Craft and the Actor

We live in a ‘now’ culture. I want a book, I download it to my iPad instantly. I want a song, it’s in my iTunes in a few moments, I want to go to the gym, I can go at any time of day or night, if I want to eat, something is open 24 hours.

But art, and I’m speaking with particular regard, to the craft of acting, does not function in an instant way. By definition, the word craft means a set of skills that with sustained learning and practice over time leads to high levels of proficiency.

Gaining a craft is a commitment. For some, it is a life long commitment. Acting teacher Sanford Meisner believed it would take the actor 20 years to gain the right level of craft.

So, why do we expect to get there in a few hours, a few days, a few weeks, or months? Why do we expect to gained mastery of skill, as easily as downloading Fifty Shades of Grey on the Kindle?

We mustn’t become despondent if expertise doesn’t arrive in 6 months or 2 years. It is a journey, and not the destination that matters. It’s what you pick up on the way.

It’s always good to have our eyes on the prize, but sometimes we can lose track of all the important lessons we learned on the way. We can become better actors and better people, if we are present during our training, and while hoping to get better, deal with the present moment.

People studying martial arts would like to be a black belt some day. But not all martial artists will make it. Many will give up on the route, somehow the journey took too long, the trials of the journey are too much for them. But the true (martial) artist knows the destination isn’t even important. To live fully in each moment means to learn the lessons of the journey thoroughly.

It is easy however, to step away from the path, to think we’ve journeyed far enough, and that we can find another, perhaps a shorter, or more direct route to the destination. That might be true. But we still miss the lessons of the journey. Many times the non-actor plucked out of obscurity, finds it nearly impossible to build a successful acting career out of their first film. They have no experience, they have no journey, they have no craft.

And craft should not hold you back, but you cannot cut corners. And craft should not limit you, but you cannot criticise it without first understanding it in your body. The academic route is to critique those things from an objective standpoint, which we have no experience of doing ourselves. We call it ‘distance’, but it is really ignorance.

First learn your craft, go on the journey, work along the way, but stay on the path, there are not shortcuts, there are no quick routes, there are no secret passageways to the destination – or if there are, they teach us little, and leave us expecting that the shortcut will always be there for us.

When you have gained craft, you have the legacy of the journey, the experience to fall back on, craft is graft and craft is commitment to journey, not destination.

COACH