Glasgow Acting Coach gives Advice: Stop acting!
The thing about acting is that it’s a misnomer, for most of the acting that you will be required to do in the genre of ‘Realism’, there will be no ‘acting’ required at all. By ‘acting’, I mean no ‘performing’, no consciously indicating to the audience that there is a performance going on in front of them. It’s different if you’re doing Shakespeare, but for television and film, and for most plays in the Realistic canon, there is no acting at all required.
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Stop acting – do not make the audience indulge you.
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But we have the urge within us to act it all out. The tendency to perform is strong within us. We like it, we enjoy it, and it leads to poor acting all over. And we’ve been encourage to do this by parents, well-meaning but misguided drama teachers and other professionals since we were wee, but it doesn’t make it right. We need to learn to stop acting in order to be great actors. One of the biggest compliments my students have ever received was when acting coach Mel Churcher said that our students don’t ‘act’. To me, there could be no higher compliment.
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Stop acting – even though you enjoy how it feels.
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To stop acting, you must stop thinking of acting as ‘performing’ something for someone else to watch and instead focus on undertaking an achievable task. This means that throughout the scene, you are truthfully engaged in doing something rather than projecting or indicated an idea outwards to the audience. Yes, it’s true, you must be seen and heard, but truthful acting starts with truthful action, in other words, doing something for real to another person.
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Stop acting – even though you think that is your job.
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The audience aren’t stupid. When you stop acting, they are drawn into the fictional world as if it were real. When you act, they are conscious that you are performing for them and they watch your performance in a removed way. Which do you want? To draw the audience in, so that they become lost in the story, or to have them sitting marveling at how clever your performance is? Perhaps you are selfish enough to want the second. But ironically, if you go for the first, you will get both. They will become sucked into the story, and then marvel at how compelling and believable you are, as if they are simply eaves dropping on a private conversation. No one ever said that about those huge ‘performances’, they are fully aware of the tragedian plying their trade.
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Stop acting – even though you love the aspect of performance.
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Stop acting. And the way to stop acting is not to replace it with lots and lots of gushy truthful emotion, a la Method, but to do real things to real people, in a truthful moment to moment exchange. If you have a task such as ‘to prevent someone from making a terrible mistake’. Do that thing. For real. Don’t perform the task. Don’t pretend the task. Don’t act it out, or perform it as a caricature, instead do the task for real, prevent the other actor from making a terrible mistake, do those things to them that you would do if you needed to prevent them from making a terrible mistake and you will stop acting and start DOING.
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Doing is what the Greek word DRAMA means (lit. to do) Acting is doing. Do, and do not perform. And stop ‘acting’.
COACH
Mark Westbrook is Senior Acting Coach at Acting Coach Scotland
Based in Australia? Mark is coming to Sydney in November for a week-long intensive masterclass! Find out more here.