Drama Schools/Conservatories Help PLEASE!

fishbowlfreshman
Thu, 01 Dec 2016 18:02:05 +0000

@BG1693

I feel that all the 4/5 letter acronym drama schools (AADA, NYCDA, AMDA) are very similar (in teaching and price) and I don’t know if it’s worth it to pay so much money to go to one of them, or if I should go to a smaller acting school/workshop and spend my time gaining real world experience instead of 2 or how ever many years in a school.

Look at the Acting faculties at those places. I’m pretty sure they all mainly teach Meisner Technique and I’d wager that not a single teacher at any of them ever studied with Sandy Meisner or Bill Esper directly and most certainly never apprenticed under either to learn how to teach it properly which is a completely different matter than simply being trained in it. Actually, at AADA LA, the last time I checked, they were mostly graduates of a lower tier college program who teach as a survival job to sustain their ambitions for careers they’ve yet to realize themselves.

You’d be better off just studying that in the studios I named on an old thread that somebody already linked in Post #15 although I left off the Joanne Baron/D.W. Brown Studio and the Taylor School of Acting because I didn’t know anything about them at the time. I don’t know if your 529 Plan could be used for that or not although you might actually have better luck with that kind of thing at the NYC conservatories like Stella’s, Esper, and Atlantic or maybe Art of Acting in LA.

Also, I don’t want any traditional 4 year colleges or universities, I want a school solely for acting. Thank you

Then you’re kinda in the wrong place. This is College Confidential after all. You might have better luck on the Backstage.com forums or the Acting subreddit. I’ve offered up some info that I’ve gathered from different sources here, but I’m college trained myself and never studied at any of those places other than with Bob Krakower and Lesly Kahn neither of whom I’d recommend to an actor at the beginning of his journey.

Hope this helps.