Teacher Introduction

My name is Johan Forslund, I’m a senior lecturer in acting at Luleå University of Technology and I will be your teacher in this course.

I’m an actor trained at the Neighborhood Playhouse in New York and the Stockholm Academy of Dramatic Arts and for about 12 years now I’ve been an acting teacher.

Creating this course has been an interesting challenge for me, just as I hope taking it will be for you. For some years now I’ve been thinking about what could be possible to achieve in an online course like this one. Can you really teach acting this way? Most actor’s gut reaction, I suspect, would be no. Because this is just not the way it’s done. But I’m not so sure about that. So, when this opportunity presented itself, I knew I at least had to try. And how did I do? Well, there’s really only one way to find out…

Anyway, here are some of the challenges we will face together:

The way learning usually happens in my classroom, or any acting studio, is that theoretical concepts and ideas put forth by the teacher through practical application become a physical experience for the student, i.e. learning by doing. And it is this connection between what I’m saying and what the student is experiencing that is really at the core of the work we do together. In the classroom we can work in a way that is very much like when someone explains the rules of a game and then after a while says, “ok, let’s just play a round and things will get clearer on the way”. And things usually do.

In this course we have to work a bit differently. Most importantly I strongly encourage you to really make the effort to put the concepts discussed here to the test. Both by applying them in your own work, and by trying to observe them in the work of others. And throughout the course I will continually ask you to do just that.

Ok. As far as I’m concerned, we’re in this together. So, let’s get on with it and see what we can accomplish.