The FLYING ACTOR STUDIO is an international center that celebrates the imagination and invites a profound journey into the very heart of life.

In Spring 2008, James Donlon, after a 40 year international teaching and performance career, was inspired to create a physical theater school in San Francisco, building on the rich history of clowning, mime, and circus that had flourished in the city for decades. Donlon invited fellow master teacher Leonard Pitt to share this vision, and together in 2009 they founded the FLYING ACTOR STUDIO, one of the few centers in North America where one can study physical theater.  In the '70's both Donlon and Pitt operated nationally known movement theater schools in San Francisco and Berkeley, as part of a vanguard of artists that included Robert Shields, Geoff Hoyle, Bill Irwin, and The Pickle Family Circus.    Now Donlon and Pitt continue.  

 

FLYING ACTOR STUDIO students work with world-class master teachers who share the knowledge that was given to them by their own mentors, while adding his or her own discoveries and secrets gained through a life in the theater.      

FLYING ACTOR STUDIO students learn the great world theater traditions of physical expression, mime, neo-classic clown, mask, circus, vaudeville, and commedia dell 'arte, all cradled by the imagination. Students develop powerful, flexible, comfortable, transformable bodies and minds that perform rare skills, tell wonderful stories, and evoke the truth.

FLYING ACTOR STUDIO is a safe place where students learn about physical and visual dramatic structure, and how to construct a character that can live in any play or film. Students learn how the elements of time, space, energy, and discipline are the source of gesture and transcending theater. 

The FLYING ACTOR STUDIO gives students a sense of their hearts, their passions, and what they can bring to the work. Often the only artists who are remembered through the generations are the innovators, expressing their personal voice with courage and skill.  

Through the coming months and years the FLYING ACTOR STUDIO will encourage and develop new performances by students and faculty. An international exchange with the Czech Republic will bring award winning theater and workshops to San Francisco. A stage adaptation of Phillip Mann's novel The Eye of the Queen will be created. Guest master classes and workshops by acclaimed artists like Geoff Hoyle and Robert Shields will unfold. Leonard Pitt will create a new solo show with director Arne Zaslove.

The FLYING ACTOR STUDIO is the place to Dream!