The Acting Blog

An Important Acting Lesson from David Mamet

Back when the Atlantic Theater Company was first founded, David Mamet, their teacher and mentor sent them a letter.  This is an extract from that letter:

“Our company is founded not on talent, not on effect, but on discipline—on the ability to do those things in moments of stress which we have decided to do in moments of leisure.  If you think about it, this is the hallmark of a good actor. A good actor sticks to the objective, rather than the emotion.  A good actor trains his voice and body and analytical powers even though this training is taxing and “no one may ever notice”.  It is this strength of character which shows on stage…”

Of course, this echoes Mamet’s unique perspective on acting, the focus on what you do, not the effect, not that intangible bullshit called talent, which is lovely to have but practically useless if you don’t know what to do with it.  I love the focus on doing something even though ‘no one may ever notice’.  The great artist may use a hundred layers in a painting, but the viewer only ever sees the surface, I like that we should apply this to acting too.

Mamet believes, as do I that it is YOUR character, your personal qualities which make you the better actor, that it is not your commitment to transformation, but your commitment to the task, to your partner and to the script.  Not only your commitment, but on the self-discipline to complete the task.  Acting is still mired in Method-inspired crap, it’s great to know that for those of us who don’t want to disappear up our own emotional sphincters, there’s someone out there for us.

I have new acting classes starting in Glasgow in September and re-reading Mamet always re-inspires me.  Thanks Dave.

To You, The Best!

Looking for Acting Classes in Glasgow? Mark Westbrook is a Professional Acting Coach and runs Acting Coach Scotland, a private acting studio offering acting classes in Glasgow, masterclasses, workshops and audition coaching for actors at all levels. His acting studio is based in Glasgow, Scotland, although he teaches all across the United Kingdom. All Blog Posts © Mark Westbrook 2010

Tweet me

Tags: letter from david mamet, original Atlantic Theater Company ensemble

HOW WILL AN ACTING COACH HELP ME?

This blog is inspired by Michael Beale and Ken Robinson.

People often ask, ‘What can an acting coach do for me?’  Professional actors are themselves the most suspicious clients that I work with.  They simply don’t see how an acting coach could help them.  Probably because most of their learning or coaching experiences have ended in little or no practical help at all.

So what should an Acting Coach do to help you? What is their role?

Thanks to educationalist Kenneth Robinson, it’s possible to recognise FOUR distinct areas where a coach of any kind can help us to succeed with our goals.  I’ve applied these 4 key areas to actor training and actor coaching and I hope it will give you a fuller picture of the roles and responsibilities of an acting coach.  Then, when you do get some coaching, you’ll have a yardstick against which to hold your experience of being coached.

ONE: An Acting Coach will Recognise Your Potential

The first thing an acting coach should do is test to see if you actually have the goods.  I don’t mean that you necessarily need to have talent, but that you have potential for training to a higher level.  Some people are innately gifted, it’s true, but some people show the signs of being ‘trainable’ and some people clearly are not.  An Acting Coach should be truthful with you about your potential and be honest with you about your chances for progression.  Even (especially) when coaching experienced actors, the acting coach should always be truthful and honest.  That doesn’t mean that they should ride roughshod over your feelings. They must believe that you can learn the skills of the actor, if they do not believe this, they shouldn’t keep appeasing you and taking your money, this is just Charlatanism.

Acting coaches have a responsibility to be honest with our students because the bond that is created is one of trust.  This can’t be built on hypocrisy and bullshit.

TWO: An Acting Coach will Encourage You

Once a bond of trust has been established, an acting coach should encourage you in any way that they can.  Once they’ve established that you are trainable, they should point you in the direction that you want to go and give you the encouragement you need to believe in yourself and your developing skills.

THREE: An Acting Coach will Facilitate You

An Acting Coach will give you the necessary practical tools that will help you to improve.  These tools should relate DIRECTLY to the job of acting.  None of us wants to learn to water-ski in order to tap dance.  Likewise, your actor training should be job specific.  You should be taught pragmatic skills that can be used immediately, or at least with practice.  Their facilitation of you should be based in practice.  It doesn’t matter how many books they’ve read, they need to know this stuff works for real, otherwise, they won’t facilitate you, they’ll actually disable you.

