Pros and Cons of Acting Class
Thought I’d talk for a little bit about my newest foray into the acting world, that of teacher. I’m teaching an acting class at a local college. Not only that, I’m directing their semester musical. I’m only a week into it, and I’ve discovered already that the two jobs are damn near the same thing. There’s a huge amount of preparation beforehand, and, much like being a parent, you are expected to know everything. So by preparing for this class, I’m discovering just how much I don’t know about what I do.
I remember at one point during my college years realizing how little I felt like I was learning, and I don’t know if, as a result, I shut down and stopped learning, or if it just didn’t make sense to me then. I knew there was at least one professor whom I felt I knew more than, whether it was true or not. I remember being extremely disillusioned with Stanislavski, feeling like it served no real purpose. After all, the audience was never going to read my character analysis, so why bother doing it?
I’ve only had experience with a couple of “methods”, and neither of them appealed to me much just because they seemed to bog things down in rehearsal. I simply got more out of being onstage and doing it, and here I agree with David Mamet - the best actor training is to get on the stage and do it. Let the audience tell you what you’re doing wrong. Since acting is largely intuitive, and you have to learn how to “feel” what the audience is responding to, getting in front of them and showing them what you’ve got is the best way I’ve come across yet to teach you how to do it. This was the best part of my college experience; since there was no graduate acting program, everything was done by the undergrads. We got all the time onstage we could get cast for. This is a problem I see with the way that many programs are structured. You need the experience to learn, and how do you get the experience? It’s like trying to get your union card, when you have to get a union job to join, but you can’t get the job unless you’re union. Curiouser and curiouser.
There are pitfalls, of course, to the onstage training idea. If you’ve got a funny, expressive face, you may learn how to mug and that’s all. Or you may become a genius at slapstick. Or crying on cue. Whatever. All valuable skills to have, so in many ways the tims isn’t wasted. Real world experience has also made me lean more toward the attitude that it’s mostly intuition and bravery. When you’ve got two weeks of rehearsal time, including tech, to mount a show, you don’t waste a lot of time asking the director what your motivation is. You get up there and find it.
But it was my first show at the Children’s Theatre that taught me the value of training. I was playing Long John Silver in TREASURE ISLAND (helluva debut, eh? I loved that show and I would do it again in a heartbeat.), and Scot Copeland (Producing Director) would give us little motivations and ideas to get us to do what he wanted onstage. One day at the end of rehearsal he said,”All of this character stuff we do, it’s just for us. It’s fun for us, and it gets our imaginations working and gets us where we need to be. The audience will never see it. It’s not important that the audience knows what you’re thinking, it’s only important that they know that you ARE thinking, that SOMETHING is going on in your head up there. Let them see that in your face and your body, and they’ll fill in the rest.”
That’s when it all made sense. I still don’t do in-depth character analyses where I create a character in my head who looks different from me, who is taller or has different hair - all of that is pretty much useless to me, because no matter what, I’m gonna be six feet tall and I’m still gonna have black hair and brown eyes. But it’s knowing the WHY of what I do while I’m onstage that makes it fun for me and interesting for the audience. So I do analyze my scenes now and make sure that I know what’s going on. I do the actor homework, finding my beats and my actions. I know what my objectives are, and that makes it all easier. I’ve become a much better actor for it.
And now I’m supposed to pass that along to a new generation of actors, which is exciting and daunting at the same time. So I’m relearning everything myself to make sure that I know what I’m doing and what I’m saying. The last thing I want to do is turn these guys off by leaving something unexplained. So I find myself rewording what I want to say constantly and trying to find the right way to say what I mean. I have to know WHY. In the end, I’m going to become a better actor as well. Which is also exciting.
I also have to recommend A Practical Handbook For The Actor. I find it to be a very simple, effective approach to the craft of acting. It removes the bullshit and gets to the action. Acting is DOING, not being. This is my textbook for my acting class. What’s extremely beautiful about it is that it doesn’t belittle or negate any other acting training you may have. Instead, it simplifies it and relates it back to the whole. It gets to the heart of what every acting “method” is really about: knowing why you’re there, what you want, and how you’re going to get it. And above all, it advocates LISTENING to the other people onstage. Beautiful.
Acting is a full-body workout. It’s an intellectual/physical/emotional workout. If you’re doing it right. It makes every part of you strong and fit. Plus, chicks dig it. Or so I’m told. So what I’m getting at is this: training and education never hurts, it can only help. You shouldn’t accept anyone’s word at face value, especially when it comes to what you want to do for a living, but a little common sense and intelligence will help you extrapolate from those lessons, and in the end you’ll teach yourself loads about your craft. learn your tools and how to use them. They can only help you. The bag of tricks will run dry someday, and if you haven’t learned how to listen and how to learn, you’re gonna be out of work. Take what you can from training courses and use it ONLY IF IT HELPS YOU. If it gets in your way, leave it. But like a good tool, keep it stored away somewhere just in case you ever need it.
September 11th, 2006 at 11:48 am
I too have problems with Stanislavsky. WHy build up a character bio when all the character feels and is in the text. Honour the TEXT I always say. Everything you need to know is there. The text is the score. We do great writers a grave disservice to make up their characters for them, when they have already slaved away doing so themselves. But if you are doing it because chicks love it, or ‘dig’ it, as you say, maybe you are doing it also, like Stanislavsky, for the wrong reasons.
all the best .
October 1st, 2006 at 7:09 am
I am not loathe to admit that Stanislavski has his uses in emotional recall, but I must admit that I don’t consciously ‘think’ of recall when working on a text. For example, if I need to cry as a character I do not sit there thinking - now I have to cry - I need to relate this emotion to my past experience so that I may bring it forward and cry. No. I have found that the emotional state of the character I perform, is enough to do so. For instance, as Fidelia in Ariel Dorfman’s ‘Widows’, where she is speaking to her blinfolded father , I broke down at the very end, just prior to telling him they’ve taken Alexis away.. and this was in practice, rehearsing at home , it just happened. I don’t recall having to summon anything up. It just happened because of the way in which I reacted to the text - naturally. And it occurred each time thereafter, from association. And so my acting became very naturalistic as a result and the effect was succesful. I was so wrapped up in Fidelia. I believe trying to work with emotional recall with Stanislavski ’s method distances me from the character and doesn’t allow me to BE that character but restricts me to always being conscious of MYSELF as the charactwer, and I don’t believe this helps with naturalism in acting. Does this resonate with how you feel about it? I am grapploing at the moment with trying to understabd Stanislavski. I think he works very well on paper, in a book, and to read. But in practice, for me, he falls by the wayside the more I allow that character I portray to take over the me. I’m interested to what you think.
October 1st, 2006 at 7:13 am
PS sorry about the spelling errors. I have duff hands at a keyboard.
October 1st, 2006 at 8:10 am
Rebecca,
We are going to read some of your comments on the podcast next week! I have to say that I think that the way that most schools are teaching Stanislavski nowadays looks much different than the way he originally intended it. I have always said that the best acting technique is the one that works for you, personally. There are aspects of Stanislavski that work very well for me (the textual analysis stuff, for example), but the rest of the work that I do on a character in rehearsals is an amalgamation of a bunch of different stuff that I’ve picked up over the years.
I’m not saying it’s perfect, but it works for me! Just like everything else, you have to dedicate yourself to a lifetime of learning when you take on this profession. The more and diverse training you receive, the stronger your acting will be!
Thanks for the comment!