Robert Epstein started his acting career in grade school in the boroughs
of New
York, taking on a number of roles, and he continued to perform in High
School and
College. Throughout his life, he explored various creative disciplines,
writing
over 2,000 published and unpublished poems, and exploring jazz saxophone
and other
musical forms and instruments both in and out of bands. His involvement
with jazz
gave him a profound interest in improvisation, which he also applied to
poetry and
drama. He also developed a profound interest in Eastern philosophy,
particularly
Zen, and studied T'ai Chi Ch'uan, yoga and other Asian disciplines.
After
graduating
from college with a degree in philosophy, Robert made his way back to
New York,
and focused on his interest in performance. He studied Mime with
Paul Curtis
at the American Mime Theatre for two years, and then began pursuing his
interest
in Meisner Technique to gain a more complete grasp of acting. During
this period
Robert also studied classical singing with a special focus on German
Lieder.
Robert studied various aspects of Meisner with a total of four teachers
over a
period of eight years, including Martha Jacobs, Rick Wessler and Tim
Phillips. Tim
Phillips's professional class went beyond basic technical training and
focused on
the development of monologues, cold reading technique, and prepared
scenes.
During this period Robert developed two wings of his own work, teaching
basic
acting classes and also working with clients and groups using techniques
of
Iyengar style yoga and therapeutic massage. Robert was offered a job
teaching an
introductory program for the Discovery Center in New York. It was taught in a
bare office space in midtown Manhattan. Students who graduated this two-weekend
program requested further lessons and the Robert Epstein Acting Studio
was born.
Robert rented various spaces in New York as his student body grew and
demanded
more lessons, and eventually, in New York fashion, he created a
permanent studio
in a large Manhattan apartment with a view of the sunset over the Hudson.
After a
number of years, during which he married, Robert relocated to to Washington,
D.C.
several months before his child was born. Here, he made the actor's
training his
sole professional focus, as he was devoting many hours each day to the
care and
feeding of his daughter. Today, Robert teaches his long-term training
program, The
Complete Meisner-Based Actor's Training for Stage, Film and TV, to four
or five
groups a week, teaches private lessons to such diverse students as actors, voice-over
artists, stand-up comedians, and business professionals,
and
produces one-day workshops in various acting themes for both the SAG/AFTRA
Conservatory in D.C., and The Actor's Center in Northern Virginia.
Over the
course of its 20-year evolution, Robert has molded his Meisner-based
program into
a greatly expanded and detailed version of the original technique. He
has
developed detailed units of his own, including an expanded Character
Course, a
highly detailed Classical Technique program, advanced courses in Film
and
Television Acting and series in Monologue Development and Cold Reading
Technique.
The final program in his advanced course, Acting and Spiritual
Development,
introduces a method by which actors use meditative techniques to
investigate the
source of their creative impulses within, and apply this specific
knowledge to
selecting and developing materials that they are most suited to work on
at the
present time. The course also uses this information to provide an
outline of a
customized career path for each actor, and a model for creating their
own
one-person shows.
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