Wadda YOU know about Acting
You know, I receive quite a bit of abuse from people that don’t like what I have to say about acting. And while my style might sometimes be provocative, I do thoroughly believe what I teach and one of the reasons that I left my conservatory teaching post was that I wouldn’t be able to teach something that didn’t connect with my own ethos.
On the other hand, I understand people’s animosity. Acting is very personal, even audiences develop a sense of themselves as shareholders in their favourite actors. So if I criticise, they feel attacked. I understand. But rather than defend myself against the abusive emails, I’d like to share some of my thoughts on acting and point to the reasons behind doing what I do.
Why did I get into teaching and coaching actors? I was a theatre director. I studied and trained as an actor, and went on to train as a director. I was surprised by how many of my friends that were actors found it difficult to find work, even if they were very good. What’s more, those that got jobs had horror stories about weak directors with no understanding of acting, or great directors with no understanding of acting. Of course, there are directors with great understanding of acting, but I have only met a few. The actors that I knew got jobs found that other actors didn’t know how to work on a script, so most of rehearsal was spent somewhere between avoiding the script, playing games with no practicable relationship to the rehearsal of the text or what might be lightly described as ‘fannying about’.
My other experience was that after many years of drama school, most of the actors that I knew or met still struggled to know what to do when they got work. Their technique, or lack of, resulted in a hit and miss approach that basically depended entirely on whether they were lucky enough to learn something about text through osmosis. Those that had a technique seemed locked into it and no technique seemed to liberate the actor, only straight-jacket them.
This was the background to which I began to conceive Acting Coach Scotland. The trouble is, that if you’ve studied 3 years of fun but not particularly practicable stuff in drama school, then when you got a job, you knew how to work with a director but you didn’t know much about how to work, you aren’t going to believe that an acting coach can help you. IF the ‘experts’ in the drama schools and conservatories couldn’t help, then why could a coach help? What’s more, why would you risk your reputation to learn something new, when what you’ve been doing all along works adequately well? Well, frankly, because I didn’t get into the creative arts to be adequate. I want to be excellent and I want my students to be excellent too.
It’s rather simple for me, I’m not coming at it from the same angle. I’m breaking acting down into some simple elements:
Audition Skills
Preparation (Voice and Body Work)
Learning to Work off the Other Actors
Script Analysis
Scene Analysis
Performance Technique
Technical Skills (Blocking, Verse, Mic Technique, Camera Technique)
We don’t address intangibles like ‘character’ and ‘feeling’, we work through doing and action, which engages the body, the mind, the emotions and the spirit. You still need a natural knack for performing, a good imagination, and the capacity to improvise and live in the moment. What we do is different. The actors that work with us don’t require belief in the imaginary, they don’t require to play children’s game in order to act the scenes in the play or film they are in. We don’t approach creativity as something that the actor sets out to achieve, instead, we learn to remove the bars to creativity that are in place. Allowing creativity to exist without restraint. Funnily enough, when you do that, you don’t need to ‘invent’. As long as you refuse to ‘deny’ your creativity, it will come tumbling out of you all over the place. If you want to actively create, become an author or a painter. If you want to learn to tell great stories by performing the actions of a character in a film, tv show or play, then acting is the thing for you.
What I teach is a combination of ideas but generally come under the term ‘Practical Aesthetics’, the technique developed by David Mamet and WH Macy. It is the most hands-on practicable approach I’m yet to discover, it’s great fun and the skills that you learn can actually be used. It’s simple stuff, but it takes a while to master and at each stage of advancement, the bar is raised, just like in life.
On a different note: I met up with John Cooper, the photographer today for lunch, a very amiable guy who does actors’ headshots and I enjoyed learning more about headshot photography from him.