Learning How to Live as a Creative Person
Interview of Thurman E. Scott

“Thurman E. Scott is the inheritor of the Stanislavski legacy and of my legacy. His work advances acting technique for the next generation.”

– Stella Adler, March 20, 1990, New York City

The Actors Theatre Workshop: Special One-Week Trip to the Bay Area

Master teacher of creative process and conflict resolution Thurman E. Scott, the Artistic Director, Executive Producer, and Founder of the award-winning Actors Theatre Workshop in New York City has been invited to lecture and teach a series of classes in his powerful original creative process technique at leading Bay-area institutions, including American Conservatory Theatre and The California Institute of Integral Studies in March, 2018. Mr. Scott is an award-winning actor, writer, director and producer who uses the principles of drama to address the conflicts of the community.

We are delighted to announce that during his trip to the Bay-area,
you can attend a creative talk given by Mr. Scott – – at no charge

On March 24th at CIIS, Mr. Scott will discuss how within every nation, culture and individual lies the choice to use our creative power to either build or to destroy.

Mr. Scott will discuss how he first grappled with this choice in his own life as a young actor studying with some of the twentieth century’s greatest teachers of drama (Peggy Furey, Lee Strasberg, Sanford Meisner, Jerzy Grotowski, and his primary mentor Stella Adler), and how he constructed a life, a theatre and a legacy around his choice to always live in a creative state.

He will speak of how his journey as a professional actor and director, learning from success, failure and the struggles of everyday life, gave him deep insights about our existence as human beings, and that all humans have the possibility to create whatever their background may be. This compelled him to get involved in the world, to teach and enlighten people from all walks of life.

Speaking to the importance of theatre, art making, and creative expression in times of political and social challenges, Mr. Scott will share stories from his own creative journey, a path which includes not only numerous artistic accolades, but also time spent teaching his original drama technique in prisons, to homeless youth populations, as well as internationally in Israel and Palestine. He will explain how his choice to always live in a creative state supported the stand he took as a creative person to uplift and teach others how to find and express their own, unique individuality on their journey of life.

This evening’s discussion will be facilitated by performer, writer, and director Mark Jackson, an innovator of our local Bay Area theatre, and former core faculty member of the Theatre-Performance Making MFA at CIIS. Mark’s wide ranging directorial work includes a magnificently nimble adaptation of Hamlet (in which the cast was assigned their roles moments before curtain call), an intensely edgy production of the William S. Burroughs and Tom Waits musical, The Black Rider, as well as a number of devised theatre pieces.

As we explore some of the most difficult questions facing creative people in America today, we will also discuss tangible creative practices we can integrate into our artmaking and scholarly disciplines, so that we all leave the evening having taken a solid step, together, towards creation and illumination.