A Word About “Staying in the Moment” Onstage

Posted on February 8, 2014 by J.

Writing about acting is challenging. It is difficult to be precise enough to be sure you’re receiving what I’m trying to communicate. In trying to write the final posts on the topic of “How to Use the Tools”, I keep finding things that I think you need to understand first if I can hope for you to really “get” what I mean about the tools. So please forgive me if I take another detour for a few posts.

What I really want to talk about is rehearsals, but I think what I have to say might have a little more clarity if I first talk a little bit more about the concept of “staying in the moment.”

I think both of these concepts are easily misunderstood, albeit for slightly different reasons. Shifting your perspective from what you are “sure of” is necessary if you’re going to improve as an actor, but it’s a very difficult shift. And here’s why.

“Staying in the moment”, whether it be as an actor or an athlete or anything else you may do, is very difficult. Heck, it’s supremely difficult to do just as a human being. People spend years studying Buddhism, in part, to learn to do just that. It’s a lifetime journey, and it’s still difficult to do it consistently at the end of it. But it is what produces quality work (or a quality life) of any kind.

Why is it so difficult to do something that came so naturally to us as very young children? Well, that’s a topic for someone else’s blog, and a lengthy one at that. Let’s just accept that after a certain, far-too-young age, it uniformly is. We may think we are in the “Now”, but we’re usually in the Past, or the Future, or both, occasionally flickering through the Present, but never for very long.

I know many people who tell me they’ve tried to meditate, but they just can’t seem to do it, to “stop thinking”. Well, those thoughts all belong to the Past or the Future, not the Present. A clear indication that you can’t possibly live in the Now very much. In fact, it’s been suggested that we spend 95% of our time OUT of the Now!

Because we aren’t very good at staying in the moment in our real lives, most of us don’t possess the natural ability to do so on stage, either. A few lucky ones do, right from the beginning. They are exceptionally gifted, although I will wager that over time, they will start thinking a little too much and will have to learn how to be in the moment all the time. But because they are gifted, they will be able to learn this fairly quickly.

A slightly larger portion of the population can stay in the moment sporadically despite having no training. I’m in that group. When I was younger, I gave performances when I was in the moment, and performances when I wasn’t. And while I knew which performances were more successful, I had no idea why, and I certainly had no control over when it happened. Sometimes I got lucky, and sometimes I felt like I was in a paper bag, trying to push my way out.

I learned how to control it one night in scene class. I had done the scene the week before, and I had nailed it. My scene partner hadn’t, though, and so we worked on it for another week. And this time I was awful. I was trying so hard to recapture my brilliance of the previous week (my first mistake) and was failing miserably. It wasn’t a terrible performance, in the grand scheme of things, but it utterly lacked the spontaneity and charm of the previous week. Afterward, my teacher explained to me what had happened, and I suddenly got it. I had the ability to put two performances of the same scene side-by-side, and to compare what was going on internally in each. I suddenly not only understood the difference between a perfectly serviceable but uninspired performance and a great one, I also knew what caused each and how to actively pursue the great one.

But most of the population who acts for fun or profit does not, at least initially, have the ability to stay in the moment, and your ability to learn how to do this on your own is limited. The odds are very good that you need at least a little assistance in this regard.

Why? Because we have dualistic brains. We know what we know because we can compare and contrast it with other things. A chair is not only a chair because it is like other chairs, it is a chair because it is not a table. Because it is not a teddy bear. Or a paper clip.

So it’s difficult to know what “staying in the moment” is like if you can’t compare it to “not staying in the moment”. If you’ve never had someone do you the favor my acting teacher did for me that day, and say (effectively, although in much kinder terms), “What you did last week was fantastic, but this week was crap,” you may only be able to have a general sense of what “staying in the moment” might mean. But not a real understanding.

I think I’ve told you that I have occasion, now and then, to chat with fellow actors about acting, and if the phrase “staying in the moment” comes up, they will nod sagely, as if they not only know precisely what it means, they practice it conscientiously every time they are on stage. And I know they sincerely believe this, but I’ve also seen their work, and so I also know that they manage to dance through the moment periodically, but to never stay there for any period of time.

