The Acting Blog

Tackling Talent: Part 2 with ACS Assistant Coach Ian Watt

Friday’s have become special days at the ACS studio. Over the last few weeks we’ve been working through a DVD of Meisner classes. It’s a real treat to watch the man himself training actors in his own techniques. At 8 hours it’s a bit of a marathon but it always sparks off lots of discussion.

We’ve been thinking about talent. The core skills of Repetition, Script Analysis & As Iffing can all be developed through hard graft – so does the term TALENT even fit with the Practical Aesthetics ethos of acting?  Does it matter how TALENTED or UNTALENTED you are?

Talent is a difficult term to understand to begin with. One dictionary definition is – a natural ability or giftedness. So someone with talent has an aptitude for certain things or an innate ability to achieve a level of skill or competency. Now here’s a much misunderstood term.  Competency sounds like an apology for being just-about-passable but is defined as a combination of aptitude, knowledge, understanding and attitude.

Two indisputable talents sprung to my mind – Picasso and George Best. Picasso’s early works are worth a look if you ever thought he couldn’t draw and Best was such a great footballer that Pele, the Brazilian legend, signed an autograph for George with the words “from the second best footballer in the world.”

Yet Picasso said it had taken him a lifetime to learn to draw like a child and Best worked so hard in extra training to develop his weaker left foot – it became stronger than his right. Without doubt both showed signs of having great talent at an early stage in their lives but they also demonstrated they had a great work ethic – even in Best’s case.

But all of Best’s aptitude for balance and ball skills didn’t help him extend his playing career and Picasso’s understanding of form and hand to eye co-ordination wasn’t the reason he continued to produce works until he died aged 92. Maybe the difference between them was attitude.

Mamet wrote a private letter to the original students of Practical Aesthetics before their first performance – ‘A good actor trains his voice and body and analytical powers even though this training is taxing and “no one may ever notice.”

I feel talent shines out. It is obvious and noticeable – especially to those who can’t. So how does that fit with the P.A. approach? To be honest – I dunno. I like the idea of talent being a gift – something you’ve simply been given.  It’s nothing you can or should take any credit for – it’s just the way you are.  If you perceive a gift as something of value then you’re likely to take care of it – nurture it and not hide it at the back of a cupboard next to the horrendous cardigan you got from granny last Christmas.

REAL talent makes something difficult look easy to do – SO easy that everyone thinks they can do it. Ultimately I guess you can either use it or choose to waste it. My advice – which you didn’t ask for – is nurture however much talent you have whether it be great or little. Don’t worry about whether you have it or not, work hard and concentrate on developing the skills you need. If you are tenacious enough to keep on learning – you might surprise yourself and manage to be competent!

Thanks

IAN

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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Tags: Do you need talent?, Ian Watt, Practical Aesthetics, Talent

Tackling Talent: Part 1 – A Guest Blog from ACS Assistant Coach Karli Evans

How many successful actors out there do you think built their careers on talent?

The answer is, probably 3.

Not only is acting not exclusive to those very few who have true talent, true talent being the ability to instinctively live truthfully under the imaginary circumstances of the play or film EVERY time, but someone with talent very rarely works hard at acquiring a technique. Why would they need to? They have talent and, so far, it has always worked. But what happens when it doesn’t work? You don’t instinctively feel it? The muse doesn’t strike? Where do you go and how do you still give a truthful and exciting performance?

A technique is designed to be a fail safe system that an actor uses when needed, to create consistently great work. That doesn’t mean being exactly the same every night, but being consistently honest, real and in the moment and therefore watchable and exciting. And a technique is learnable. You aren’t born with a technique.

Can you build a successful career on talent? The necessary characteristics of an actor extend much further than the ability to act well. An actor needs to have a fantastic work ethic, self motivational skills, incredible staying power and the ability to constantly accept rejection without slipping into self loathing and despair.

If an aspiring actor is not as naturally gifted or talented as others, to continue on this career path takes grit, passion and absolute love for the job. Does this mean talented people are less passionate because the same level of grit and hard work are not essential?

My thoughts are that true talent (making it work instinctively EVERY TIME) is so rare that it doesn’t matter and even a truly talented person must find somewhere to showcase their work and get themselves known. Everyone who wants a career as an actor needs to put in the work. Some natural ability can be a good starting point, but a football player with natural ability still needs to train every week to make the professional league.

