Manuel A. Santos

This was a 3 year higher education course in Porto's best performing arts school. The teachers of this course were very varied - from more established well-known actors and directors to more independent, but still accomplished artists.

This course included a large variety of subjects on acting including dubbing, solo singing, chorus singing, physical theater (clown, mask, buffon, etc.), camera work, epic theater, naturalistic acting, aikido, various vocal techniques, text analysis (both general and acting specific), theater history, contemporary art history, musical theory, and much more.

We also had a kind of internship twice per year where active directors would come and create plays that would be presented either in the Helena Sá e Costa theater, in one of the classrooms that doubled as an auditorium or in unusual spaces outside the campus (in our case, it was an abandoned factory turned artistic foundation).

This course was more geared towards having actors with a lot of variety. It offered a more art-focused view of acting (actors as creators). It also opens doors to not only acting, but also directing, performing and more general theater creating.

This is a professional high-school acting course that I took from 2013 to 2016. It features a core group of actors as teachers, a few normal high-school teachers and various other actors and other creators from outside the school coming to teach specific subjects.

The focus of this course was divided among three disciplines: voice, acting and movement. We learned a large variety of different techniques from these. We also had a few different subjects sometimes such as playwriting, directing, filmmaking, etc.

This course was very much geared towards classical theater acting with a more director-focused view of actors (actor as a guided performer more so than a creator). Most of the teachers we had worked in TNSJ, which is Porto's national theater (as in, the city's largest and most important theater).