Authentic, Intentional and Holistic

Ruthie Landis offers classes, workshops, and private coaching for actors engaged in theatre, on-camera, or voice-over.

Ms. Landis also works with dancers, singers, musicians, public speakers, and other performers.

  • Audition with freedom, joy, and spontaneity
  • Relieve performance anxiety by using your body as an information base – the body never lies
  • Access your authentic and charismatic “presence”
  • Learn how to be fully in the moment
  • Use the Enneagram as an essential tool for self awareness, scene analysis, and character building
  • Be free and comfortable in your body, taking “your time” and “your space”
  • Move beyond technique to inspiration to truth
  • Begin with your imagination and engage your intuition
  • Build with your “blocks”
  • Move through your resistance to infinite possibilities
  • Sense greater intimacy and trust between yourself , the character, and the text
  • Learn to focus your energy and attention.

The Enneagram for Actors and Writers: The Perfect Tool

Performance Anxiety & Body Psychotherapy

Four tracks used equally in Building The “Actor-Self”

Experiential

  • Deepening the mind/body/spirit awareness connection
  • Working with intentionality on two planes- the life scene and the play scene
  • Preparing the receptive field from which creativity and spontaneity can easily flow.

Educational / Cognitive

  • Note recommended texts
  • Reading and journaling about the essence of what you’ve read
  • Exercising the observer-self with nonjudgmental noticing: notice, then imagine, then feel.

Technique

  • Body as pliable tool
  • Intuition building
  • Imagination- asking the questions that lead to more questions
  • Visualization-environment, character building, actor/character bridging
  • Distilling the “want”, the hunger of the character
  • Playing the intention, not the obstacle
  • Video playback as learning tool.

Working with Text

  • Reading and analyzing material
  • Learning by heart
  • Embodying text, bringing to life that which is on the page
  • Choice making.

Monologues

Every monologue is a dialogue. Monologue preparation and auditioning can be a gratifying, enriching, and pleasurable discipline, one that the actor looks forward to doing. We focus on all aspects of the monologue process: selection, editing, preparation, performance, and on-going growth and learning following auditions. Actors need monologues like a carpenter needs his tools. It is optimum to have many in varying styles and genres. Each monologue is treated like a scene and emphasizes spontaneity and interaction with self, environment, and the other characters in the scene. We utilize mind/body/energy/heart work to supports the whole actor, inviting greater awareness, creativity, and safety for the actor.

General Scene Work

We invite the actor to explore the process of scene work on many levels: character development, being fully present in the moment, receiving before responding, text analysis, organic blocking, and response from an authentic impulse. The Enneagram is an essential support tool for all of the above.

About Ruthie Landis

Ruthie Landis has been a prominent acting coach and participant in the U.S. acting community for more than twenty years, teaching, directing, writing, and acting. She has worked at such theatres in Chicago as Steppenwolf, Goodman, Court, Victory Gardens, Apollo, Next, City Lit, and Novel Ventures. Ms. Landis has worked extensively on-camera in film and television, and in voice-over. She has taught in the university setting (Northwestern, Roosevelt, Columbia College ), at professional actor’s training centers, and has conducted workshops nationally. Her innovative approach to Acting and the Creative Process draws from her work as a certified mind/body therapist, (utilizing gestalt techniques, rooted in Feldenkrais awareness work, and Alexander Technique). Ms. Landis is a certified hypnotherapist, and Reiki Master. Her teaching encourage growth through awareness and support rather than judgment. She is a teacher of the Enneagram and is a presenter at the International Enneagram Conference- 2006.

Recommended Reading

The Power of Now by Ekhart Tolle

Point Zero Creativity Without Limits by Michelle Cassou

Kitchen Table Wisdom by Rachel Naomi Remen

The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron

The Potent Self by Moshe Feldenkrais

Gestalt Therapy Verbatim by Frederick S. Perls

Building a Character by Stanislavski

Respect for Acting by Ute Hagen

To the Actor by Michael Checkov

Audition by Michael Shurtleff

Secrets for the Film Actor by Patrick Tucker

  • The Literary Enneagram Characters from the Inside Out by Judith Searle Enneagram Movie and Video Guide Thomas Condon
  • The Wisdom of the Enneagram by Russ Hudson and Don Riso
  • Books by Meisner on the Meisner Technique
  • Books by Stella Adler
  • Acting in Film by Michael Caine