Recycle and not Reset

No, this isn’t a blog post about environmental sustainability, although you should be doing that thing too!

When we are working at our acting studio in Glasgow, we use the term to refer to repeating the scene that you are working on. When we get to the end of a scene, we ask the student to ‘recycle’ and not ‘reset’.
To reset is to start the scene from the beginning in every way, this includes going back to the original blocking and stopping the moment and starting fresh.

Instead, whatever the actor is doing at the end of the scene, that’s what we want them to do at the beginning. So, if the actor is praising another actor at the end of the scene, then that’s how they start the new scene.

This may seem a little odd, but the idea is for the actor to avoid breaking the moment, to have them deal with the truth of the moment and bring themselves back to their task in the scene.

It releases the actor from the idea that the scene should/can be done in a certain way and opens up the potential for the scene to anywhere. It also allows the actor to perform for any length of time on the same scene, discovering many new things about the scene. What’s essential is that each scene is a fresh chance to discover something new and every that you do is based on this new moment and not a desire to recreate an old moment. So at the end of the scene, we Recycle and not Reset.

Something to think about.