Not their fault. They really think they’re working correctly, and until they decide that there might be a better “them” yet to discover, they won’t learn what “staying in the moment” really means. Because it doesn’t mean concentrating only on what is happening on stage, without regard for your shopping list or the fact that you forgot to pick up your dry cleaning this afternoon.

“Concentrating” and “staying in the moment” are not the same thing. It is perfectly possible to fully concentrate and still be completely focused on yourself and your own performance. It is perfectly possible to look your scene partner in the eye without wavering and still be completely focused on yourself and your own performance. And when you are focused on yourself and your own performance, it is nearly impossible to stay in the moment.

To read What Are Rehearsals For? Part I, go here. To read Part II, go here. To read Part III, go here.

Directors Use Adjectives, Actors Use Verbs

Posted on February 6, 2014 by J.

(A slight detour from the tools’ posts, which are still a work-in-progress…)

Let’s say you’re still making this transition, trying to learn how to avoid thinking in terms of angry, innocent, deceitful. You’ve studied the script, you’ve marked your beats, you’ve found your verbs, and by God, you really are trying to play them for all they’re worth!

Then you’re at rehearsal one night, and the director says to you, “You used to be angrier in this scene.” Or, “Could you be a little more confused when she asks you that?” Or, “I think the scene would work better if you were more excited when she comes home.”

It’s almost like offering an alcoholic a cocktail, only with much less serious repercussions. But there’s a strong temptation to comply. You want to please your director, and he must know better than you do, that’s why he’s in charge! You may not even realize that he’s putting you back on Adjective Road, so eager are you to “get it right.”

But there is something worth noting: your director has a different job to do than you do, and adjectives/adverbs are part of the language he is apt to speak. He may not even be aware of this adjective/verb thing. He’s going to continue to use adjectives, and you know what? That’s just fine.

Because you can translate them into verbs.

Why does he use adjectives and adverbs if they aren’t part of a good actor’s language? Because he’s not an actor. Because it’s a quick way to communicate what he wants; verbs take longer to find. Because even though it’s live theater, his view is almost cinematic, and so he is dealing on some level with images, sounds, emotions. Large brush strokes. And because he naively thinks that he is getting to the heart of the matter and being helpful.

So if he asks you for anger, or confusion, or excitement, he’s not really telling you how to do your job. He’s just telling you what he wants to experience viscerally. He may not even know what he means, exactly; but he’ll know it when he sees it from you.

It’s not his job to learn an actor’s verbs; it’s your job to translate his instructions into terms that are meaningful for you.

So maybe “angry” becomes, “I want to make you accept me as I am!” Maybe “confused” becomes, “I want to understand how this happened.” Maybe “excited” becomes, “I want to get married tomorrow, not next week!”

You may need to take a minute in rehearsal to make this translation, which goes something like this:

“Angry? Angry. Why would I be angry in this part of the scene? What is it that I want that I’m not getting, and why does not getting it upset me so? How can I raise my stakes in this scene, so that not getting what I want really pisses me off?”

When you have a verb you can actively play that will help you produce anger, you can move forward with the rehearsal. But if you allow yourself to revert to using adjectives just to please your director now, that choice will have a negative impact on your performance, and that won’t please your director later. You’re just postponing that difficult discussion for another day down the road, when he realizes that you aren’t making the progress with the scene that he had hoped for. And believe me, he’s not going to realize that he hamstrung you back at the rehearsal where he asked you to play angry.

Take the time you need to make the translation and then to consider how this adjustment might affect the scene. Then play the scene again, with the adjustment.

I’ve never met a director who objects when an actor asks for a minute or two to make an adjustment. Don’t feel that you can’t ask for time. In the long run, you are helping the production and saving it time. Trust that.

To read Big Verbs vs. Little Verbs, go here. To read Why Playing Verbs is (Ultimately) Easier Than Acting Emotions, go here.

