The company of Henry V (2025), in rehearsal
Viewpoints & Ensemble Practice
This is a laboratory to train your instrument, heart, mind, body, and soul, and to align with artists who commit to the idea of ensemble.
The company of Henry V (2025), in rehearsal
Wisconsin Classic Stage trains actors the way a musician trains an instrument: daily, physically, together. This fall we’re opening three doors in: an ongoing ensemble practice, a two‑week intensive on voice and command, and a five‑week scene lab built around George Bernard Shaw. Come for one. Stay for the whole arc.
Imagination Is Resistance
Our flagship class, offered year‑round as scheduling allowsThis is a laboratory to train your instrument, heart, mind, body, and soul, and to align with artists who commit to the idea of ensemble.
Viewpoints Ensemble Training is an accumulating experience: each Saturday builds on the last, so we hope you’ll join us for the full three‑session arc. Expect work that is physically rigorous and full of embodied joy. This is ensemble training, in the truest sense: imagination held in common.
Led by Josh Pohja, Executive Artistic Producer & Education Director, WCS Actor’s Studio
with Mark Corkins
Mark Corkins is a Milwaukee‑based actor, teacher, and voice/speech teaching artist. A graduate of UW–Milwaukee’s Professional Theatre Training Program, he spent many seasons as a resident actor with Milwaukee Rep, with favorites including True West, King Lear, Dracula, and several productions of A Christmas Carol, plus summers with Utah Shakespeare Festival, American Players Theatre, Berkshire Theatre Festival, and SITI Company. He built this class from a career spent learning what makes a voice fill a room.
Taught by Mark Corkins
Rhetoric, Wit & the Joy of Language
George Bernard Shaw gives actors something extraordinary: the opportunity to experience intelligence as theatrical pleasure. His characters argue, seduce, provoke, contradict, maneuver, and delight in the sheer pleasure of trying to change another person’s mind. Beneath the elegance of Shaw’s language is an actor’s playground, where thought has velocity, language has consequence, and a brilliantly turned phrase can change the temperature of an entire room.
Rhetoric, Wit & the Joy of Language places the actor inside that world. Working from selected Shaw scenes, Josh Pohja leads actors through the architecture of rhetoric and the discovery of how language becomes action: how an argument shifts, how a question can become an attack, how a joke can establish power, and how a carefully constructed sentence can remain completely spontaneous in performance.
Rather than treating rhetoric as an academic exercise, we approach it as a source of freedom: actors investigate syntax, punctuation, breath, rhythm, articulation, timing, status, interruption, and persuasion while asking the essential theatrical question: what am I trying to make happen to the other person?
That is the pleasure of Shaw, and the pleasure of classical actor training at Wisconsin Classic Stage: rigor in the service of freedom, intelligence in the service of play. Come think. Come argue. Come laugh. Come play with the language.
Led by Josh Pohja, Executive Artistic Producer & Education Director, WCS Actor’s Studio
Josh Pohja, Director of Education
Josh Pohja & Anne Bogart, 1998, Saratoga Springs, NY · SITI Company
Josh Pohja is Executive Artistic Producer and Director of Education at Wisconsin Classic Stage, where he leads the Actor’s Studio and its ensemble training. His own training runs directly through the source: a graduate of Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Drama (Class of ’99), he has worked as a professional actor at theaters including The Guthrie Theater, Milwaukee Chamber Theatre, Alley Theatre, the New York Fringe Festival, and The Acting Company, and trained alongside Anne Bogart and the SITI Company, immersed in Viewpoints and Suzuki training in Saratoga Springs.
That lineage is what he brings into the room every Saturday morning, training that treats the actor’s instrument as something built over time, in the company of other committed artists, and passed forward hand to hand.
WCS Actor’s Studio
Calvary Presbyterian Church
628 N. 10th St., Milwaukee, WI 53233
Comfortable clothing you can move freely in, bare or sock feet for floor work, and a water bottle. Come ready to work with your whole instrument.
All levels of ensemble experience are welcome. The work is rigorous and built for joy, and space in each session is limited, so reserve ahead.
Our suggested fees and course costs cover the room, the instructors, and the craft, but they’re never meant to be the reason someone stays outside the door. If you’re able, a gift to our education fund helps us hold scholarship spots for actors who want this training and can’t yet afford it. If you’re the one who needs that seat, reach out. We mean it when we say all are welcome to train.