How’m i doing?

A student asked me how would she know if she were doing it right, if she didn’t have me standing over her shoulder in the future. The answer I think is fairly simple.

With an improvisational style of acting like Practical Aesthetics, there is no way of knowing how you’re doing. Because to be entirely absorbed in the moment requires total commitment.

Those schools which teach the ludicrous, laughable ‘performance monitor’ are really just encouraging students to step out of the moment, stop acting and check in with themselves.

But how can such a monitor work without pulling you away from your only task – to help tell the story of the play through your interaction with other actors!?

And what do we have to check in with? Yesterday’s performance? Something we did 2 weeks ago in rehearsal?

That will only serve to distract you further as instead of dealing with your onstage task, you will start attempting to deliver yesterday’s performance today, deadening each moment of your performance and ignoring what’s happening today, in the here and right now.

This type of actor is entirely dependent upon their director. They are infantilised, like a child dependent on their Mother or Father. And so, like a child, they always want to check with Daddy for their approval. Like a child turning cartwheels, was it as good as last time Mummy?

So what can you do, surely to maintain quality we should uphold a certain standard?

True and in training, you learn, not to ‘repeat’ yesterday but to build a unique performance today. You learn to be the adult actor, responsible to the audience, clear of their job, not looking to repeat but to create uniquely in each moment.

This starts with understanding the material. I recently had a discussion with a friend, a long time, experienced actress. We were disagreeing over whether actors should read plays.

She argued it didn’t help her to act, no matter how many plays she read. And that human experience had taught her to act. I agree with much of this but at the end of the day, you will have nothing to bring your experience to bear upon if you do not feel comfortable with a script.

And so rather than ‘just’ reading plays, I implore actors to learn how to glean action from literature. To learn to ask the right questions and hone and sharpen the skill of helping to lift the actable from the page.

Without this, you would indeed flail in a terrifying improvised moment, with nothing to hold onto but the words. And under those conditions, who wouldn’t want to just repeat yesterday for security.

But with the experience of translating page to stage or screen, transforming literary ideas to life, you go out into what Mamet calls the terrifying unknown with something to do and someone to do it with.

Acting at it’s best is truthful, sincere and immediate, which means it can never be repeated. To live with this scary thought requires the actor to be bold and have courage.

When you have confidence in your understanding of what you will do tonight. You will go out on stage and bravely commit everything to each moment.

As was once said, it does not matter whether you play well or badly – only truly.