Good Process = Great Performances

Posted on February 5, 2014 by J.

“for colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf” (From Page to Stage)

I direct community theater plays. I’ve worked with actors with natural talent and actors with little natural talent, with lots of experience or none at all. Actors with different learning styles and ways of processing information. Of these, perhaps three gave indications through how they worked that they knew something about what they were doing. Everyone else was flying by the seat of their pants.

My directing style reflects the fact that I am a teacher by nature. A few moments in rehearsal are clearly instructive, but mostly, I introduce technique without specifically saying, “Okay, this is something you want to use in every play you do.” I hope that my actors will realize the benefits of what they are doing and carry some small portion of that experience forward into other plays. I am sowing seeds, as it were.

“When Men Are Scarce” (Caribbean Community Theatre)

I ask my actors to work in ways that use the tools without actually identifying them as tools. I help them to work in healthy, organic, productive ways that they’ve never used before. I help them to work in the way well-trained actors do, and every time they veer off course, I push them back on.

I don’t do the work; they do. I just make sure they are working correctly. Good process = great results.

My rehearsals are hard work. I have high expectations and encourage them to strive for greatness. And to a man (and woman), they do.

“A Christmas Carol” (From Page to Stage)

It’s a different way of working, and it’s uncomfortable for them. I run scenes as much as I can, but less than most community theater directors do. I work the beats. I work moments. I dig for motivations. I demand great physicality. As you’ll see when I talk about blocking, I keep my actors moving.

Actors have so much to learn in the course of my rehearsals that when they think about opening night, I can see the panic in their eyes. After five weeks, they have no confidence that this thing is going to come together in time. Everything still seems like a haphazard work-in-progress. They can’t make many conscious decisions, because I keep changing things just enough that they are always a little off-balance. “Where’s the run-throughs that are my security blanket?!?”

Once we start with run-throughs every night, I still have this annoying habit of stopping mid-scene and addressing issues that I deem too critical to wait for notes. Over the next couple of weeks, the interruptions become fewer, and the notes start addressing tiny details instead of major issues. As we approach tech week, we are fine-tuning at a level the actors have never done before. And now, the actors are beginning to think that we just might pull this off.

“Moonlight and Magnolias” (Caribbean Community Theatre)

And two nights before we open, they kill it. They absolutely kill it. And they know it. They have brought this play to a place they never dreamt of. They have each gone well beyond what they thought they were capable of.

It happens every time. No matter who is in the cast, or how little experience they have. Good process = great performances. And you can do it without me there to guide you. I promise.

To read Trusting Your Subconscious, go here. To read The Subconscious Effect, go here.

Trusting Your Subconscious

Posted on February 4, 2014 by J.

How I swing the golf club isn’t going to be exactly the way you do. Our golf swings are as unique as our personalities. But good golf swings all have certain things in common. You can’t break the laws of physics and have success.

When I break the golf swing into little pieces so I can learn to do it better, I can clearly identify what works and what doesn’t work, using these natural laws. I can then practice what works over and over.

Acting is different. This is a new play, and I don’t have a clear destination. What I did in the last play doesn’t apply. I am starting from scratch and have to figure out what works in this play, with this cast. Acting is a creative, subjective art, and we make our way to a final performance bit by bit.

So how do you decide what works in a role, which “bits” to keep and which to discard?

The best way is to let your subconscious decide for you. As I’ve said, it is much better equipped to synthesize everything into a cohesive performance than your conscious brain is.

This doesn’t mean that you won’t make some conscious decisions throughout rehearsals. You will. But if you refuse to set them in stone until your subconscious lets you know what conclusions it’s come to, you’ll give a more integrated and complete performance.

So how do we keep our conscious brains from doing what they love to do: make decisions left, right, and center?

It’s an act of self-discipline, for starters. You have to learn to intentionally sit on the fence for a while, to refuse the temptation to hop down on one side or another. To hold open the possibility that something is different than what you expect it to be. That your subconscious may have a different opinion.

It’s a product of actively seeking opposites, and developing a willingness to experiment.

