Dear Actors:

Happy Holidays and New Year’s!  I look forward to all your news and wish you health, happiness and good fortune for 2025!!

ACTOR NEWS

Dan Abramovici

Dan was in my classes some years ago and then went on to the CFC program. He’s acted and directed in many projects.  Recently, he got in touch with me about his photography studio:

Callback Studios is run by Dan Abramovici, a working actor and filmmaker with a real understanding on both sides of the lens. Dan has 15+ years shooting Toronto’s performing community, and focuses on bringing out your personality from shot to shot, capturing a variety of looks to show your range.

Dan is an award-winning actor, filmmaker, and a professional photographer. With photo clients ranging from Toronto’s Second City, to CBC, and The Canadian Opera Company. An alumnus of the 2016 Canadian Film Centre’s CBC Actors Conservatory, Dan’s recent acting credits include WAYNE, Star Trek Discovery, Jubilee, and The Marsh King’s Daughter. As a director, Dan’s two most recent projects as a director are liminal and Play It Again. liminal has enjoyed a successful festival run, including playing Academy-qualifying festivals such as Raindance, HollyShorts, and DWF. It is now available to stream on CBC Gem.

He is offering my students 20% off all photo packages at www.callbackheadshots.com

INSPIRATIONS

I recently borrowed Al Pacino’s memoir – as an audiobook.  It is such an enjoyable listen!  His narration is like his acting – alive and spontaneous; it’s like he’s talking to you as a friend.  I’ve come to understand what a committed artist he is in his ongoing need to be nourished by this art we all love.  His career spans the great (and not great) films you might have seen.  But he constantly works on plays – and organizes productions and play readings. I am also inspired by his love of Shakespeare.  He’s performed in multiple productions of Richard III; in 2004 he was Shylock in a film version and then in 2010 he appeared in the same role in Shakespeare in the Park and then on Broadway. 

After that, I watched ‘Looking For Richard’ – his self-financed, labor-of-love-docu-drama about rehearsing Shakespeare’s Richard the III.  It has an incredible cast of American actors with many inserts of famous British actors and Shakespearean experts.  There’s also a lot of humour and passion as they tackle this difficult play.  I highly recommend it.

This is one of my favourite quotations where he’s talking about his dream of performing:

…’ Night after night, I’d show up, go on that stage and say: tonight, I will play this role, and I will play it without knowing what I will do next.  I will say my lines and not know what the other actor is saying next, and the words will come out spontaneously.  I will perform moment to moment.  I will be alive and ready to engage in that kind of environment.  This was going to change my deliveries and get the nerves and the body and sinews to open up to life – almost like improvisation, only with the great words of Shakespeare.  I failed at that, but that was my reach, and that’s what made the fails so exciting.  Will I make it?  Will I get there? Will I be able to get to the place where I was the night before when I got a standing ovation?  Can I get it again?  It’s all challenge, challenge, challenge, and that’s why I love the theater.  It’s all in your control and you’ve got the ball.  I can’t say that I made it, but here and there it brought a different kind of life to the part. … It’s something else out there on that stage … To think, wow, I got there a couple of times in my life – I came close to the Holy Grail.’

 So inspiring!!!  That’s really what we work on in class and hopefully bring to all of our work!

 Now he wants to work on King Lear!  

Speaking of theatre, I just saw Big Stuff with my husband and was so moved! It’s the best theatre I’ve seen in Toronto in quite some time. The show is everything theatre should be: by sharing the actors’ and audience’s personal stories there’s a sense of community, communion and catharsis. It very much has to do with events and people remembered through objects and our senses; this very Proustian sensibility is the basis for actor’s Sense Memory exercises – especially the Private Object Exercise!  It’s too late to see it this year, but hopefully they’ll remount it!

If you have some time over the holidays, watch my most recent short – Magic Madeleines.

It’s a Magic Realism Fairy Tale about connecting to our childhood – and has a lot to do with Sense Memory as well. My co-producer, Sera-Lys McArthur and I have written the feature version and are pitching it to various production houses – we’ll see!

ABCs of acting inspirational thoughts

Here’s the last section of my ABCs of acting inspirational thoughts – the final quotation (one of my favourites), is perfect for a New Year’s inspirational Meditation!