Lazy or just adrift?
After teaching Step 1 yesterday evening, Ian Watt and I (like Waldorf and Statler) sat in a snug in a local bar and wrote this blog together.
I was concerned with why sports people seem harder working than actors…
Are actors just lazy? Sometimes it might seem like it, particularly compared to sports people:
It’s because most of them don’t know what their doing. They spend a great deal of time in a mire of uncertainty.
They’re pretty certain the director doesn’t know what they’re doing. And the rest of the cast won’t admit what it either.
So they’ve no idea what they should be spending their time doing. With this level of uncertainty, it’s no wonder they become static, giving the impression that they’re lazy.
This lack of direction, creates the appearance of laziness. This results in the actor randomly and desperately searching for their own direction, looking for the ‘right’ shoes in a second hand shop, or hours spent in the library researching the socio-historic epoch.
They know they should be busy. But most have no clear idea of what they should be busying themselves doing.
People like to work, they like purposeful occupation, meaningful tasks.
But most of our current methods of training do not provide the actor with consistent tools that help them find a meaningful task.
It’s alright complaining about it, someone emailed me, but do you have an answer?
Actually…
Even our introductory students, after a few hours have the basic tools to occupy themselves in rehearsal with purpose.
As we spoke of yesterday, most of the current model of rehearsal is an exercise in wasting time and flogging a dead horse.
Since no one knows what to do, we occupy ourselves in entertainments and distractions fit for a children’s birthday party. Those that won’t play nicely with the other kids are chided for their lack of…commitment.
If you have no target to aim at, you become slack. And if you realise the whole profession is doing the same and it’s unlikely to be any different, you’ll soon become bored and that will lead laziness.
The flip side of this is the so-called Method actors, who are occupied with a multiplicity of meaningful tasks.
They are the one eyed man, king of the blind, because they have direction, and it’s lauded by fellow actors and audiences alike for their ‘hard work’ in producing -stand out- performances, which wrench all meaning from the writer’s hand and over-write it with the actor’s own self-possessed/obsessed vomit.
As Brant L Pope writes “The propensity to demonstrate character is often reinforced by both conventional Method training and the director in rehearsal, leaving actors trapped inside a world of imitation and self-indulgence.”
There is an alternative, it’s called common sense and the queue starts right outside our studio door.