It’s a function of inputting data into the computer (your subconscious), and trusting that it will do its calculations and spit out the right answer. I can assure you that it will. Learning to act is, in part, a matter of learning to stop manipulating your subconscious and to trust it instead.

I tell my golfers that their subconscious knows how to play golf, and that if they could only shut down their conscious brains, they’d all play great. And it’s true. Your subconscious will compensate for your swing flaws as much as it can, because it knows what you’re doing wrong. It’s fascinating to watch.

The same thing applies to acting. Your subconscious will find your character much faster than your conscious brain will. And time is, after all, of the essence. A rehearsal period is finite.

Ah, but I hear you say, “You are asking me to trust this blindly, to not only try these things in class, but to try them when I’m in a play. But what if they don’t work? I’ll make a fool of myself on opening night!”

No, you won’t. And I’ll explain why I am so confident of this in the next post.

To read The Subconscious Effect, go here. To read Good Process = Great Performances, go here.

The “Subconscious Effect”, or Why You Can’t Do Any Acting Until You’re Off Book

Posted on February 3, 2014 by J.

Have you ever been part of a theater production that seemed to be noticeably better on the second weekend of performances? Have you personally experienced moments in the last couple of weeks of rehearsal, or during performances, when you did something, said something, in a completely different way than you ever had before? And it surprised you, but it worked?

Not only did it work, but it was so much better than anything you could have dreamt up if you’d tried! It was a “gift of the acting gods”, who kindly sent you a little epiphany.

If so, you’re looking at what I call the “subconscious effect”.

Your subconscious is not only in the business of making you happy; it is in the business of synthesizing disparate things into a “whole”. Your conscious can’t do this very well, because you can only hold so many things in your head at once. Even if you’re a great multi-tasker, you’ve got your limits, and creating a believable and interesting character on stage surpasses them.

So your subconscious plays a very large role in what you do on stage. Yes, your conscious brain has a function during acting, too. Among other things, it notices when something unusual happens that needs to be acknowledged (like when your earring falls on the floor.) It notices when the audience’s laughter has crested, and you can deliver your next line. And it saves the day when someone forgets their lines.

But most of the heavy-lifting in performance is done by your subconscious. Learning how to act is, in part, figuring out how to keep your conscious brain from interfering with your subconscious.

In the first weeks of rehearsal, your conscious brain is fairly active. It’s putting data into the computer. Your subconscious is participating, too, but it’s difficult for it to be involved continuously in this phase. That’s okay. The more you do this, the more you’ll learn how to make room for it. But right now, don’t worry if you notice that you’re “thinking” more than you’re “not thinking”. (You will find that the tools I’m introducing you to help you to “not think” in a constructive way.)

As long as you have a script in your hand, your conscious brain is more active than you want it to be. Both the physical presence of a script in your hand, which you won’t be carrying in performance and is therefore unnatural and distracting, and the ability (or need) to read lines rather than speak them from memory impede what your subconscious can do. You are too aware of the mechanics and the underlying unreality of what you are doing – that is, that you are pretending to be someone else – to do any real acting.

You can lay a great foundation for real acting in these early weeks of rehearsal. Absolutely! And that’s what you should be using this time for. But don’t for a minute think that you’re doing anything worthy of an audience at this stage.

Once you get off book, your subconscious gets very busy and does work on your role that you aren’t aware of. This is where good acting comes from. Once your subconscious has the freedom to work, because your conscious brain has started to cede to it, the character finally starts to seem like a real person. And it’s because this happens that people think that Learning Process #2 is sufficient. They understand that the subconscious is working in some mysterious way. But think how much more your subconscious can do for you if you give it more quality data using Process #3!

To read Trusting Your Subconscious, go here. To read Good Process = Great Performances, go here.

Good Lord!

Posted on February 2, 2014 by J.

I try to keep my blog posts short and consumable, which is why I sometimes end up with multi-parters. Sometimes topics are longer than a single post, and so I try to break them into the smallest bits possible, to stick to my self-assigned word count and thereby hold your attention.

