No Place for Brutality

Acting teachers and acting coaches come in all shapes and sizes, with many different personalities. The type of training you receive often has a lot to do with the type of acting coach you have.

But brutality is not something that the acting studio should teach you. Because it is not the responsibility of the acting teacher to humiliate, bully or brutalise you.

They are there to nurture you and develop you into an actor.

Instead what you find are acting teachers who attack their students out of frustration with them, or perhaps worse, they humiliate their acting students and call ‘honesty’.

That’s horseshit. How you choose to speak to your students is within your control.

Sadly, many students, masochistically accept their teacher’s brutality, since they believe it is good for them, and legitimise this approach through their acceptance of it. They may even thank their teacher for such straight forwards honesty.

But victim mentality doesn’t add real credibility to these charlatans.

Telling the truth, not letting an actor hide, correcting them, challenging them, even provoking them a little is one thing, but it’s something totally different to use brutality as a weapon of pedagogy.

I fully reject these charlatan bullies and their unnecessary approach, their half-cocked, half-baked pseudo-psychological crap.

Your coach, is your guide, your confidant, your sensei as the Japanese call it. One who goes before. They must teach their students first with respect.

Anyone who brutalises you and says they are doing it for your own benefit is like the father who beats his child, because it willmake a man out of him. It is the abuse of a coward.

And do not be the victim of this person, your acceptance of their bullshit legitimises it.