The Naked Face
with David Penn
25, 26 & 27th April
‘Ingmar gave me so much with his close-ups, I came to realise that they cannot be done either by a great or a bad actor, only by one who is prepared to make their face naked’ Liv Ullmann
A transformative 3-day, small-group workshop for actors, uncovering the magic of what the lens sees beyond the naked eye. Limited to just 8 participants!
Over the course of three transformative days, David will:- Introduce the language of the lens.- Articulate what truth means in its gaze.- And, on the most alchemical level, teach the difference between merely performing… and truly creating.
Sign up today for the full three-day journey and experience the lens as you never have before
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DAVID PENN and an ETHOS
David is an award-winning director and acting coach, who’s worked in theatre, television, film and opera worldwide for over forty years. He was a resident director at Glyndebourne, the Bristol Old Vic and the Royal National Theatre, at the latter an Assistant to Harold Pinter, David Hare and Tom Stoppard. He has directed on film, tape and digital, over one hundred hours of broadcast television drama, including Howards’ Way, Coronation Street, The Bill, Brookside, Casualty and Dream Team.
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David is a visiting professor at FAMU, the legendary film academy in Prague.
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He has worked with countless actors, some of world renown, discretion dictating their anonymity here. The remarkable fact is, having engaged with the revelatory process of his Naked Face masterclasses, actors regularly declare it a life-changing experience; not only, subsequently, do they get cast more frequently, the holy grail for actors if ever there was one, but careers, on record, have opened out, sometimes spectacularly.
Something radically different is happening here.
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It’s unique, David’s enlightenment.
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The Naked Face addresses the crux of the matter. Whilst acting coaches everywhere, drama schools and academies, focus on the processes of acting, the lens of the camera quite ruthlessly gets on with exposing the self-awareness of the actor at work. Riveting magic, so rare, is something else, elusive but related directly to time, rhythm, tone and the unexpected.
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On stage, it’s an actor’s responsibility to tell the story; impossible in film, where the logic is otherwise taken care of, by everything and everyone else, from the screenplay to the staging to that ultimate edit. It is key for an actor to understand the huge significance of this but very few do; which is why we have a lot of very confused screen-actors out there.
It doesn’t have to be like that.
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Learn more about David and his work here
The Preparation: On the day, each actor needs to come with two learnt duologue scenes, not much more than a page in length. They can be from theatre or film but mustn’t be ones the actor has performed in before (resisting, too, the temptation to seek them out on YouTube). The scenes should be emotionally confrontational. It’s much the best if the actor finds his or her own but, if all else fails and that proves difficult, click on ‘Scenes’ for s
The Preparation:
On the day, each actor needs to come with two learnt duologue scenes, not much more than a page in length. They can be from theatre or film but mustn’t be ones the actor has performed in before (resisting, too, the temptation to seek them out on YouTube). The scenes should be emotionally confrontational. It’s much the best if the actor finds his or her own but, if all else fails and that proves difficult, click on ‘Scenes’ for suggestions. Hard copies must be brought along, so that another, or the other actor, can read-in the other character off-camera.
25th, 26th & 27th April​ 2025
10am to 5pm each day
Special one-time offer of €350 for all three days
at STUDIO 32, Kostelni 32, Prague 7 (Letna)
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