toronto, Paris, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, México and Sao Paulo.

For more information visit www.efactuacion.com.ar.

Theatre In English – Ana O’Toole

This theatre class is perfect for English speakers who seek fun and relaxation from acting. Ana will not only give you a basic introduction to theatre, she will get you to put yourself out there, have fun with every exercise, and learn to laugh about yourself.

The beginner-level class trains and develops your creative imagination. Basic movement and pantomime exercises warm you up and give you an understanding of your own physical state throughout different activities. After the warm up, fun improvisation exercises loosen the group up, encourage experimentation and lead to a fun show for those watching the scene of their fellow students. Later on in the course, Ana works on scenes with the students and prepares them for the big final performance in front of an actual audience.

Ana O’Toole studied Direction of Opera & Musical Theater at Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires and Drama at the National Institute of Dramatic Art IUNA. In addition, she is an English professor, giving English theatre classes in schools at both primary and secondary level. As an assistant director she worked with the second cast of the opera ‘Madame Butterfly’ and was responsible for production management and assistance in various events and performances directed by the theater company Integra ART – Actors Repertory Theatre. She is currently teaching theatre at ICA (Institute of Choreography Argentina) and musical theatre for children.

For more information visit www.haceteatro.com.ar.

Physical Theatre – Claudia Quiroga

This class is highly stimulating to anyone interested in developing their capacity for theatrical, expressive movement, and truthful acting. Teacher Claudia has an extraordinary talent for showing the secrets of acting while making every exercise a fun and seemingly simple game.

The workshop aims to deepen body awareness and to give the possibility to creatively explore time, space and energy. Sensory exercises, improvisations, and individual or group experiments will teach you to ‘be’ in the moment, the number one requirement for powerful acting. The exercises inspire you to make yourself available to the play and to truthfully live the action of the scene. When working with dramatic texts, Claudia directs your focus to the life of the scene, rather than to the words in the text. Relaxation and physical exercises include the creative use of objects.

This class is full of fun, creativity, surprises and challenges. You will learn how to relax, be yourself, explore your potential and enter fiction truthfully.

Claudia Quiroga is an actress, teacher, author and director. She graduated from the Municipal School of Dramatic Art and has been an acting teacher for over 20 years. She is a teacher of Corporal Expression at the National Institute of Dramatic Art (IUNA) and the director for adult theater workshops at Ricardo Rojas. Moreover, she is part of the acting duo ‘The White Girls’ (www.laschicasdeblanco.com.ar). Besides many other shows, she directed “Bitter almonds”, “Fear and misery in the early Franco” and “The age of the plum,” at CELCIT, where she currently offers her physical theatre class.

For more information visit www.celcit.org.ar.

Clown Class – Marina Barbera

This cheerful and demanding clown class will open the door behind which your hidden clown personality is waiting to burst free. Marina does not only make sure that each class is funny and entertaining, she also teaches the craft behind the art of clowning.

The class starts with a warm up that will awaken your body, your imagination, and your vulnerability—the prerequisite for being a truly creative and interesting clown. Constant communication with your partner and the outside world is encouraged. The warm up exercises make you loosen up, go crazy, get stupid, and have a lot of fun.

After that, the red nose is put on and the spectacle starts: fun improvisations teach you to follow your impulses and to throw yourself into situations of uncertainty and confusion, despite the positive nature of the clown. You discover the beauty of your own imperfections, laugh out loud and get desperate with and in front of your audience. At the end of the class, the improvisations are analysed in the group to assure a maximum learning outcome for each student.

Marina Barbera has been a clown teacher for 12 years. She studied the art of clowning with Cristina Martí, Guillermo Angelelli and Cham Gabriel Buendia. Her 2007 show “Parece ser que me fui” premiered at the International Clown Festival of Andorra. Since 2003 she has been a member of the clown group ‘Los Papota Payasos’, with which she travelled to Europe to participate in festivals such as the Festival di strada degli artist in Sora, Italy, Festiclown in Galicia, and the International Clown Festival in Madrid.

For more information visit www.noavestruz.com.ar.

The Actor and the Mask – Marcelo Savignone

This masquerade class is a creative approach to the art of acting and will teach you how to convey your feelings when your face is hidden behind a mask. The body becomes your tool and you learn to use it efficiently. Marcelo uses the mask to show you how to create characters in different ways and physical extremes, opening a more amplified world of character development to you.

Marcelo’s one hour warm up will definitely make you move – he wants his students to be receptive and react quickly to any imaginary game he proposes. There is not much time left to think – receive, react, be flexible and move on is the theme of the warm up. The second part of the class focuses on the artistic use of masks, giving the actor an understanding of his expressive possibilities. Marcelo detects your physical restraints and trains your body step-by-step to express what you had planned to project in your mind. A nice plus is the one-hour yoga class right before the acting class starts.

This class is appropriate for you if you already have theatre experience. It is not so much for exploring your imagination as it is for connecting your imagination with your body and physically reacting to the incentives given on stage.

Marecelo Savignone is an Argentine director and actor. He has taught since 1998, giving seminars and workshops in Spain, Peru, Colombia, Chile, England, and Germany. In 2004, he received a scholarship to specialize in Melodrama, Grotesque Theatre and Pedagogy from the director of the Lecoq School in London. Since 2001, he has worked as an actor and director in the following productions: The Wait, Mojiganga, El Comeclavos, In Sync, Felis, Flight, Luck or Alive. He traveled to Indonesia in 2002 in search of Balinese masks to refine and deepen the interpretive work for the play Mojiganga.

For more information visit www.marcelosavignone.com.