But I know that I am pushing my readers’ patience on this one. I started with this very practical, “How the heck do I use the tools effectively?”, and I’ve gone conceptual on you, talking about learning processes for three posts, and now I’m about to move into the subconscious for three posts:

The Subconscious Effect, or Why You Can’t Do Any Acting Until You’re Off Book (read here)
Trusting Your Subconscious (read here)
Good Process = Great Performances (read here)

But if you are reluctant to trust what I’m telling you, to actually try doing what I suggest when you are under the gun, facing an opening night that your entire family will be attending, then understanding what is in these posts will help you to trust. None of us knows our own subconscious, except indirectly, so it can be difficult to trust both its power and capabilities. As I’m writing these posts, I realize that these tools are all in service of helping you to quiet your conscious brain when it is making too much noise, using your conscious brain in ways that will actually benefit you (but which you probably aren’t doing right now), and giving your subconscious more latitude than you usually do.

And from that comes great acting. No matter who you are.

Figuring out how to use your subconscious on your own takes time. I want to put you on a shortcut. I want to introduce you to your subconscious early in your development, so that you can recognize when it’s around. Because it will make an immediate, noticeable difference in what you do on stage. Who wants to slog through the usual slow learning process when you can be fast-tracked?

So please trust that I will get back to the practical as soon as I can, and at least skim these theoretical posts. Because they help to explain the process in their own way — just not in my usual hands-on fashion!

The Learning Process, Part III (The Fastest Route)

Posted on February 2, 2014 by J.

When it comes to acting, there are two levels of learning. One is learning technique – the tools we are talking about. But once you’ve learned technique, the learning process doesn’t stop in the way that it did when you learned to drive. Each time you do a play, you have to learn the play. Rehearsals are all about learning. So understanding the learning process and how you can use it to your benefit matters.

Given that we have a short time frame for rehearsals, we want to move as much knowledge about the play and our character as we can into our subconscious as fast as possible. The better we get at this, the more layered and interesting our performances will be.

So what’s the fastest way to learn? Intentional focus.

The best way to learn to do something well is by breaking it into its smallest parts and getting really good at each of those parts without regard to any of the other parts.

Let me say that again, because it’s really important: If you can give up attachment to how you do all those other things, and just pay attention to how you do this one particular small piece of the big puzzle, you’ll get really good at this one particular small piece of the puzzle, and in surprisingly short order, too.

Let’s look back at the Process #2 example. If we stop worrying about all the other things we do “wrong”, and just pay attention to the speed of our backswing, we can figure out what is going on in our backswing and what corrections we need to make. If we stop worrying about what the ball is doing – the final product – we can focus on making the backswing the correct speed, and by repeating it often enough, we can groove the speed so well that it becomes part of our subconscious behavior, and we can turn our attention to something else.

Confuse our subconscious by trying to do too many things at once and not doing any of them well, and it takes a while to learn. Isolate the pieces that we are trying to learn so we are giving our subconscious clear information about our expectations, and we can learn much more quickly. Get the process right, and the final product will take care of itself.

Acting isn’t golf. We aren’t trying to create a perfect, repeatable swing every time. We’re trying to create a character who lives and breathes in ways that may be unique every night. But as actors, we are as prone to focusing on final product – our performance on opening night – as a golfer is. It is just as true for us that process is what matters, and that good process results in great performances. This is what we call “staying in the moment.” (More on that another time.)

Okay. I’m now going to wind my way back to the matter of acting tools. I’m going to talk a little about the role your subconscious plays in your acting, because it will help you to commit to using the tools. And then I’ll talk about the practical aspect of how you put the tools together.

See Part I here, and Part II here.

The Learning Process, Part II (The Usual Route)

Posted on February 1, 2014 by J.

The second way to learn is to actively try to get better. We gain a little bit of knowledge, enough to get a feel for the complexity of what it is that we are trying to do. If I’m learning to play golf, at this point I understand that I have to learn to rotate my arms in a particular way, to push the club away from me rather than lifting it, to deal with weight shift, maintaining spine angle, keeping my head behind the ball, not rushing my backswing, following all the way through, finishing high . . .

