<p>In the classes in Ithaca’s acting curriculum, do they emphasize truth in acting and being natural, with Stanislavkian objectives or other systems like that? When I look at the picture galleries of productions posted on the website, the productions definitely look fantastic and the actors seem to be very in character and involved with what they’re doing, and have the right movements and gestures. However, to me, no matter what the production is that I look at, the actors don’t seem to be acting so that their actions and emotions onstage come out naturally out of the given circumstances and objectives. While they seem very intense, it also seems like they’re doing, frankly, a sophisticated, better form of mugging, instead of being truthful. I know that there are many different styles of acting required for plays, and the acting in a farce may have to be more heightened and stylized than acting in a naturalistic Chekov drama. However, when I compare these photo galleries to others such as at Carnegie Mellon or University of Michigan, I don’t get the same impression, and even when the play is a crazy absurdist comedy, the actors still seem, even with the stylization, somewhat grounded in truthful emotion. Is this just maybe due to when the photographer was taking pictures, he/she asked them to maybe get into positions onstage in different scenes and “pose” in whatever spots they were in, so it’s not like they were in the middle of the scene going through it fully in character? I don’t want to offend anybody, I just wanted to hear what people involved in the program had to say.</p>