Acting Techniques are Pointless
BellaLuce asked “What acting techniques/exercises have you found particularly pointless?”
Hmmm. Acting Techniques and their exercises are necessary. The trouble is that most of them are entirely pointless. They do keep you occupied, they’re often fun, or least they make you feel like you’re working, or mostly, they frustrate and irritate you into complying with whatever the teacher says you’re meant to think/feel/do/pretend.
We need technique. The problem is that most of them are nonsense. Acting teachers and Professors of Theatre don’t want you to know that, because it undermines most of their careers, and frankly, the way they earn their living.
Personally, I’ve always had what I jokingly call “a Wank Radar”, anything that seems like self-gratifying, time-wasting, pretendy-crap almost definitely is so…
Sandy Meisner said that acting was ‘the ability to live truthfully under imaginary circumstances’. To me this is a good enough starting point for acting. When I teach acting, I think of acting as something a little simpler. Look at the person you’re meant to be speaking to and speak the lines with a similar intention to the character in the scene.
Many people have a talent for acting, some don’t even bother to train, they simply go on their gut instinct and the gift they were given. I must confess some admiration for this. Nonetheless, it is my belief that talent is never enough. It can take us so far, then we need a little help. To some, that means ‘technique’, some think of a ‘methodology’, some look to the stars, but let’s be clear – many can do well on talent alone – but without the challenge, someone or something to work from, a framework, you end up stuck in the same place.
However, any technique that doesn’t immediately make its use applicable to your work as an actor is suspect, not necessarily pointless but suspect. It becomes pointless, when after a few hours of work reveal no positive benefits towards actually acting the damned scene.
I have been warned for my whole career not to get stuck into one technique. The people that told me that usually realised that the techniques they learned were bullshit, so they took a bit of that technique and added to a bit of something else, and sort of bungled together a technique from toilet rolls and sticky-tape. It’s a nice idea, the so-called Linguini-effect (it’s become the mainstream approach to acting in many drama schools in non-technique schools)- throw enough technique at the actor and hope some of it sticks, but basically it sucks because the results are unpredictable, inconsistent and cannot be relied upon to produce results each time you work. A technique of acting must work all the time, every time.
For me, that is Practical Aesthetics, a simple, no-bullshit approach to acting. It works for me, it works for the actors that use it and it works for the students at ACS Studio. It can work for you too.