Reflections on a Conversation with Ian
My friend and fellow acting teacher Ian Watt was speaking with me in my office last week. We were talking about how we seem to actually teach acting from the other side of the looking glass. It’s as if we turn it around and everything that other people say about acting – we are saying the direct opposite. Not to be controversial, or special, but because that’s what we believe makes for the best performances. Yes, we see that people make performance in other ways, but we think there is a way that beyond even this, and it is the opposite of what the books and the teachers say.
So, it can be confusing when new students arrive and whether they have experience or not, we tell them:
You cannot become the character.
Leave the words alone.
Acting isn’t expressing emotion.
Performance is the result and not the objective.
Acting is a misnomer, it’s about being real.
It’s not about what you do, it’s about what you do to others…
No wonder they look at us as if we are Martians.
One of the most wonderfully articulated things that Ian said was on reflection of teaching our beginners over the past few years. He sees students struggling to improvise someone ‘asking for forgiveness’. Instead of placing their attention on another, and doing those things to the other that someone who needs forgiveness does, the students fake the state of pity.
Instead of working outwardly to affect another, they play the state of something. They work inwardly instead of outwardly. And when they do this, they fake it. And never very well.
Whatever you have to portray, you need to be, you can’t do that by trying to become it. If you need to play Seductive or Authority, the image you have in your head of what those things are will impede you.
It’s not about becoming those things, it’s about doing something to someone else that gives the impression of being those things. But if you play at it, if you pretend it, you will fail. Don’t look for why, the answer is not in why, it is how.
COACH