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Acting muscles get a workout photos by Jim Craven Peter Alzado leads acting students through a guided mediation Saturday during the first session in a workshop at Actor's Theatre in Talent. Theater crafts class gives students a shared experience in exploration By Bill Varble of the Mail Tribune TALENT -- Peter Alzado and Kate Sullivan walk toward each other in slow motion, taking a long minute to cover 20 feet of space. Ever so slowly, they meet with a lingering touch of fingers. The point, Alzado says, is awareness. "I've been doing this a long time," he tells the acting students gathered at Actors' Theatre in Talent. "And I'm thinking, `Gee, I hope I don't embarrass myself."' Peter Alzado tells his students that the tension or fear an actor feels on stage can be transformed into energy. Then everybody tries it, and the slow motion bodies make the room look like a Tai Chi class being held in molasses. It's the first session of a six-week workshop called "Exploring the Craft of the Actor," which has brought together nearly two dozen people, male and female, young and old, to a big room with the black walls and ceilings and theatrical lights and seats lining three sides. "It's open to everybody," Alzado says. "We'd like to build a company." Alzado, who is also an actor and director, and Sullivan, of Ashland, have worked together before (starring in A.R. Gurney's "Love Letters" in Ashland, for example). But he says no experience is necessary for the workshop. Alzado asks people what they felt in the slow-motion exercise. "Awkwardness," one says. "Keeping my mouth shut and breathing through my nose." "Kind of tense." "Like being in love." "Warmth." "I wanted to hurry." "Not blocking it out. Accepting." "It's accepting everything," Alzado says. There's no right or wrong in this exercise. Alzado stresses being aware of feelings without judging them. "It's a way of releasing tension and transforming it into energy," he says. In another exercise, students lie on the wooden floor, eyes closed, arms at their sides, as Alzado leads them in a guided meditation. They are to go to a place they imagine and hear its sounds and smell its smells. Several go to beaches. Sharon Schilling says she met a man and kissed him. "I got the feeling she wasn't telling us the whole story," another student says. "I think we all got that feeling," Alzado says. Laughter, Schilling sharing it. Alzado says increasing awareness is a never-ending process. "An actor doesn't all of a sudden know," he says. Sullivan, of Ashland, says she's done similar workshops before, and for some reason she's getting a lot out of this one. She says the hardest part is getting up in front of people. "The moment of fear is a moment I've very interested in," Alzado says. "It allows us to be expressive." People come for varying reasons. Verle "Rowdy" Yates came to acting after many years working as a logger. It took a divorce to push him into a class. "A friend said it's good therapy," he says. "And it is. It's the warmest group I've ever been around." The 62-year-old Talent resident had a role in a recent production of "To Kill a Mockingbird." Schilling says her acting fits in with earning a master's degree in teaching English at Southern Oregon University. Like Yates, she finds something communal in the theater. "It's a shared experience," she says. She's written an essay she'd like to see produced on stage. "A story can't be told without an audience," she says. The need for expression is a powerful force, Sullivan says. "In live theater you have a chance to reach out," she says. Central to today's exercises is the difference between an actor feeling that he's really in a situation versus simply giving information about a situation, Alzado says. He's borrowed concepts from his own training and from Stella Adler, the famed acting coach who contributed to the use of Konstantin Stanislavky's system (popularly called The Method). Such theories call for work on the self as well as work on the role, and for tapping into the actor's personal experience. "Something that works for one may not work for somebody else," Alzado says. "It's how the notes are played." Mail Tribune Copyright � The Mail Tribune 2000, Medford, Oregon USA