Why Acting is Ping Pong not Chess
Yesterday we spoke about why textual analysis is a busy but fruitless endeavour, today I want to explain why I believe so many people have the wrong idea about acting, and by people, I mean actors, directors and (cringe) acting teachers too.
The standard model of acting practice is wrong. It propounds that acting is like playing chess.
Chess is a game to be studies, considered over, every move is calculated for it’s pros and cons. Years and decades after, chess players can study famous moves and positions and pit themselves against the same situation and cogitate over the right and wrong moves.
In the chess model of acting, everything is prepared in advance, the lines are gleaned for their meaning – textual and subtextual and strong creative, artistic, academic and intellectual reasons are given for the choices.
All the choices are made up front, so that no decision is made without serious contemplation. We still imagine that we play the game in the moment, but really, nothing is left to the moment.
Character work, emotional preparation, textual analysis, it all belongs to the chess model of acting, where decisions can be pondered over in advance and then trotted out later.
To my mind, acting is not chess at all, it is ping pong or table tennis if you prefer.
In table tennis, years of practise come to fruition in an instinctive, moment to moment, action-reaction game, in which to be out of the present moment is to lose the point or even the game.
In table tennis, you still attempt to out manoeuvre your opponent, but there is no time to think about it, it’s simply a matter of reacting to what is happening now. Ping players don’t watch the ball, they instinctively respond to what the other player is doing in the present moment, if they were to wait to see what the ball is doing, they would be too late.
All their cues are taken from what the other player is doing in the moment, their reaction is unprepared, they instinctively allow years at the table influence their reaction. They bring years of expertise, training and honing their reactions to the moment, so that in the moment – thought is second to action.
In the chess model, thought is primary. In the ping pong model, action primary.
In ping pong, everything is secondary to the moment. Nothing can be prepared for, practice has taught them how to improvise in the moment. As they say in military strategy: No plan ever outlives first contact with the enemy.
In other words, in the heat of the moment, our planning goes out the window as we respond to the here and now.
In the heat of the moment. The actor will inevitably drop all their intelligent preparation, their textual analysis, the character work, it all goes out the window. The trouble is… The chess model actor spends so much time in contemplation that when all that flies out their ears in the heat of the moment, they’re improvising in panic mode.
The ping pong actor is also improvising in the moment, they’re also a little scared, but they live in that place, and so it’s exhilarating to deal with what Mamet calls ‘the terrifying unknown’.
The chess actor is left staring at the pieces, studying, trying to figure out where it all went wrong.