The SIX R’s of Acting

These SIX R’s are at the heart of acting (of course there’s more to it, but these SIX R’s are very helpful):

Resistance
One of the actor’s greatest enemies is their natural resistance to change, new things, the unknown and things that threaten their basic instincts. On the one hand, we all have boundaries to protect us from the ravaging Sabre Toothed Tiger (biologically) and (more recently) sleazy producers, but resistance is generally problematic. Sometimes resistance prevents us from experiencing something new. Often it prevents us from releasing ourselves, making ourselves vulnerable and going to new places as an actor.  I have met many great actors crippled by resistance. Resistance can occur in learning new things, experience new things, accepting ideas or changing.

Resilience
Parents constantly ask me “what does my child need, what’s the one thing they need to make it in the arts?”, and I always say the same thing and it refers to all of us, “resilience”. You are going to have sand kicked in your face, you will have a crisis of confidence, you may go months or years without earning a living from the art you love, only resilience will see you through it. Otherwise, you’ll give up and become a high school teacher, cos it’s easier and it’ll be closer to other people’s vision of you as a “grown up”. At every point on your journey, it will be easier to give up than to keep going, resilience means to keep going. As you get older and it becomes less and less socially acceptable for you to be broke all the time, it will get VERY hard. That’s when resilience will really come into its own.

Repetition
Repetition is a vital tool that is still NOT regularly taught in the UK Drama Schools. How they could begin to teach acting without the core skills that are developed through this exercise is beyond me. You can really learn to ‘adapt’ in the Stanislavskian sense to your scene partner if you are not used to it and faking it (which is what you do if you can’t do it for real) just doesn’t match up to it. The ability to take action based on the truth of the moment and based in what the other actor is doing, is an essential skill. The fact that it doesn’t come into three years of most British actor’s training is remiss to me. Simple repetition is unusual, scary, uncomfortable, and hard to relate to acting, but later as it develops it becomes essential.  Find a good repetition teacher and you have won half the battle.

Risk
Risk is difficult and especially hard (well, okay, impossible) if you aren’t already resistant. You don’t want to look like a fool, you don’t want to make a mistake, yet without making mistakes (without willing to get it wrong) then you will never really reach any truly spontaneous moments in your acting. As Joseph Campbell said “where you stumble, there you shall find your treasure”. It’s so important to allow yourself to stumble. Stop thinking about getting it right, put your focus on the right things and let everything else take care of itself. With time and efficient practice (under a good teacher) you will start to allow risk into your work and risk’s reward is spontaneity. A truly spontaneous moment comes as a shock to the actor. Take risks, as Sanford Meisner said “If you’re afraid, give in to it and be wrong”.

Rehearsal
Traditionally, rehearsal is a time when you repeat something over and over until it sticks. Rehearsal suffers from the terrible etymological relationship to the word ‘recite/recital’ which means ‘repeating from memory’. From this, we lose the need for our rehearsal process to be about exploration, experimentation and discovery. Rehearsal is a terrible term for what it is that we do.   It reminds me of the Mamet quote “what you practice, you will perform”, so if your rehearsal is the ossifying process of setting in stone everything you are going to do in performance, you are making concrete those things that need to live spontaneously in front of the audience. How could you possibly convince an audience that this is the first time you’ve said these lines if you’ve said them hundreds of times in the same way? You may do it sometimes, but you are working against the grain constantly, you are defying the truth in every moment.

Instead, rehearsal should be about learning the actions to take, so that your tactics can remain fluid and based on the actions of your fellow stage/screen partners. In essence, as Megan one of my students mentioned in class this week, we are preparing to work by instinct. Again David Mamet offers us a great quote for this occasion, rehearsal is preparation for performance so to learn to be immediate, to learn to live truthfully, “we prepare to improvise”.

Reviews
There are many reviewers that know a lot about acting and there are many that do not. You must ask yourself what value you place on the opinion of others. A reviewer works for a newspaper, a newspaper needs to maintain (in this climate) circulation. Their desired outcome is different from yours. But many reviewers offer very fair, very enlightened reviews, and some are just plain rude. I don’t think I’ve ever received an inaccurate review. When it was bad they said so, and I agreed. Mamet offers a great quote on reviews without trying to attack the reviewers and it’s something we can all learn and grow from as actors:

“The great reviews are never good enough and the bad ones are devastating.” David Mamet

Decide long in advance of your first reviews how you will deal with them, read them or don’t read them. Decide what value you place on them.  And then take action.