Fusion Technique

At various times in the calendar year, Alex Murphy offers a Fusion Technique with Short Play Production workshop at Mulholland Academy in Amsterdam. Fusion Technique is for intermediate/advanced level actors -admittance based on an audition and an interview.

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Why Fusion Technique?

It has been said, “success leaves clues.” Very few successful actors today have relied on a single technique of acting-one way of working to get them and then keep them at the peak of their abilities- making it possible to deliver, on demand, a rich and very watchable level of performance on stage or camera.

Fusion practice employs a collage of world-class actor techniques to get you there: Stanislavsky, Meisner Technique, Practical Aesthetics, Stella Adler, and Second City Improvisation technique. And then add to that distinct, challenging, playful stage performance project goals for each cycle of Fusion workshop.

Fusion Technique for Actors offers a multi-layered, cross-training approach as precisely the way to work.

Among all best teachers and directors anywhere in the world, listen closely, and what you will hear among the most viable, practical, playable voices, there is a unity, a relativity to the creative goals each have-in their own way- for the actor. There may be different ways of articulating the goals, different exercises -as many different ways as there are good teachers/directors. In the end, all the good directors and acting mentors will be essentially urging you toward refining, reviewing, and then revisiting a handful of universal practices for the rest of your creative life.

The Fusion Technique programming for actors, as curated, devised by Alex Murphy, it has evolved over thousands of hours of classes and workshops, through trial and error. And, most certainly, it honors and then draws from the thinking, practice, and experimentation of numerous, seminal actor trainers of the modern era. Over the years, via his own acting experience, directing, and teaching, Alex has observed that by explicitly blending disparate but somehow relative training techniques over a patient, focused period of time, a kind of an expedited grip on the ability to be “precise, well read, and very relaxed” takes hold for the actor. As “cross-training” is to athletes, Fusion Technique for the actor seeks to develop long term core flexibility by offering the actor a chance to actively apply the best, most playable contemporary, classical actor training perspective to their preparation and rehearsal process, while also leaping continually into playful, focused, asymmetric presentational challenges. And finally, by doing what it takes to ready and then perform text for a live audience-live stage performance and “final cut” on-camera act challenges being an essential component of Fusion training. Alex has come to believe, firmly, that the Fusion Technique’s approach over time feeds into an actor’s sturdy ability to subjectively “hold the mirror up to nature” in any kind of role, for any performance genre.

Thus..Fusion Technique for Actors becomes, in and of itself, a way of working.

As a stand alone practice, The Fusion Technique workshop series recognizes that many actors, with limited time, they are struggling to keep the skills sharpened, evolving, while, at the same time, they may be working “survival” jobs and/or studying to obtain a formal academic degree, and often, additionally - some actors also may have steady family commitments to maintain. Time and finances are limited for many talented actors to workout with more than one of the act disciplines that intrigue them. In an intensive workshop setting, or, for on-going weekly series of classes- Fusion Technique by design actually offers an actor the opportunity to experiment with finding their way of working by putting into practice -specifically- the synergy of multiple act techniques.

Alex Murphy has been conducting classes for years exclusively rooted in Meisner and Stanislavsky techniques , Stella Adler principles, the relatively new Practical Aesthetics methodology, Acting for the Camera technique, and Second City Improvisational technique. Presently, he teaches the Fusion Technique w/Short Play Production series of workshops regularly in Amsterdam, Netherlands with Mulholland Academy, and privately, with gogoHeart Film and Stage for International workshops.

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Act Technique ethos- gogoHeart Film and Stage.

“The real benefit of actors 'technique' is a very slow cook..absorb its virtues, its essence, its scent.. then forget it.”

Technique was never necessarily meant to teach you how to act. It is there to activate, to refine..it is to be used when you’re stuck, flat, off the mark, and significantly, when you are not serving the “original intention” of the writer’s script-you will have such days. Technique is there to to get you asking good questions, experimenting - which will activate choices you make in rehearsal and performance. Paradoxically, the road to the cold dead place that is mediocrity is littered with skilled smarty pants act technicians. Act technique in the the service of genuine, spontaneous, very human acting is another thing. “The prize is in the subjective.” It is what we all wait for.

Improvising, remaining spontaneous while working with text and playing the role-making that leap as honestly and impulsively as you can - your take on the world at that moment-using no more, no less than is needed, and then doing this as much as possible, with ebullience and an open heart - because you WANT to do so.  This, I believe, is the surest way for actors to perform for the stage or the camera in a way that will linger in the mind and the heart of any audience. - Alex Murphy

“Learn to ask: what does the character in the script want? What does he do to get it? What is that like in my experience?..Every scene should be able to answer these three questions: “Who wants what from whom? What happens if they don’t get it? Why now?” -David Mamet

“You're always playing yourself. It's all autobiography, whatever you're doing. It's using them as a kind of prism through which to throw something real about yourself, or something relaxed at least. Because the last thing you want is to look like you're acting.”  -Tilda Swinton

Your acting will not be good until it is only yours..you work until nobody is acting like you. -Sanford Meisner