FOUR: An Acting Coach Stretch You

A good acting coach will never stop pushing, gently, sometimes sternly, but they will always keep trying to stretch your capabilities.  It’s not always pleasant, any kind of change is usually accompanied by some kind of pain, some mild and some less so.  After a number of classes, you should feel that the coach is pushing you and helping you by not letting you rest on your laurels, or get comfortable, by constantly shifting the goal posts, they will continue to stretch you as you improve.

However, they should acknowledge your achievements and encourage you to press on ever upwards towards perfection, even if you never reach it.

To You, The Best!

Looking for Acting Classes in Glasgow? Mark Westbrook is a Professional Acting Coach and runs Acting Coach Scotland, a private acting studio offering acting classes in Glasgow, masterclasses, workshops and audition coaching for actors at all levels. His acting studio is based in Glasgow, Scotland, although he teaches all across the United Kingdom. All Blog Posts © Mark Westbrook 2010

Tweet me

Tags: how will an acting coach help me?, reasons to get an acting coach, what can an acting coach do for me?, what does an acting coach do?, what will an acting coach do for me?

Action is Acting for Actors

Acting is action.  It’s all in the name.  It’s not thought, it’s not feeling, it’s not emotion, no one knows the thoughts, feelings and emotions of fictional people.  They don’t exist you.  When you give an actor a clear ‘something to do’, they come alive, the take action, they act.  I’m not saying that they shouldn’t think, feel and emote, just that the over-concentration on these things is unnecessary and so let us focus on the actions of the actor as the mainstay of any technique of acting, if such a technique is necessary.

But for the actor to take action, they must first have a clearly established goal.  Something to head towards, a target to give their action some direction.  All the very best actors are doing is taking action under the imaginary circumstances of the scene.  You do not need to believe you are someone else, you need to take actions on the character’s behalf.  What’s more, it is not that you need to become the character, but that by taking the actions of the character, the character becomes you.

When you perform the psychological actions of the character, you become engaged on all levels, you are emotional, mentally and physically connected to what you are doing.  Of course, it’s not that simple, but I suppose what I’m saying is that if you are given the actions to perform, quite a lot of the rest takes care of itself.

One of the most difficult lessons to teach someone is to stop them pretending and to let them leap out and just take action.  It requires courage, it requires bravery and it’s not easy, but if you can work off the other actor, if you can understand a script, your last step is to take action.  So, take action.

To You, The Best!

Looking for Acting Classes in Glasgow? Mark Westbrook is a Professional Acting Coach and runs Acting Coach Scotland, a private acting studio offering acting classes in Glasgow, masterclasses, workshops and audition coaching for actors at all levels. His acting studio is based in Glasgow, Scotland, although he teaches all across the United Kingdom. All Blog Posts © Mark Westbrook 2010

Tweet me

Small Lessons on Learning and Experience

You should know by now that I love quotes, i find all sorts of inspiration in them.  This blog is short but sweet.

I believe that all artists should be great observers of people and life, but perhaps not as an exercise or activity, but unconsciously taking things in to use later.

“To look is to learn, if you listen carefully.” Per Arnoldi.

“Stare. It is the way to educate your eye and more. Stare, pry, listen and eavesdrop. Die knowing something. You are not here long.” Walker Evans

Finally a version of something Derek Jones is fond of saying:

“Beware of the man who says he has 20 years experience. When what he should say is that he has one year’s experience repeated 20 times.”

To You, The Best!

Looking for Acting Classes in Glasgow? Mark Westbrook is a Professional Acting Coach and runs Acting Coach Scotland, a private acting studio offering acting classes in Glasgow, masterclasses, workshops and audition coaching for actors at all levels. His acting studio is based in Glasgow, Scotland, although he teaches all across the United Kingdom. All Blog Posts © Mark Westbrook 2010

Tweet me

Tags: learning for the actor, observation for the actor

Coping with Rejection

Acting is a personal profession, that is, we are the product/service that we sell.  For this reason, like in many of the arts, we take rejection of our product very personally.  We can’t help it, we are our art form, so when we aren’t right for the commercial, when we aren’t ‘Irish’ enough or because we aren’t as skinny as the last girl, well, we can’t help take it all to heart.

