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●Master Class On Respect For Acting by Uta Hagen.
Uta Hagen was an acting teacher and a Broadway actor who developed an acting technique built on Stanislavsky’s System.
At the tender age of 18, Hagen-born in Germany but raised stateside-made her Broadway debut in Anton Chekhov’s “The Seagull.” Her portrayal of Nina had critics raving, and it became clear that the teen would leave a mark on American theater. Thrust into the Broadway big leagues, Hagen was forced to develop techniques to perform Chekhov’s famously subtext-heavy writing. This experience gave Hagen the confidence to codify her technique for conveying natural behavior onstage.
Hagen played some of the most iconic roles during the golden age of American theater. Her best-known roles include the title role in “Saint Joan,” Blanche DuBois in “A Streetcar Named Desire,” Desdemona in “Othello,” and Martha in the premiere of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” If it weren’t for McCarthyism and Hagen’s unjust ensnarement in the Red Scare, she likely would’ve taken Hollywood by storm. But because of the Los Angeles blacklisting, she remained in New York and became a fixture on stage.
In 1947 she began teaching at her husband’s acting studio, the Herbert Berghof Studio, which still teaches her techniques today. She was awarded several Tony awards for her acting and a National Medal of Honor for the Arts for her contributions to American theater. She died in 2004.
What is Uta Hagen’s acting technique?
Hagen’s acting techniques encourage actors to avoid over-intellectualizing their processes and instead root themselves in rigorous observation of daily life. The five key elements of Hagen’s technique are substitution, transference, specificity, authenticity, and preparation. We break each one down below:
Substitution: Hagen’s substitution is a variation of emotional recall. But unlike Strasberg’s Method, which asks actors to mentally recreate the emotional conditions of their lives onstage, Hagen’s technique focuses on pinpointing moments where activities or sensations from an actor's lived experience intersect with the scene at hand. For Hagen, substitution is more about the actor convincingly putting themselves in the circumstances of the performance, rather than importing their own life’s defining moments into their work.
Transference: The actor’s duty, according to Hagen, is to find their relationship to the character based on their own experience and perspective-a process she terms “transference.” Hagen is also very clear that an actor should never substitute circumstances on stage that they’re uncomfortable talking about or exploring publicly.
Specificity: Hagen taught that an actor knows what to do and how to behave on stage by interacting with objects that would realistically be in the environment of the scene. Hagen insisted actors rehearse with the specific props that they would use in the final performance and visualize specific objects when looking at blank walls or into the audience.
Authenticity: In her studio, Hagen pestered students to fully utilize props, costumes, or even architectural features of the venue to motivate authentic action. During scene work, Hagen’s students always had a pile of props and furniture on the stage because it was their relationship to objects that manifested in naturalistic behavior.
Preparation: Hagen asserted that developing authentic behavior and performing a role fluently requires rehearsal. She believed that a two-minute exercise based on an actor’s life required at least an hour of rehearsal. Hagen created a series of exercises to help actors observe human behavior and recreate it on stage to assist with preparation.
Hagen’s technique is a favorite among actors because it’s a middle ground between internal (representational) and external (presentational) work. These methods are also helpful for actors who wish to be self-sufficient or maintain autonomy in their training process. Before Hagen ever gave critiques to actors, she asked how they felt after their performances and if anything felt unusual or off. This gave the actors a voice in how their performances were interpreted and also reinforced skills of self-observation and reflection-which Hagen insisted were paramount to develop for a professional working actor.
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