RESEARCH

Our aim is to continually develop our acting methods.

Collectively, the board of directors and the core faculty at CISPA represent many decades of performing, directing and teaching. As a central tenet of our education, these teachers (of acting technique, singing, voice, dance, movement psychology, scene study, applied theatre history, rhetoric, theatre and performance studies, etc.) work closely together across their disciplines.
Embracing different methodological traditions, that constructively challenge each other, we’ve aimed at finding a common terminology and creating cross-disciplinary continuity and coherency for the students.

Anchored in a solid sense of tradition and years of experience, our aim therefore is to continually develop our acting methods practically and theoretically in what we’ve coined Contemporary Method Acting. This practice research is constantly assessed and further developed both in the daily practice, in collaboration with students and other teachers, in teachers’ seminars, and not least by CISPA being an active part of an extensive international network of performing arts practitioners and researchers who exchange and collaborate in projects, conferences, workshops, et cetera, benefitting teachers, directors and students alike.

Similarly, this practice-research approach is taught to and implemented with CISPA students in a holistic training that, at all stages, facilitates both practice (physical doing/action), theoretical perspectivation, and embodied reflection. Different modes of theoretical reflection are taught, covering both analytical scrutiny and discourse (without academic airs) and more intuitive, stream of consciousness techniques. Embodied reflection, meanwhile, refers to the student’s processing of new insights accessed through practice, assimilating them with existing insights, faculties, skills, knowledge, experiences, ideas, and values, both conscious and unconscious, and in turn letting this reflection inform and advance further practice. All told then, this practiceresearch model empowers the practitioner to “bring together action and reflection, theory
and practice, in participation with others, in the pursuit of practical solutions to issues of pressing concern to people, and more generally the flourishing of individual persons and their communities.”

Fittingly, one of the two major exams at the end of the 3rd Year (the other being the Graduation Performance) is the Lecture Performance, which is a type of performance that goes beyond the conventions of artistic expression by fusing the knowledge sharing of the lecture format with aspects of performance and of visual and other media disciplines, applying learned knowledge and experience to a live presentation which benefits didactically both the group and one’s self.

This format, like the whole of the CISPA training, explores the relations between art and knowledge, between art and research, and between art and forms of communication and/or dissemination.