A am an actor. I am also an acting teacher. Why do I do what I do? How do I do it? What is may method? After all these years, how do I explain it, describe it, an teach it? Well, to some extent, my method, and the method that has evolved in the program at NYU in the last several years, is deceptively simple, and incredibly complex: There is no method. Beware of a method. All methods are valuable as individual tools. We audition almost a thousand students each year from around our country, and around the world. We only choose eighteen. In the first year, our students are taught in their acting class, to essentially find their own particular, personal sense of truth by studying naturalistic plays. In the second year, we add to their process what they initially find to be the burden of that dreaded word “style”-heightened language and the different physical and cultural worlds characters exist in. and throughout their second and into their third year they work, tirelessly, to synthesize all that they’ve been taught from every class-voice, speech, text work, clown class, theater games, circus, the culture of style, psychological gesture, acting, Alexander technique, and more. Why do we spend so much time, energy, and efforts on acting? It is because of Love. I remembered what Aristotle had written, about his belief in Art, in its ability to teach transcendence; something that cannot be put into words. Its ability to lift a human being into a place of beauty and grace that is unspeakable. The experience of beauty, and the ability to inspire that experience in others; this is the impulse, the belief, that has always motivated me, even from a time when I didn’t understand it, and couldn’t have explained it. It is also the strand that unifies the different areas of my life, both professionally, and personally. It is the reason I’m an actress, the reason I’m a teacher and a director, and I came to realize, the reason I wanted to come to Taiwan to speak to you.