Training / Workshops / Projects

My actor-training work is grounded in more than twenty years in theatre and on screen, and in fifteen years of teaching in China and, in recent years, in the UK. It takes place in conservatoires, professional rehearsal rooms and commissioned projects for theatre, film, television and the games industry.

My training centres on a single underlying problem: misalignment. This misalignment arises from four kinds of contextual break: linguistic shifts between English and Chinese, differences in cultural understanding, differences in embodied culture and the failure of training-room instruction, where implicit talk and vague wording give the body nothing clear to do. These breaks distort how training is understood, methods are altered as they are passed on and actors either cannot realise the work physically or spend years drilling the wrong thing.

My work intervenes at the source. Drawing on cross-cultural sensitivity, I identify and clarify where these misalignments occur. The solutions draw on an action-based intercultural framework that uses Western and Eastern perspectives as complementary resources, so that existing methods are adapted and further developed within new contexts. For each case I redesign the way of working and offer a specific, workable route through the material.

I work with emerging actors preparing for drama-school auditions, professional performers represented by leading agencies and screen actors working across film, television and games. Actors I have trained continue to use this approach in production, have taken leading roles on stage and screen and have gone on to study at RADA, RCSSD and other leading conservatoires, and to sign with major agencies.

At an institutional level I work structurally with drama schools and conservatoires, providing cross-cultural training design, curriculum-development consultancy and practice-based research workshops; advising on UK-China collaborations including joint programmes and shared curricula; and translating methods and terminology across contexts so that techniques developed in one setting can be adjusted and further developed in another. I also collaborate with games and other creative companies to design action-based performance frameworks for narrative and character development, working from diagnosis through design and delivery to post-project feedback.

Selected recent projects include:

Professional Coaching & Institutional Consulting – bespoke one-to-one coaching for professional theatre and screen actors; intercultural audition masterclasses; and curriculum work with Chinese conservatoires on integrating an eclectic British actor-training framework into existing programmes and contemporary Chinese practice.

Translation & Cultural Mediation & Workshops – Initiating and self-funding the end-to-end introduction of Actioning into the Chinese-speaking context, from securing rights for two key books through to translating and editing the Chinese editions with critical introductions and annotations, and embedding the work through workshops and masterclasses with conservatoires and professional companies.

Cross-Industry Training Design – Designing from scratch and leading an action-based character-development framework for a leading publicly listed global games company, taking the work from initial diagnosis through design, delivery and post-project feedback, including high-level consulting with the CEO and senior creative leadership and a cross-department training programme for more than 300 staff across narrative design, animation and performance teams.

To see how I extend this work visually in training, see Visual Approach.