“Sheesh! That’s a lot to pay attention to, but okay – I want to learn this game, and learn it quickly! So I make a swing. And I have this feeling that I swung too quickly, and I know I did the weight shift wrong, and I hit behind the ball, so I must have done something else wrong, and I don’t know if I finished correctly or not. Did I get all the way through? And look what the ball did! It never got higher than ten feet off the ground, and it’s over in the bushes, I don’t know if I can even find it over there.

“Let me swing again, I’ll do it better this time. Oops! I lost my balance that time, and I’m not sure what happened in the second half of the swing, but the club was doing some really weird things, and I could really tell that I rose up that time. And the ball popped up and went left, but it came down just as quickly.”

How much learning do you think is going on here?

You can eventually sort everything out using this approach, but it’s a little time-consuming. You gradually figure out what matters and what doesn’t. Take a new physical activity, for instance. You don’t know what muscles are required to get the job done initially. But as you go along, your subconscious figures out what muscles don’t need to participate, and it shuts them down.

As long as you are actively paying attention to what happens (unlike the golfer in the previous example), the wheat and the chaff get separated over time. You may go down some wrong paths, but you figure that out before you get too far, and you come back to the fork in the road and follow the other route.

But a certain amount of what happens in this learning process is serendipity. Your subconscious is looking out for you and it does its best to make you happy. Sometimes the best it can do it to try to save you from yourself, but given enough time, your subconscious will often figure out how to do something better. What it can’t do, using this process, is figure out how to be great.

Why? Because the rehearsal process is short. Whether you use a two or six or eight week rehearsal period, it’s a finite length of time. With each play, you’re starting the learning process at zero, but you don’t have the leisure to learn at your own pace. No one is going to delay opening night so that you can improve your performance.

I guess you can figure out that my personal preference is Learning Process #3 . . .

To read Part I, go here. For Part III, go here.

The Learning Process, Part I (The Path of Least Resistance)

Posted on February 1, 2014 by J.

So how do we develop good acting technique?

Let me digress just a bit and talk about the learning process.

In a previous post, I talked about your conscious brain being a Commodore 64 computer, while your subconscious brain, by comparison, is 1,000 times better than the most sophisticated computer and software presently available. Let’s take that a little further and say that your conscious brain is like the computer’s RAM, while your subconscious is all the files you have saved.

Your conscious brain is the threshold over which knowledge passes into your head. While you’re learning something, your conscious brain seems to do most of the work. Once you’ve learned it, it is largely resident in your subconscious brain, from which it can be called forth when needed.

As actors, we want to move knowledge into our subconscious as much as possible, so that our subconscious can play a very big role in what we do on stage. Yes, our conscious brain will be active during a performance, too, but great acting requires that your subconscious participates. A lot.

There are three basic ways that we can teach our subconscious. I’ll explain how they impact acting, and you can choose which route you’d like to take.

First, understand that your subconscious doesn’t have a value system. It’s your conscious brain that decides ice cream is good, while sorbet is bad. (My husband’s opinion; I love sorbet.)

Your subconscious does understand frequency, however. Do the same thing over and over, and your subconscious will learn to do that thing very well. Why? Because it equates frequency with desire, and your subconscious wants you to be happy. It wants you to succeed, and its job is to help you do that.

So it does its best to learn whatever it thinks you want to do, and to learn to do it better. To learn to do as much of it as possible without troubling your conscious brain, freeing your conscious brain up to find world peace or the best price on a hotel. A lot of your day is spent doing things on autopilot, thanks to your subconscious. And isn’t that a good thing! Remember how you had to pay full attention when you were learning to drive? Now you can have a conversation when you drive without having an accident.

Self-taught golfers eventually come for lessons. They have tried to imitate what they see others do, but they don’t know enough about the golf swing in the early stages to make the right choices. They can’t see what they look like when they swing. They imagine they look like Tiger Woods, when in fact they look like Charles Barkley. (If you’ve never seen Barkley play golf, take my word for it, it’s not pretty.)

