Acting & Performance
Technique becomes a means of making precise, embodied choices—while cultivating presence, responsiveness, and trust in one’s own artistic intelligence.
03 / Teaching
Build the conditions
for discovery.
Then make room.
I teach performance as a way of knowing: an encounter among disciplined practice, cultural inquiry, imaginative risk, and the intelligence of the body.
My classrooms ask students to become more exacting readers, more generous collaborators, and more independent artists—capable of making choices they can articulate, test, and revise.
01 / THE PEDAGOGYChallenge with purpose.
Challenge with purpose.
Support with rigor.
Learning becomes consequential when students understand not only what they are being asked to do, but why it matters—and when they possess meaningful agency in discovering how to do it.
I design courses around clear questions, active experimentation, close reading, structured reflection, and repeated opportunities to apply feedback. Intellectual inquiry and embodied practice do not sit on opposite sides of the room; each sharpens the other.
The objective is not imitation. It is the development of artistic judgment: the capacity to observe closely, choose deliberately, collaborate ethically, and remain open to discovery.
Curiosity is not a warm-up.
It is the work.
Selected teaching
Different rooms.
One living inquiry.
Script Analysis
Students learn to read plays as dynamic systems of action, form, history, and possibility, translating close analysis into consequential artistic decisions.
Autobiography in Literature & Performance
Literary study, cultural inquiry, and student-authored performance meet in an exploration of how identity is narrated, staged, contested, and revised.
Devised & Solo Work
Students generate original performance through research, writing, movement, experimentation, and an iterative process of making, testing, and reflection.
Manuel Simons is Assistant Professor of Acting and Performance at the University of Florida. Their teaching connects literature, cultural history, critical analysis, embodied practice, and the creation of original work.
What students practice
Read closely.
Risk intelligently.
Make boldly.
Reflect honestly.
Agency
Students learn to identify and pursue questions that give their work urgency, specificity, and personal consequence.
Collaboration
The room becomes a place to listen across difference, exchange precise feedback, and build work no single person could make alone.
Transfer
Students connect artistic practice to writing, research, communication, cultural analysis, and the broader work of understanding one another.
02 / THE LEARNING CULTUREA demanding room
A demanding room
can also be a
generous room.
Transparent goals and criteria make ambitious work possible.
Questions are treated as instruments of discovery, not signs of deficiency.
Feedback becomes useful when students can test it, interpret it, and make purposeful choices.
Students are invited to bring the complexity of their histories and perspectives into the work.
Areas of collaboration
Ways we might
transform a room.
- 01Acting, performance, and ensemble training
- 02Script analysis and dramaturgical inquiry
- 03Autobiographical and solo performance
- 04Devised and student-authored work
- 05Curriculum and course development
- 06Faculty and teaching-artist workshops
- 07Arts-integrated and interdisciplinary learning
- 08Coaching for educators, artists, and students
Education begins in attention—and becomes powerful when
attention turns into action.