Articles on Process

How Do You Create Virtuoso Human Beings?
by Ron Bieganski
American Theater Magazine: Jan. 2004

"Part of the problem, I have come to realize, is that most acting training takes for granted that the actor already understands where creativity, emotion and spontaneity come from. But the more I've worked with youth, the more I've realized that they don't understand these things. So developing a training process -- and, more generally, a working process -- that is about being an artist and opening creative potential has become my mission."
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A Simple Joyful Life
by Ron Bieganski
PerformInk: March 2004

"In developing a training process for working with youth at Free Street, I started with what I thought was a very obvious question: What is the most basic talent for an actor?.... For Free Street, talent is the ability to be filled emotionally, while at the same time expecting nothing. Talent is also the ability to react intimately (emotionally open), immediately (reacting instantly, both emotionally and physically) and spontaneously (reacting in your own unique way) within an imaginary situation. By this definition, talent can be developed."
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Performance Reviews

Free Street breaks ground with imaginative 'Mad Joy'
by Hedy Weiss
Chicago Sun-Times: Sept. 23, 1996

"Take the absurd spirit of Eastern European literature from Kafka to Kundera. Spin it together with the funky, sometimes dissonant marching music of a New Orleans funeral. And you may just get a hint of what awaits you in Free Street's haunting, hugely imaginative production, Mad Joy, now in a brief engagement at the Steppenwolf Studio Theatre."
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Originality, the Risk Pays Off
By Gabrielle Kaplan
PerformInk: December 19, 1996

"Mad Joy is one of the riskiest, most innovative and sophisticated pieces of original theater I've seen in Chicago in the last three years."
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