They have swing flaws that they have grooved over the years through repetition, and they come to me to undo years of learning in one lesson. Which is extremely difficult to do. Their flawed motion is firmly embedded in their subconscious, and it is only with great conscious discipline that they can change that.

How does this approach to learning affect an actor? You make choices early in the rehearsal process, what seem to be the “obvious” choices about how to say your lines. You have a “vision” of what you want the final performance to look like, and so you rush to put those pieces of the puzzle together and trust that everything else will fit in, over time. Once you’ve got a few weeks under your belt, you’ll be comfortable with the material, and then you can really start to explore it.

“Getting comfortable” typically means run-throughs. Let’s run that scene again! And again! And when I’m home rehearsing and memorizing my lines, I’m going to read them over and over. And I’ll probably do a little bit of “acting” as I memorize them. So I’m not just memorizing the words, I’m memorizing my surprise when you tell me you eloped with someone you met last week.

Before you know it, you’ve memorized a “primitive” performance, one without nuance or a real understanding of the character (which only comes with time. You just met this character, after all.) You’re well on your way to a performance that is superficial, with no real emotional core to it. If you’re talented, you can shine this baby up, but you will never be able to give it a soul. You can’t peel back the exterior you’ve created to add the foundation halfway through the rehearsal process, because adding the foundation is going to change the exterior. At this point, you’re committed to the exterior. You have grooved that swing.

Early run-throughs – repeating the scene without having a reasonably good idea of what you are trying to achieve in doing so – are the death-knell for great acting.

To read Part II, go here. To read Part III, go here.

What Do I Do With These Acting Tools? Part II

Posted on January 31, 2014 by J.

If we have a strategy, a process, a way of going about things that is intentional on some level, the odds are very good that we will perform whatever activity we’re doing as efficiently and effectively as possible.

Let’s say you’re cooking. Maybe you’re making Yorkshire pudding. Maybe you’re baking bread. Or an apple pie. Whatever you’re making, you need some skills. The first time you sift flour, you probably make a bit of a mess (or if you’re my husband, a lot of a mess). You’re a little uncoordinated, or you sift far more than you need.

When you measure the flour, how do you do that without losing the benefits of sifting? How do you make sure the salt is evenly spread through it? How do you knead the bread correctly? Or roll the pie dough?

These are all techniques. You don’t do them particularly well the first time out. The more you do them, the more you understand them. You learn what order to do things in. What has to be done, and what can be skipped. What makes the tastiest bread, the flakiest pie crust. And you also learn how to do it as quickly as possible. The better you are at technique, the better the product and the faster the process.

Which is why, for instance, I can do the Open Door Reading Process so quickly now that you wouldn’t even know I’m doing it. But when I first did it, it was as tedious and sporadically useful as it is for anyone who’s doing for the first time.

Tools are about technique. They are about making you proficient at how you go about acting, so that it is less of a guessing game. And because you are more proficient, you can get further along in the process by the time you get to opening night. What used to take you five weeks, now takes you only three. So now you have time to spare to really fine tune your performance, and to come up with some unexpected and creative choices.

Without technique, it is unlikely that you’ll have time for that. And it is also unlikely that you’ll be able to turn in a consistently believable performance. You’ll toggle between “true” and “false” all night long.

Which is perfectly fine if you’re okay with that. It really is. If you’re working in community theater, and you’re doing it for love and to share time with other people who enjoy putting on plays, then the imperfections in your performance may not matter to you. But if they do, or you hope to act professionally, read on . . . Be warned, though, I’m going to take a little (necessary) detour and talk about the Learning Process for a few posts. It’s directly related to this topic, so don’t skip it, but it will help me avoid having an eight part series . . .

To see Part I, go here. To see The Learning Process, Part I, go here. To see The Learning Process, Part II, go here.

Spacious Acting™

the online acting technique resource

Tag Archives: Rehearsing