But listen up:

You’re going to deal with professional rejection all of your career, it is something you must come to accept, just like the rain, traffic and taxes.

Even the very top earning professionals are rejected during the casting process, it’s not personal, it’s industry-wide.

It doesn’t matter whether you thought you were RIGHT for the role, it doesn’t matter if it’s your favourite play, you must let go.

For you are not in control.

And if you are not in control, you should leave those things alone.

Don’t expect to get a place, a job, a role, expect nothing.  Accept it when you get it though )

If the rejection comes with genuine advice, it might be worth ‘strengthening’ your dancing or your accents or your verse work or whatever, but otherwise, don’t take it personally, march forward, without anger or malice.  You shouldn’t hate them for making their choice.  In their shoes, you would also choose the person that you thought would return their investment.

Casting takes all types, all shapes and sizes, all ages, race and colour.

But how do you cope with continued rejection?

Well, you have two choices.

The first choice is to give up.  Go be a high school drama teacher, it’s a stable, reasonably paid job (I’m told).  It will give you that deathly state of ‘stability’. That you must crave.  Of course you do, we all do.

The second is to simply resist the temptation to settle for anything less than what you want.

Rejection is natural.

So is success.

If you want one, you must accept the other.

To You, The Best!

Looking for Acting Classes in Glasgow? Mark Westbrook is a Professional Acting Coach and runs Acting Coach Scotland, a private acting studio offering acting classes in Glasgow, masterclasses, workshops and audition coaching for actors at all levels. His acting studio is based in Glasgow, Scotland, although he teaches all across the United Kingdom. All Blog Posts © Mark Westbrook 2010

Tweet me

Tags: acting and rejection, coping with rejection for actors

Story for Actors

As an actor, you are one of the elements of dramatic storytelling.  You help to embody a character for the benefit of an audience in telling the playwright’s story.   For this reason, it would help if you knew something about story.

Story is a part of our humanity, we see it on the cave paintings at Lascaux and in Xbox Games, Novels, Blogs, Fanzines, Shakespeare, and the oral traditions before, during and after the invention of the printing press.  Story is a part of us, we enjoy regaling others with our tales, and sometimes we add flourishes and bend the truth here and there to make it seem more exciting, or as we might say ‘dramatic’.

Storytelling is traditionally made of THREE parts.  Beginning, Middle and End.   And we understand story on a deep level, for we have a story that has these three parts too, from our birth to our death.

A well-written script will follow some basic rules of storytelling and that is that however the story is told, it will more often than not feature a beginning, middle and a end.

Story begins with an inciting incident, something gets the story going.  Red Riding Hood’s tale is fairly boring until she is sent to Grandmother’s House.  It is this ‘being sent on an errand’ that incites the entire story.  Without it, the story doesn’t exist.

The Protagonist, in this case it is Red Riding Hood is then sent on a dramatic journey and she becomes The Hero.  One could easily argue that her first meeting with the wolf is also an inciting incident, but it is infact simply a conflict, something that temporarily hinders her on her way to her goal.  A story continues by building the difficult of the conflicts, if you like barriers that are raised, the Wolf becomes increasingly sly and increasingly tries to eat her.  As the conflict builds, there is more and more at stake for both the Protagonist and the Antagonist (Mr Wolf).  As the stakes rise, the dramatic tension increases as we place ourselves in the shoes of the Hero under immense pressure.

At some point, all of this tension reaches a crisis point.  At the crisis point, it is live or die, do or die, go or stay.  This can simply be about whether the character, Red Riding Hood escapes the Wolf (and in some versions) he is killed by the local Woodchopper.  Or the Sheriff kills the shark, Daniel defeats the Bully or Bob Ford kills Jesse. This invokes the highest point of dramatic tension, when the tension cannot build any further and this is the climax of the story.  At this point, the story comes to a resolution, the point at which the cause of all the conflict has now dissipated and the Hero has either won or lost.  When the resolution comes, the audience knows it’s time to go home.

Understanding the mechanics of story can help you to understand more about the job of the actor, the professional storyteller.

To You, The Best!

