Spring Term 2024
“The Yat Malmgren technique gives an actor an inner roadmap that helps create characters they never knew were possible; to transform, yet always come from a deep place of personal truth.”
Welcome to Spring Term at YBC.
We welcome ongoing students back and look forward to introducing new people to the work.
Our YBC Team works with people from all stages of development. We teach seasoned artists, theatre leaders and curious young emerging artists at the beginning of their careers. YBC creates a nurturing and brave place where theatre and film artists of all levels can explore and develop the inner resources that are true to them; those they know about, and those that they have yet to reveal.
The Yat Malmgren technique gives an actor an inner roadmap that helps create characters they never knew were possible; to transform, yet always come from a deep place of personal truth.
It is a difficult time in the world.
At this point it is essential that artists leave their egos at the door and find a way to view and represent the world beneath language and border. By experiencing new realities it can bring us together as a global community.
This work is for the artist who wants to dive deep. To relish in the joy of discovery and develop all of the notes inside you, rather than just the familiar.
Tom and the YBC Team
Classes are offered in person in the SF Bay Area, LA and on Zoom.
Questions? You can also reach out directly to team (at) yatbentley.com. We look forward to speaking.
NEW TO THE YAT/BENTLEY METHOD?
There are pay-what-you-can Introductory & Special Workshops and Intensives coming up: RSVP
WHOS | WHO?
WHO’S YAT?
Yat Malmgren revolutionized the way acting was taught in England. Originally a famous interpretive dancer, he developed a technique for theatre artists based on the psychological theories of Carl Jung (Sensing, Thinking, Intuiting and Feeling) and the work of Rudolph Laban. Together with influences from the most truthful variations of Stanislavski work in America, he forged a new approach to the actor’s training, creating a dynamic and very specific roadmap that opens the actor to subtleties of character transformation, that state of performance where the actor is unrecognizable yet coming from the essence of a a deep inner truth.
Yat’s work was the inspiration for Drama Centre London where some of the finest actors and directors in Britain trained in his work. Actors and Directors taught privately by Yat and at the Drama Centre include Sean Connery, Anthony Hopkins, Colin Firth, Helen McCrory, Peter Brook, Tom Hardy, Patricia Neal, Michael Fassbender, Simon Callow, Frances de la Tour, and Tony Richardson.
WHO’S BENTLEY?
During the early 1970’s, twenty-two year old Tom Bentley-Fisher had the enormous good fortune to be one of the 16 students Yat took privately through the work. Tom had already been acting on major Canadian stages, including being part of the company ensemble at Toronto Workshop Productions, as well as studying with some of the best teachers in North America, including Sanford Meisner. But somehow he knew he had not found the work that could feed him during his career, the kind of work that digs deeply into the intricacies of the enormous life forces existing in the interior of character, sometimes creating havoc with the outer, sometimes harmony, but always welcoming the unknown at every twist and turn. So he met Yat. And to his great surprise Yat took him under his wing immediately.
Throughout Tom’s career as a director, teacher, novelist, and artistic director of theatres in Canada, the U.S. and Spain, Tom has carried Yat’s work with him. Celebrating and watching the growth of actors and emerging artists in a technique based in such incredible humanity and optimism, is the best. And it’s never short of revelations!
“As an artist and teacher, I discover new and deeper levels in Yat’s work every day. And what a gift it is to watch the actor grow, discovering aspects of themselves they never knew possible, and engaging in the magic of true transformation.”
WHY SWING?
If everything is revealed in moment, the conscious and the unconscious, then entering the external energies of movement can open and reveal inner resources for the actor. Swinging is not so much about an external freeing - it is a swinging through the inner.
Since working with Yat, I have developed many swinging exercises that can help an actor free the knots that often get in the way of deep work. I still get calls from artists I’ve worked with forty years ago, letting me know they are still swinging, not only because the swings help free the emotion (free flow) as we go into performance, but that they also take us to new energy sources that help us see the world from new perspectives, softening the armour we often carry with us through life.
When directing Catalan actresses in an all-female version of the Iliad in Barcelona, we spent a month using the swings in physical exploration through the swings before we entered the creation of the play. What we did opened a universal language of ‘sensation’, allowing us to begin the internal exploration of this epic story, taken from the perspective of peace rather than war.
I have had general managers in theatres I’ve run wondering why I’m spending an hour swinging with the actors in the lobby when we’re paying them a good equity salary to create a production on stage. And my response is easy - because in order to great creative work, we must be open to all internal possibilities, free in our emotion life, and be at one with the present. That’s when we move forward with joy and adventure, rather than carry our personal resistances on stage, battling them through the day.
IN THE SWING:
We experience our personal ebb and flow. For every action there is a release, as in all good acting.
We feel the beauty of chaos and the wonder of ‘surrendering the in-between’. Unbalance leading to balance. Chaos to understanding.
We meet our resistances, rather then spend our energy keeping them buried.
We free our psychological knots though gentle recognition, rather deliberate force.
We experience the child in ourselves, the same one who couldn’t stop the gentle swing, waiting on the steps for the best friend to come over.
We step out of the ‘pocket’ of ourselves and feel the ‘enormity’ of our engines.
We can experience our power through yielding.
We leave our heads and trust our instincts, because swinging is actually effortless.
We can use the swing to help prepare us for specific character choices.
*A few years ago I had forty days of radiation treatment for Cancer. I spent a lot of time thinking about the circles of energy swinging through us, as I lie motionless in the machine. I loved that time. When I emerged it was the first day of shut down in Canada due to Covid. So I went online and began swinging, with themes, for about forty sessions. I didn’t charge anyone to show up, they just did, and by the end of those sessions I was swinging with people from all around the world. How great was that? If it was half as healing for them as it was for me, what a miracle!
You can check out those sessions below:
PRIVATE LESSONS
The YBC Teaching Company is also available for one-on-one private coaching in the Yat/Bentley Method, Feldenkrais, and Voice. See our One-on-One Classes page or Contact Us for more information about available times and rates. In Los Angeles Tom is accepting in-person private students at Seydways Studios on Thursday and Friday afternoons.
Private students can book online private sessions on Tuesdays and Thursday during the term.