By Kate Alexander, Associate Director, Florida Studio Theatre and Founder of the FST Theatre School

In our relationships with other people we all seek and often assume a mutual basis of truth in our communications with each other.  As coaches, counselors, consultants, therapists, health providers and human resources people (among others), finding ways to express ourselves authentically and truthfully and to evoke the same in our clients can be challenging.

Similarly, in the world of professional theatre, actors seek to find ways to embody their characters’ lives and experiences in such an authentic way so that we, the audience, can empathize, understand, and experience what the characters are experiencing as the play progresses. Most of us can easily name at least one or two actors or actresses who have moved us deeply and who have given powerful, truthful portrayals of their characters – so much so that our disbelief that the characters are real may fade and we may come to identify the actor with the character so much that we forget they are not the same person!

But how do actors achieve this? How do they learn to evoke such a deep sense of truth in their performances? Similarly, how do we as coaches and counselors find ways to not only be truthful with ourselves and with our clients, but also to encourage our clients to live, speak, and behave authentically and truthfully as well? Kate Alexander, the Associate Director of the Florida Studio Theatre, will share with us some of her insights and techniques from the professional theatre world for coaching people to speak and behave truthfully!

Kate AlexanderKate Alexander is the Founder of the FST Training School. FST’s acting classes use a technique based on the Stanislavski method in which the actor must learn to draw on their life experience, emotion and empathy to paint their characters and generate truth on stage. In addition, their methodology helps each student find his or her own “door” to creative achievement. Kate also pioneered the acting training method for children which serves as the foundation for the FST school. Many of our greatest and most authentic actors have studied one form or another of the famous Stanislavski method of learning acting.

Come join us and explore with us the fascinating and valuable insights and techniques Kate Alexander and the world of professional theatre have to offer us about speaking and living truthfully and authentically.

Kate Alexander is the Associate Director of the Florida Studio Theatre and is the Founder of the FST Theatre School. She has 36 years of experience in profession theatre and has been with Florida Studio Theatre for 34 years.

Ms. Alexander ministers to the artistic needs of the theatre and its many community and state educational programs: she pioneered the acting training method for children which serves as the foundation for the FST school and co-developed the award-winning WRITE A PLAY program which touches the lives of more than 55,000 children annually. She has directed more than 50 shows, including Dancing Lessons; Becoming Dr. Ruth; Freud’s Last Session; Thurgood; South Beach Babylon; The Columnist; Talley’s Folly; Jericho; Next Fall; The Savannah Disputation; Ghost-Writer, The Savannah Disputation, I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change, Bridge & Tunnel, Shotgun, Shirley Valentine, Pure Confidence, Wit, Proof, The Exonerated and Brooklyn Boy, Clever Little Lies, Brownsville Song, and Becoming Dr. Ruth and performed leading roles in Taking Shakespeare, Golda’s Balcony, Master Class and The Occupant. Ms. Alexander is the recipient of numerous acting, directing and public service awards. She co-authored the book Ideas for the Animated Short: Finding and Building Stories which now has a second edition available.