The Suzuki Method for Actors: What It Trains and How to Start

Your first Suzuki class goes like this. Music starts, loud and percussive, and the teacher has you stomping around the room in a half-squat. Your thighs burn by the second minute. The music cuts out, everyone drops to the floor, and you lie there breathing hard while someone tells you to stop breathing hard.

Then you walk. Then you hold a pose that looks simple and isn’t. And somewhere around the forty-minute mark you start to wonder what any of this has to do with playing Hedda Gabler.

The short version: the Suzuki Method trains control. Control of your center, of a lot of energy at once, and of your breath, so you can stand still on stage and still be the most alive thing in the room, and speak while your body is working hard. It looks like gym class. It’s actually a test you take over and over until you stop failing it.

Where the Suzuki Method comes from

Tadashi Suzuki is a Japanese director, born in 1939. According to his Wikipedia biography, he began developing the method with the Waseda Little Theatre, which he founded in Tokyo in the 1960s, then moved his company to Toga, a remote mountain village, in 1976. The company became the Suzuki Company of Toga, or SCOT.

In 1992 he co-founded SITI Company in Saratoga Springs, New York, with the American director Anne Bogart. SITI became known for combining Bogart’s Viewpoints with the Suzuki Method. SITI stopped producing and teaching at the end of 2022, but by then the training had spread well beyond it.

How far? In a 2017 American Theatre feature, Scott T. Cummings wrote that the method is “ubiquitous in training programs and theatre departments around the U.S.” If you train in a BFA, an MFA, or an ensemble-based company, you may well meet it.

What the training is actually for

Suzuki has been unusually clear about his goals. In his essay “Culture Is the Body”, he says the training teaches actors to speak powerfully and with clear articulation, and to make the whole body speak, even in silence. He also wants it to build what he calls a tenacity of concentration.

He calls the exercises a kind of grammar. You drill grammar so you can stop thinking about it: nobody enjoys a conversation while consciously parsing every sentence. The exercises are meant to sink into the body the same way, until they work without your attention and you can spend that attention on the play.

Ellen Lauren, a SITI co-founder and Suzuki’s principal American protégé, sums up the principles in the same American Theatre piece: control of your center of gravity, control of an excessive amount of energy, and control of your breathing. Those three ideas run through the exercises.

Notice what’s missing from that list: emotion, character, backstory. Suzuki work doesn’t tell you how to play a scene. Paul Allain, a drama lecturer at Goldsmiths, writes in Total Theatre that it doesn’t relate directly to performance and doesn’t prescribe an aesthetic. It builds the instrument; other techniques tell you what to play on it.

The stomping exercise, step by step

Stomping is the part everyone remembers, and Suzuki describes it himself in “Culture Is the Body”. Here’s the sequence:

1. Music with a strong rhythm plays, and you move around the room in a semi-squat, beating the floor hard with your feet.
2. The music stops, and the whole group drops to the floor at once, relaxing completely.
3. You lie completely still and quiet.
4. Slow, smooth music begins, and you rise however you like, slowly and steadily, until you’re standing upright again.

Suzuki says the purpose is to develop “concentration on the body through controlling the breathing.” The first half is fierce motion, the second is stillness; he describes them as a pair, the release and the holding back of physical power.

The real test: keep the top still

The essential point, Suzuki writes, is to keep stomping with the same force without your upper body swaying. That’s harder than it sounds. Every stomp sends a shock upward, and the harder you stomp, the more your chest and head want to bounce. To stop it, you have to absorb the force in your hips, and keep a steady connection between the top and bottom halves of your body.

When your concentration drops, two things happen. The upper body starts to rock, and the rhythm of the stomping goes uneven. A teacher can spot both, and with practice you start to feel them yourself.

Allain adds two details worth knowing before your first class. The breath has to be sustained and hidden, so you don’t gasp after the drop. And you try to stay ahead of the music rather than landing on the beat. He calls the exercises “startlingly diagnostic”. In other words, they show you where your control runs out.

Walks and statues: stillness that is still working

Stomping is only one exercise. American Theatre reports that Suzuki has codified six core exercises that form the foundation of the training. Allain describes one, Basic Number 2, where one leg flicks up and stamps down with the knees bent, testing your balance every time.

Classes often also include walks, a set of different ways of moving across the floor, and statues, where you move into a shape and hold it. In a student’s workshop diary for Teatru Malta, the statue work was used to see the body in stillness as a sculpture, and holding the poses was much harder than it looked.

Here’s the key point: Suzuki stillness isn’t passive. Allain writes that in this training “centring is constantly re-established and tested”, and a statue is that test with the movement taken away. The energy you used to get into the shape is still there, held in rather than let go.

