The Actor’s Theater of Orcas Island is sponsoring an acting workshop with acclaimed playwright and teacher Rachel Nelson on Thursday, Aug. 17 from 7 to 10 p.m. and Saturday, Aug. 19 from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.

Nelson is a playwright and theater maker from Oregon, currently based in New Orleans. Her work has been featured at The Playwright’s Center in Minneapolis, The Lincoln Center in New York, Hollins University, the Minneapolis Fringe Festival, the University of Maine, the Mudlark Theater in New Orleans, and Performance Space Northwest in Portland. She is a recipient of the Rosa Parks Award for Social Justice in Playwrighting from the Kennedy Center, and is is a professor at Hollins University in Virginia. Her work strives to uphold the voices of marginalized people, and to illuminate topics that connect and empower us all.

This class will help you find your authentic center as an actor. Who are you as an individual? How do you communicate, how do you store your emotions, and how does that inform how you can act? Using the Lucid Body Chakra technique as a base, we will explore holistic elements of voice, body, and text, to give practical and lasting tools to each actor as an individual. This class is open to everybody, total beginner and seasoned performer alike.

One minute of text should be memorized prior to the class to use for rehearsal. Dress in comfortable clothes, and come prepared to explore!

The fee is $20 and class will be held at the Grange. To register, contact Melinda Milligan at melinda@rockisland.com

Nelson will be performing her one-act play “And Then the Moon Swallowed the Sky” on Friday, Aug. 18 at 7:30 p.m. at the Grange.