Acting, imagination, and dream work
Life, work and teaching
Sandra Seacat worked as an actor, acting teacher, and coach. After graduating from Northwestern University, she studied with Michael Howard in New York and became a lifetime member of the Actors Studio. Lee Strasberg encouraged her to teach and invited her into his Institute when it opened.
Seacat conducted her own classes and workshops in America and Europe from 1975. Her teaching brought the actor's imagination and personal creative resources into the development of a role. Performers' accounts collected by Schott Acting Studio describe dream work as one route into a character's experience.
The actor's study
Her professional life joined teaching with theatre and screen performance. That connection matters: preparation must find expression in the actual conditions of a production, with other actors, a script, and an audience or camera.
For your study, treat imagination as something you can explore in action. Keep dream material voluntary and its use theatrical. Actor training is a practice of craft and expression; a student's testimony describes that student's experience.