Speaking text from a statue

Classes often add text. In the same diary, the students memorized an extract from Macbeth and spoke it during the stillness work. It is the method’s goal in one exercise: a body under load, and a voice that stays clear and full anyway.

Take this speech from Act 5, Scene 5, for example, as printed in the Standard Ebooks edition:

MACBETH: She should have died hereafter;
There would have been a time for such a word.
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,

Try a home version of the statue work. Lower into a half-squat with your weight even across both feet, and say those three lines at full voice. Listen for the moment your voice thins, your breath catches, or your shoulders lift. That’s the moment your attention left your center. Reset and say it again.

One condition makes this work: you have to know the text cold. If you’re hunting for the next word, your focus jumps up into your head and the statue collapses. Learn the speech before class, not in it.

Why beginners hate it, and what changes

You may not like it at first, and you won’t be the first. Suzuki himself writes that many beginners feel “forced to move mechanically,” as if the delicate nuances of their own bodies disappear. He noticed it especially in American actors trained in realism, who start stomping hard and then lose their concentration.

The actor Tom Hewitt, in the American Theatre feature, remembered his first impression as “weird character walks to Japanese elevator music.” Then he saw the SCOT actors perform and wanted what they had. That’s a common arc: the exercises feel arbitrary until you see what a body trained by them can do on a stage.

Suzuki also rejects the idea that the training only suits Japanese actors, or people with particular legs or stamina. He says it’s about discovering a physical sensibility everyone already has. Noh and Kabuki actors stomp on stage, he notes, but so do many traditional dances, and even ballet depends on a feeling of connection to the ground.

Allain puts the payoff plainly: the training is as much about the performer’s will and concentration as about the body. In practice, what changes for you isn’t that the stomping gets easy. It’s that you notice sooner when your control slips, and can bring it back without stopping.

Suzuki and Viewpoints: why they’re taught together

You’ll often see “Suzuki and Viewpoints” on the same class listing, because SITI taught them side by side for three decades. They’re separate methods, and they train different things.

• Suzuki works on you: your center, your breath, your control of a lot of energy, mostly within a fixed form the teacher sets.
• Viewpoints works on your awareness of time, space, and the other actors, through open improvisation that changes with the group. Our guide to Viewpoints for actors explains the nine.
• Used together, Suzuki gives the ensemble bodies with power and stillness, and Viewpoints gives those bodies a way to listen and respond to each other.

You don’t need both to benefit from either. But if you’re choosing between two classes and one offers the pair, it’s worth taking, because each one shows you what the other is for. If you like body-based work, Laban’s efforts are another vocabulary worth knowing.

How to start

Suzuki is a technique you learn in a room with a teacher. The forms are precise and the corrections are physical, so a book or video won’t tell you when your hips are doing the work your knees should be doing. Look for a teacher who trained with SCOT or with former SITI company members, and ask about their lineage. Short introductory courses exist too: the Old Vic, for example, offers an introductory course for actors of all levels.

Before your first class:

• Wear fitted clothes you can squat and kneel in, and ask the teacher what to wear on your feet, since some classes have a rule.
• Tell the teacher about any knee, hip, or back injury before you begin, because the work loads the legs hard.
• Learn any text you’re given before the first session, so your attention can stay in your body.
• Expect to be corrected often. In this training, a correction is the exercise doing its job.

That third point is the one you can work on alone. Suzuki asks you to speak while your body is busy, so the words have to come on their own. If you use Offbook, you can hide your lines and run the speech with cues until it comes without effort, then take it into a squat. You can find more speeches to work on in our monologue library.

Questions actors ask

What is Suzuki stomping for?

Suzuki says its purpose is to build concentration on the body through control of the breath. The specific test is to stomp hard and steadily without your upper body swaying, which means absorbing the force at the hips. The drop and slow rise afterward train the opposite skill: stillness with your energy still running.

Can you combine Suzuki and Viewpoints?

Yes. SITI Company was known for teaching them together for three decades, and classes often still list them together. Suzuki trains individual control and power; Viewpoints trains awareness of time, space, and the ensemble. They work as complements, not as one technique.

Is the Suzuki Method only for physical theater?

No. It doesn’t tell you how to play a scene, so it fits alongside whatever approach you use for text and character, including realism. What it adds is control of your breath, center, and energy, which every kind of stage acting needs.

How long is a Suzuki class?

It varies by teacher. Suzuki’s own training regimen runs about two hours, and some introductory courses run over two or more days. Ask the teacher before you sign up.