Training Program Overview

Led by TBG co-Artistic Directors (Seth Barrish and Lee Brock) and Executive Director (Robert Serrell), The Barrow Group School offers professional and emerging artists training in acting, directing, filmmaking, playwriting, and screenwriting.

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 – 99 Bits of Craft” by Seth Barrish.

Faculty at The Barrow Group go through a year and a half teacher training program with Seth Barrish and Lee Brock, in which they learn to teach The Barrow Group Approach, so that in every class there is a codified method of training.

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The Barrow Group Approach

The Barrow Group School 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.