Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Ottavio Taddei. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Alright, Ottavio thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Learning the craft is often a unique journey from every creative – we’d love to hear about your journey and if knowing what you know now, you would have done anything differently to speed up the learning process.
I graduated from 2 acting conservatories,”Stella Adler Studio Of Acting” in NYC and “Art Of Acting” in Los Angeles. I believe I understood what “craft” really meant, at least to me, only a few years ago in particular thanks to the teachers Ron Burrus, H Richard Greene, Sam Schacht and Bruce Katzman.
There are many ways to learn an art form and mine of course are just personal opinions of today based on my life experience, I might feel differently in the years to come!
Craft is vital to handle the repeatability of a performance but can also be detrimental if it sacrifices creativity and spontaneity, is one of those elements that needs to reside in you second nature and not interfere with your impulses.
Allow me to be more specific:
Ron Burrus would teach about the distinction between “raw talent” and “professional talent”, that consists in your ability to re-deliver a performance as if experienced it for the first time, and with awareness of every little gesture and movement that might be required for theater blocking or camera continuity, that certainly requires artistic maturity.
H Richard Greene is certainly a master at stage craft and mainly, what do I mean with that?
I’d say, it’s as if I had something really compelling to say but I didn’t have the right words to express that concept at its best or simply I didn’t speak the language at all and most of my message would get lost.
Stage craft is the understanding that certain adjustments during a live performance will dramatically improve the ability of the audience to enjoy, understand and share the journey of the actors. It’s about the power of intentional and specific movement. “E-motions” are movement and the use of the voice is movement too.
I believe intentionality and specificity in life are great qualities that are getting lost in certain social habits of wanting to please and as actors we must learn from our lives as well.
“Growth as an actor and as human being are synonymous” quote from Stella Adler.
This “craft” though has to reach an instinctual state or it may read as stagey or presentational.
Now going more into subtleties, Schacht in the process of training new aspiring actors wouldn’t care about stage craft as much but in the ability of the actor to craft truth, he didn’t necessarily cared about how you found your truth but he did have X-ray vision and would always know when a performance was alive and psychologically justified, I wish I was more mature when I had the honor to study with him but clearly some of him is still vibrating in me.
Similarly, I had the great pleasure to study Chekhov with Katzman recently, the psychological depth of the author and the expertise of Katzman really refreshed in me the need and desire to go deeper in the understanding of a character and investigate what really moves us as humans and therefore as actors.
Once you experience that work with Chekhov or Shakespeare or many other extraordinary writers, if you manage to bring the same depth to contemporary writing for theater and film I’m am pretty confident to say, you will have an Actor.
Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.
My name is Ottavio Taddei, born and raised in Italy I moved to the USA to become an actor after a health scare that created the perfect opportunity to adventure myself into the unknown.
I graduated from 2 acting conservatories, Stella Adler Studio Of Acting in NYC in 2014 and Art of Acting in LA in 2022.
I am also a professional contemporary & classical dancer, pilates and Gyrotonic instructor, fitness enthusiast and I have a bachelor’s degree in economics.
My most prestigious film credits are “Ford V Ferrari”, “His Only Son”, “Hirowareta Otoko-Lost Man Found”, “Why The Nativity”.
As a dancer my biggest achievements have been to dance with the MET and with LA PHIL, I danced in Italy, Qatar, Oman, and the US in musical, operas, pure dance shows etc.
Now, you can see I heavily relied on education to gain confidence in my craft, it’s not necessarily the only way to go but it did expose me to a great deal of talent and hopefully it wasn’t all for nothing.
The biggest challenge to my career has been being born elsewhere, there is a lot of controversial dynamics with regard to the hiring process of performers on O-1visas “aliens with extraordinary abilities” and most networks will not hire visa holders making it almost impossible to succeed and build a career, it is my personal mission if I will gain more notoriety as an actor to address the lack of proper legislation on the matter.
Nevertheless I have embraced the approach that an acting career is a Marathon not a Sprint.
It took me more than 10 years to get my green card and I’m excited to see what I can achieve now that the pandemic is behind us, I no longer have to be discriminated for my foreign status and the strike is over (even though I have heavy concerns about where the industry is heading and I personally do not find the outcome of the negotiation a victory).
We just have to hope humanity will find peace again and leave all this hate behind.
I am the type of person that will succeed or will die trying, I’m ok with it!
I have been planting seeds throughout these years that are starting to sprout and I have a positive outlook toward the future so hopefully you’ll see more of me soon.
How can we best help foster a strong, supportive environment for artists and creatives?
The world is changing quite rapidly! Some are good changes some… not so much!
We can realistically expect that 5/10 years from now a lot of automation in factories, transportations, agriculture, medicine etc. will occur and hopefully society will benefit from that as a whole.
it’s totally possible though that this “capital intensive progress” could easily be controlled by very few people and that is concerning.
Alright, my point is, if we as a society, no longer had to worry about our basic needs, I’d consider art, literature, philosophy, healthy living and other forms of creative expression the most noble activities we could dedicate ourselves to.
That said I wish there was more awareness of the role of art in society, it’s what elevates us and connects us to the divine and what should certainly not be delegated to machines and computers, maybe as a novelty, yes, and potentially even a genre per se but not a substitute.
Society needs to be reminded that likely some of our most precious memories were created at a concert or at the theater or at the cinema or simply by walking through the streets of Rome, Paris, Madrid etc. contemplating what humanity has achieved in the creation of beauty and harmony and then, of course, there is Mother Nature, that is the art form of the divine. I think a HUMAN LIFE needs art to thrive and therefore I hope society can increase the appreciation of creatives.
Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?
A few times in my life I have been exposed to some extraordinary performances that brought me to tears of joy and awakened something quite magical in my soul, I wish nothing more than gifting others with an experience similar to the ones I had. I have such clear recollection of those performances even after more than a decade because these artists poured their hearts and became completely vulnerable and real for the sake of their audience.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.OttavioTaddei.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ottaviotaddei/
- Facebook: https://m.facebook.com/ottavio.taddei/
Image Credits
Pete Black Avenoir Movement Photography Giordona aviv Sebastian Gimelli Morosini Joey Snap