Looking for Acting Classes in Glasgow? Mark Westbrook is a Professional Acting Coach and runs Acting Coach Scotland, a private acting studio offering acting classes in Glasgow, masterclasses, workshops and audition coaching for actors at all levels. His acting studio is based in Glasgow, Scotland, although he teaches all across the United Kingdom. All Blog Posts © Mark Westbrook 2010

Tweet me

Tags: Story for Actors, Storytelling for Actors, The elements of story

SORRY – the Least Useful Word for an Actor

Don’t Say SORRY, the word SORRY is abhorrent to me

Firstly, let’s start off by saying that if you commit some kind of malfeasance, you should naturally apologise.  We should apologise if we waste someone’s time, do something that causes them pain or distress whether we meant to or not.  HOWEVER, the word SORRY isn’t the correct word to use.

If you have been asked to learn your lines on the first day of rehearsal and you don’t know them, then SORRY will not fix the problem.  SORRY is simply an attempt to make YOU feel better.  Please don’t be mad at me, for I can wash away sin with the word ‘SORRY’ and you should then forgive me.

SORRY is a useless word.  It does not help the person that you burden it with.  If you are late for rehearsal and you say SORRY, do you think that excuses you? By no means!  If you bus was late, you enter the rehearsal room and state:

Apologies everyone, my bus was late, I’ll get an earlier one tomorrow.

There, you have both apologised, given an excuse and suggested a way to ensure that it will never happen again.

Sorry, the bus was late – to me this sounds like you are making an excuse.
For even an excuse is a reason and a reason an excuse.
I see sorry everywhere, you are trying to buy yourself time, you are trying to spare your blushes and misdirect the heat of attention, but sorry just doesn’t cut it.  SORRY is disruptive.  If you’re playing a warm up game and you keep messing it up, surely that’s part of the game.  DON’T be sorry.  No one WANTS TO HEAR it you’re SORRY, they want you to keep playing and improve as you practice.  Stop trying to let yourself off the hook by thinking that a kind word (SORRY!) will help you out when things get tough.

You may WELL be sorry, but I implore you not to use it, it is a whiny, sniveling little weasel of word that attempts to get you excused for something, to win or curry favour, to be forgiven your misdemeanour.

If you break the Stage Manager’s favourite pencil, do you say SORRY? SORRY does not bring the pencil back.  No sooner than wishing can bring back the dead.  SORRY is your excuse made into a word.

Instead, you go out and find an identical or equal pencil and give it to them with a real apology.

IF YOU DO SOMETHING WRONG, DO NOT APOLOGISE.

You forget a bit of blocking and you hear the director shout ‘YOU’RE IN THE WRONG PLACE’.  DO NOT SHOUT –SORRY-.  Confirm where you should be and then bloody be there! Nothing is worse than having to tell an actor something twice or give the same note more than once.

Before you let this shitty little word out of your mouth, think about the value of your sorry, if you use it frequently, it has NO currency.  If you use it a little, it means more.

Don’t be SORRY. Because SORRY is an invitation to EXPLAIN YOUR EXCUSE.  SORRY, yes, I wasn’t feeling well and I got confused about where I was supposed to be standing and then Jackie confused me by lifting her broom up early AND

You are wasting EVERYONE’S FUCKING TIME with your snivelling drivel.

APOLOGIES and make it right.

WORDS do not forgive CRIMES.

ACTIONS will help you convince

Do you prefer the lover who tells you that they love you, or the one that SHOWS you?  I’d say if the lover TOLD you but never showed you, you would be less and less inclined to believe them.

It’s the same with SORRY.

Don’t be bloody SORRY.

And don’t say you’ll TRY HARDER next time.

If you’re only going to TRY, then don’t bother.

As Mamet says ‘I’ll Try’ is preparing to FAIL.
Would you marry someone who told you that they’d TRY to be faithful?

OF COURSE YOU WOULDN’T.

EITHER

Give it your best shot.

Or

Go Home.

To You, The Best!

Looking for Acting Classes in Glasgow? Mark Westbrook is a Professional Acting Coach and runs Acting Coach Scotland, a private acting studio offering acting classes in Glasgow, masterclasses, workshops and audition coaching for actors at all levels. His acting studio is based in Glasgow, Scotland, although he teaches all across the United Kingdom. All Blog Posts © Mark Westbrook 2010

Tweet me

Tags: Don't say Sorry, Rehearsal Room Etiquette, tips for actors