The Acting Blog

How Actor Training Disables the Actor

The trainee actor already has the tools that they need to become a professional performer.  Most of the training should be targeted at reconnecting them to their common sense. Much of traditional actor training defies common sense and is aimed at pleasing someone other than an audience.  The successful completion of a pointless exercise is met with approval.  Confusion and perturbation is frowned upon.  This is not an educational process, it is bullying.  Submit to my will and I will approve of you.

So the actor learns to please, and does themselves a disservice at every turn.  Their entire performance becomes about pleasing and approval.  Most actors can’t tell whether they are doing well or not in their performances, and when they’ve years of people pleasing, they can’t stop doing it.

As their training continues, they stop listening to their impulses, they eschew spontaneity for ’same as last time’ which originally pleased the teacher or director and will never again, because that moment is gone and their frustration that you don’t have a ‘copy original’ button on your arse will be taken out on you as if you were meant to be a Xerox machine.

There are three stages to the training of the actor. Common Sense, Technique and Common Sense again.  The first differing from the last only in so much as experience can teach.   The conservatory is a place to develop and cultivate a form of common sense alongside the skills necessary for the actor to get work, do work and survive working with people who can’t do but still get work.  Common sense is learned, it is learned through communal experience and comes into being through contact with groups or cultures that share commonalities.  If actor’s training together accept this pleasing process, if they allow it, if they make concessions and approve it, they are turning this into their currency of common sense.

The trouble with training is that few things in life are one-size fits all.  When training is conducted on this basis, it erases the individual.  There is no Stanislavski system of acting, there was Stanislavski’s system of acting, which worked for him and the adjustments made by Michael Chekhov, Vakhtangov, Meyerhold, Adler, Meisner etc are just that, an offshoot from the original, it is Strasberg’s Method that students learn, it is not Stanislavski’s in any way.  It may be influenced by Stanislavski, but that’s a matter of history and heritage.

Training asks you to give up your common sense in response for secret knowledge and ninja skills.  When you realise that most of this knowledge is nonsense, you experience a crisis of confidence.  You have some skills, but those that relate to the secret knowledge seem to require voodoo to work and that makes them unreliable and that kills your confidence in them and in yourself.  You have two choices.  Find your own way, or carry on the lie.  There are a lot of liars out there, convincing everyone and fooling no one.

I am not anti-training.  I’m suggesting a rethink.  A model based on the individual.  A model based on the student and not the teacher.  A model in which common sense isn’t ignored, in which delusion isn’t required, in which prostrating yourself to power is NOT how you rise.

To You, The Best!

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 2009

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