Drama Schools/Conservatories Help PLEASE!

Delegator
Sun, 20 Nov 2016 19:11:12 +0000

Your lack of experience with acting tells me that you should really approach this as a major that is POSSIBLE, but not lock yourself into acting by going to a school that has no other fields – in other words, I would strongly suggest that you look at liberal arts schools with strong acting programs.

The reason I say that is that there is a huge difference between the acting to which you have been exposed and what it takes to pursue the craft full-time. If you have never spent multiple weeks, 14 hours per day, working on a show, then you may not know what you are getting into. We actually encouraged our daughter to do just that by going to a summer theatre intensive at a college, and the results were truly informative. While she ended each long day with more energy than she began it, she had a very talented friend in the program who ended up deciding that her passion was really in music and teaching.

That’s just an example, but it is no lie when admissions counselors tell you that over half of all college students change their majors at some point. Unless you truly know that acting is something you want to pursue full time, and unless that knowledge is based on experience, you could find yourself at a place like AMDA in a year thinking, "gosh, I really like theatre but I’d really like to be TEACHING theatre and not performing…but will my credits transfer to a school that offers a theatre education program?

Based on that, some of the schools I would suggest would be NYU, Pace, Marymount Manhattan, Emerson, Syracuse, Boston University, Hofstra, Brooklyn College, Drew University, Wagner College, etc. Liberal Arts programs with extremely strong theatre departments.