The Barrow Group Performing Arts Training Program

three woman laughing during an art training program
actors during play theater
two girls during an art training program
teens during an art training program

“TBG was really the institution that taught me how to act.”
–Anne Hathaway, Academy Award winner

An Actors Companion, book by Seth Barrish
AN ACTORS COMPANION by Seth Barrish.

The Barrow Group, located in New York City, offers professional and emerging artists training in acting, directing, playwriting and screenwriting.  View descriptions of our school's adult classes here. We also offer kids, tween and teen performing arts camps and classes.  Check out the upcoming class schedules here.

At the heart of the Barrow Group Approach is the desire to promote clear and concise tools of the trade.  These tools are outlined and published in "An Actor’s Companion - Tools for the Working Actor" by Seth Barrish, TBG’s founder and co-Artistic Director.

What makes The Barrow Group different from many other studios in NYC is that all of our teachers have gone through an intensive teacher training program with TBG co-Artistic Directors Seth Barrish and Lee Brock.   This faculty training assures that students receive a codified, consistent learning experience from teachers who have been training with The Barrow Group for years.

The Barrow Group Approach

The Barrow Group offers techniques designed to do the following:

  • Encourage spontaneity
  • Foster entertaining, human, and compelling behavior
  • Help you become more sensitive, imaginative, responsive, and alive onstage
  • Relax you
  • Change your work effortlessly and invisibly (so the audience won’t detect any effort on your part and therefore will feel like they are watching a real person rather than an actor “working”)
  • Bring more freedom to your work

In a nutshell, these are TBG's beliefs about acting:

  • Acting is easy.
  • Acting is most exciting when it is spontaneous and moment-to-moment.
  • Unplanned behavior is usually much more interesting than planned behavior.
  • Relaxation is the key to many of the things we strive for.
  • The best technique is invisible.
  • The best technique leaves us free (free to imagine, free to respond, free to feel, free to whatever).
  • We don’t think there is one “way” to approach acting. It’s about finding whatever works.