about John Markland
The focus of my approach to acting, is personalization and unblocking of emotional walls.
What is that?
If you are feeling stagnant or blocked in an area of your life, relationship, or work and are not growing as free as you would like, then these are the areas I ask you to dig in, expose and reintegrate with/through your character. These places often have the richest soil even though it may feel the opposite. I want you to feel bold and instinctive in your choices, feeling the work from a personal place rather than an external goal orientated one. The destination is original work with risk taking from authentic intentions.
You will gradually feel your work move beyond a performance and into an experience.
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“STATE OF PLAY”
John approaches the work, and artists, with a sincere belief; there is no separation between life and art. Our personal evolution, as a human beings, is intrinsically connected to the development of our art. This symbiotic relationship allows experiences from life to enrich our art and discoveries through our art to further our self-awareness.
Children explore and discover themselves and their world through play. It is a form of translation between the conscious and unconscious - the Ying and Yang. Perhaps, undivided, in the earliest stages, our consciousness separates and continues to grow apart as we age. So, as wounded healers, as storytellers, imagining metaphorical, symbolic worlds and birthing them into reality, we must some how encourage that state of communion our conscious and unconscious mind once had. The two minds must dance, and dance in balance, for then magic happens, paths clear, faith rises and our art transcends, allowing our humanity to connect to others.
Another way of looking at it, we are fragmented selves and our goal is to become whole. This suggests the process of reunification itself is fragmented or interdisciplinary. Body, breath, psychology, emotions and dreams are all strands of a web we must weave. The pains, shames, self-sabotaging, addictions, deceits and many of the darker wounds we carry could be said to be the side effects of this fragmentation. Allowing, forgiving, exposing, acknowledging, accepting and expressing therefore would be part of the healing necessary to re-integrate.
This approach to living and acting is not just restorative; it’s redemptive.
We rediscover a State of Play.
Current workshops/classes
AUDITIONS: TASKS
An audition is an opportunity to enhance and evolve your craft while demonstrating the level and range of your work to a casting director. You want to dissolve the false belief it is to get a job. Fact: you could deliver the best audition the casting director has ever witnessed, making them laugh and cry from their hearts but you are too tall, have blue eyes, remind the director of his ex-wife, cologne is too strong, have big hands, look like the lead’s sibling, voice bit too high. etc. etc. You do not control being right for a role.
LA
Characters From Songs
Music has our soul… it can dial directly into our hearts, guts, and imagination. And yet, when we build characters or pull-on heroes or idols they are always from film or tv and for some who still read – books. There are characters born of songs that have been etched into the fabric of our culture, ones that we want to fall in love with, others who we want to be and some who we already are
ONLINE
SOMATIC CHARACTER EMBODIMENT
Muscle memory; as actors we hear this a lot, and occasionally experience the magic of it. Emotional immersion is similar but with feelings and intuition. Sometimes when you experience this you “get lost in the scene” the separation between you and you character dissolves and after, it may feel as if you “blacked out”. Somatic. Character Embodiment is the joining of these two processes.
WORKSHOP
“A number of the younger dream work practitioners, such as Elizabeth Kemp, Kim Gillingham, Dana Wheeler-Nicholson, and actor/director John Markland...as well as Sandra’s daughter and fellow acting coach, Greta, all claim Seacat as their mentor.”
