Think for Yourself

The system that currently exists in terms of Western acting is one of dependency. In the conservatory – the acting school, the university, college or studio – they teach you to obey. They also teach you to need. You need the teacher and as you pass from aspiring actor to working professional, you take your dependency with you into the profession.

Many of the acting exercises that you undertake in the school will require the positive approval of the teacher before you’ll have the slightest clue whether you were successful in the operation of the exercise. These exercises are mainly crap and they only enslave you to the good opinion of the charlatan teaching you. This charlatan will hand you on to directors having taught you nothing but obeisance.

When you reach the directors, you will have no tools with which to approach your job. Can this be true? Sure! Ask an actor how they do their job and you will get a lot of hot air and baloney and not much sense. Just watch the end segment of Inside The Actors Studio – it’s often presented as the lofty wisdom of those who have succeeded, but if you record it, go back and listen to what they’re saying, usually (not always) it’s entirely laughable. The real message is ‘I don’t know how I do what I do – just don’t catch me out on National TV admitting it’.

Actor training should lead the actor towards freedom and independence and not dependency and enslavement to the power figure in the room. You do not need them, you have a mind of their own.  I’m sure they have something to teach you, but if you give them your all, in a few years (weeks, months, or perhaps minutes) you will wake up and realise that they taught you nothing and that you know nothing of value from them.

Ask an actor to teach a class on acting and they scrabble for books on acting games. If they were successfully taught, surely they don’t need someone else’s silly games, they just teach the techniques they use. But of course, they don’t use techniques, they don’t know what they’re doing, they busk it with confidence and they get by. OR you get the opposite, those teaching the same old techniques they learned in drama school, without ever questioning them, or EVEN IF THEY WORK! (Because to admit they don’t work, is to admit that what we were taught is bullshit).

You have a brain. Be curious. Learn for yourself. Listen carefully to the instruction, try it out, but don’t wait for the good opinion of the charlatans and idiots that force you into compliance with their children’s games. Think for yourself. Question what they teach you, question what I teach you, wanting something to be useful is not the same as it having functional value. You are not robots, you can think for yourself.