What Acting is NOT

For Tom, get better soon buddy, we miss you.

Some acting teachers will tell you that acting is the ability to create emotional realities and imaginary worlds.  They are talking shit.  They have no idea how to create emotional realities and they certainly haven’t got the foggiest when it comes to imaginary worlds.

And it’s exactly this kind of bullshit that people have been fed for years.  And when you realise that this type of stuff just eats into your life and budget, you wake up angry at being short-changed by so-called acting teachers.

We cannot look to our old friend Stanislavski for the solution, because Stanislavski and the schools based on his ideas are essentially giving us an out of date history lesson.

Being a professional actor has NOTHING to do with slavish adherence to out of date methods, nor being able to create emotional states, emotional realities, or ‘imaginary worlds’

The fakes and the frauds have convinced themselves that acting is playing emotionally. That acting is living inside imaginary environments, they’ve convinced themselves because the reality is that if they confess to themselves what they know to be the truth, they’d have to shut up shop and get a real job.

And the public have bought into their voodoo and parrot is back as if ‘emotional life’ and ‘imaginary worlds’ and all the nonsense of the Method are the only way to act.

And then they say that approaches like mine are too ‘cold’, to ‘analytical’.  Yes, I agree, we work analytically on the script, because like to understand what we’re dealing with. But no, they don’t like that, because to do that would deny the … (insert mystical bullshit here).

First, you must understand the script, then all the rest can come.  I don’t care what technique you use.  But using voodoo bullshit terminology has never helped a single actor to do anything, they lose faith in technique and they go back to their acting careers poorer in all sense.

Acting is not ‘eliminating emotional blocks’, in fact, acting has little to nothing to do with emotions. Emotions are a byproduct of a truthful interaction between people.

If you are going to be a truly great actor, do not let yourself get caught up in all the old-fashioned, mystical voodoo crap that acting teachers sell as technique.  You need a simple, common sense, practicable approach that illuminates and does not obfuscate the process even further.

And YES, that IS what I am selling, because I know that what I teach works. And it works consistently.  And if you can capture the essence of the approach that I teach at ACS, and you use it, you WILL get better and better, you will get better and better.  Nothing can stop you.

How do I know? Because my acting students are already doing it. Not by accident, by the design of a simple approach.

Here’s what I’m selling. CRAFT. STRUGGLE. STUDY. GRAFT.

No mystical wisdom. Straight forwards, practical acting classes at our Glasgow Acting Studio. Nothing more, nothing less.

If you can commit to that, instead of committing yourself to indulge the bullshit merchants, then you have a chance at being truly great.

COACH

Mark Westbrook is the owner and Senior Acting Coach at Acting Coach Scotland, an independent acting studio based in Glasgow.