www.carolfoxprescott.com

 

 

Coming soon: 1 week intensive workshop with Carol Fow Prescott in Paris

 

 

Carol has worked in the professional theater as actress, director and teacher for close to forty years. She was taught acting by such masters as Robert Lewis, Morris Carnovsky, Charles Nelson Reilly, Joshua Shelley and Michael Moriarty. As an actress she played featured and leading roles in New York, National Touring Companies and Regional Theaters throughout the country. Her roles included such varied characters as Tzeitle in A Fiddler On The Roof with Zero Mostel and again with Luther Adler, Agnes Nolan in George M! with Mickey Rooney, Catherine in Pippin, directed by Bob Fosse and Guitele in The Rothschilds,  opposite Hal Linden. She appeared as Kate in Shakespeare's The Taming Of The Shrew and Celia in "AsYou Like It" as well as the title role in Ibsen's Hedda Gabbler. She was standby for Ellen Burstyn on Broadway in "Sacrilege" and performance consultant for Eve Ensler on her Broadway Show, "The Good Body". She has directed award winning productions of David Mamet's A Life In The Theater, Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet and Ibsen's A Doll's House.

Her teaching career began with a nine year tenure at The American Academy of Dramatic Arts and Five years at the T. Schreiber Studio in New York City after which she created her own studio.

From an interview with Carol:

" I didn't have what I would call a mentor, but I certainly had influences. Why I say I didn't have a mentor is that where I had professional relationships, they never passed beyond the classroom. It may simply have been because I was very shy when I was young, and I got what I could and snuck away with it.

Peter Brook had a tremendous impact on me. From his work, from his productions, from his books, and from hearing him talk. Morris Carnovsky was an enormous influence on me. I spent a summer when I was in college at the American Shakespeare Festival and was with him and watched him work. He made me realize clearly, in no uncertain terms, when I was twenty years old, that he never became the character. I sat there in his living room and watched him literally transform himself in just talking about different characters, and when I commented on that, he got very upset and said, "I'm not a different person. It's just what I do that looks different." So, I count that as my first real acting lesson, because I really got it.

When I got out of school, I worked with two people who were my primary acting teachers. One was a guy named Joshua Shelly, who was a group theater person and then was blacklisted in the early fifties, so he never had the kind of career that the other people had. He was a wonderful teacher. And I worked with Charles Nelson Reilly at the HB Studio because I was a singer. And so I have this kind of traditional method training on one side with Josh, and I had this buoyant, exuberant, thrilling, based on nothing but, "Are you enjoying yourself?" training with Charlie. I worked with Bobby Lewis for a while, and that was very wonderful, too. And then the other big influence was Michael Moriart, who was the first person that I heard say, "It's all in the breath."

By that time, I had been teaching a few years already. I was acting and teaching, and I was basically teaching everything that I had been taught, and sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn't. I don't have a good memory — I don't remember my childhood very well, and so you know, in emotional memory exercises, I was lost. It never meant anything.

Then, I did a scene and just worked on noticing where the tension was coming from and relaxing it. And that was my total point of focus. And you know, that was the best work I did up until that point.

And I never understood what that was. Interestingly, as a singer, I had much more access to my emotional instrument, and in a very easy way, than I did in my early acting training. And I couldn't understand it, and nobody could explain it to me. It was such a bleak discomfort for me. And I realized many years later that it was because I was breathing kind of funny. It was that simple. But we didn't know. Nobody knew.

So there's something about my experience back then that I have come to find out kinesthetically. I don't necessarily experience visually. I don't necessarily experience literally. So I had to go about finding a way of working that fit the way I learn. And now in my teaching, I'm very mindful of how people learn, so that I can adjust what I'm doing. The easiest people to teach, of course, are the people who receive things the way I do. The challenge is, when somebody is very literal or visual, to find ways of translating what I do so that they get it.

I teach a method of acting based on breathing, awareness and joy. If you're having a good time, it's very likely that everybody else is too. And that's all there is to it. I teach mixed level classes, so that in any given class, I'll have people who are beginning actors, people who are more experienced actors but who are beginning with me, people who have been with me for a long time, as well as people who are working and then come back to class when they're in town.

My classes are four hours long. The first hour or so is a warm-up exercise. It's a physical vocal/breathing . warm-up, and within it, it contains the seeds of all the concepts that I work with. Then I'll do an exercise that gives people the experience of working with the breath without the pressure of text. It's all group work; everybody's doing it. And it's very simple work. The problem with learning it is that it's so simple that people want to complicate it. The only thing that is difficult about it is that the breath is a very direct route into very deep emotional responses. I think of it like learning how to ride a bucking bronco: For some people, when the feelings come up really intensely, they're home free. But for other people, they need to learn how to move with that energy rather than sitting on it and going up into their heads and trying to make it right.

As a teacher, I think my strongest suit is how much I love to teach, and it's always a surprise to me. I can walk into class feeling like the whole world is falling in on me and find myself— in a moment — blissful. So I don't know where that comes from, but I'm very grateful for it. I think I have the ability to listen so that I can address each person very specifically. I love acting, and I think that's the reason I focused on teaching, because it's the ideal world of acting that really turns me on.

I try to create a learning environment that is as safe as possible. I can be tough. I can be very demanding, but I make sure that before I do that, there's a safe, loving environment from which to learn. My first choice is always to be as gentle as possible, to get people laughing a lot. I've had experience with put-down teachers and dangerous teachers, and I work very hard to create a healthy environment. When I give the students feedback, I make it's positive and that I am teaching what works, because people know what doesn't work. People know when they don't feel right. So I find that the safer I can create the environment, the harder that I can be, and people seem to appreciate that.

This is not one of the traditional techniques. It is simply a useable, tangible, delicious acting technique that works. I had a conversation with a woman recently who's a student at the Strasberg Institute, and she asked all these questions about my work, and I was talking and talking, and she was really probing, and then she finally said to me, "So, what technique do you use?" So I said, "What are you, the method police?" So I think there's a part of me that keeps expecting the method police to come and close me down. But I love this work, and it works, and it's very exciting when it works. So I guess if anything, it's not just who I am and how I do it, but that this is a very reliable, tangible, body-based technique that I can take with me anywhere.

I like to work with passionate students, people who have to act. I don't care about the rest. I don't care how old they are or how experienced or inexperienced they are or anything. People who really want to do it are the people that I want to work with. If the passion is there, the instrument is there. I really believe that."