Remember that acting is learnable. A technique is learnable. Acting is not an exclusive club for the ‘chosen ones’.

We often see a great film or play with great acting and say ‘Wow, they’re talented. They’re so lucky to have gotten their break.’

Anthony Robbins’ definition of L.U.C.K

Labour

Under

Correct

Knowledge

Nowhere in that statement does it mention talent.

What you and everyone else see up there is not talent, but the result of hours upon hours of hard, gut busting work.

All the best

KARLI

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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Tags: Acting Coach Scotland, Do you need talent to be successful?, Karli Evans, Talent

Know your Job

Greetings, apologies for the lack of blogs recently, been very busy, but which of us isn’t and excuses don’t cut it.

I’ve been reading Larry Moss’ book, The Intent to Live, he’s got some amazing clients and speaks a lot of sense, although personally I disagree with about 70% of it. His distaste for Mamet is evident, and many times his examples are born out of clear misunderstanding, but there’s still much to learn from Mr Moss.

I was thinking about at what point the actor’s own ideas begin to encroach on the script itself. Certainly my own experiences of the recorded media indicate to me that encroachment is the norm. There are so many opportunities for the actor to flex their creative and imaginative muscles in each role that it seems that impinging on the text is unnecessary.

It is when the actor’s choices damage the text and their relationship to it that it starts to become a problem.

It isn’t your job to ‘help’ the script, 9/10 your helping is a knee-jerk reaction to having to deal with the difficult part of acting. But you do not need to help the script, you need to develop the solid skills to open it up and fully explore it as an actor. If you think you can do better, then go write something but don’t be lazy and don’t feel that your creative domain includes the writer, how would you feel if the writer gave you performance notes….? Precisely.

Do your job, leave the others to do their own.

Tags: Larry Moss

Finding Fulfilment

What is fulfillment and how do we achieve it? From the day we are born, whether we know it or not, we are continually seeking the answer to these questions. For some people, fulfillment is called pleasure; some know it as accomplishment, triumph or contentment, others know it as piece of mind or being at peace.

But what is fulfillment – this insubstantial and indefinable condition, this desire that we are burning to attain? Fulfillment is feeling whole, sated, full up, completed. It is absence of absence in our lives. We want for nothing.

Equally, if we do not experience this completeness, then this lack of fulfillment haunts us. We become distressed at the awareness that something important is lacking from our lives and we feel deficient. No one prepare us for this intangible dearth, this absence of an elusive presence. Rationally, we irrationally spend much of our time trying to capture or recapture this state.

We are compelled by an invisible need to sate this desire, to fill the emptiness that is left by its absence. We attempt to do this in so many fruitless ways. We leave our husband, buy the sports car, change jobs, eat the entire tub of ice cream or max out the credit card on new clothes. Each activity will provide satisfaction, but it will be short-lived, temporary, only filling our need for fulfillment, our craving for a very short time. When the buzz of the sugar rush leaves us, we crash, feeling more empty and guilty than before.

Under the pressure to fulfill this gnawing desire, we can behave out of character. We move from person to person, searching for a relationship with ‘the one’. It makes us cheat on our wife over and over, explore ‘open’ marriages, compels us to try to quench our thirst for fulfillment with a new sexual partner each week, seeking the elusive excitement of the beginning of a new relationship. What cause us to behave this way? The cause, our justification is often:

‘I did not feel fulfilled.’ or ‘I have needs and this person does not take care of them’. ‘You don’t do it for me any more’ or ‘we want different things from life’.

No, what you want is exactly the same; it just manifests itself in different ways.
But what did we expect? How self-centred we are to believe that another’s purpose is to make us feel replete.

But the hole in us, this bottomless void knows no sating because we are addicted to our desire for fulfillment and when we are not trying to gain it, we are unhappy too. Once we have performed these actions, these acts that we felt were so necessary to our happiness, no – our mental survival and stability, we quickly realize that we were wrong and very soon the urge for fulfillment surfaces again. But this time it takes on a new shape, an entirely new form. That’s why it’s so elusive, it never appears in the same guise twice.

Many of us attain the highest positions of employment, great personal and financial success through our job, only to realize that one’s career goal, our ambition, did not fulfill us, did not close the avoid. So, we think there is something wrong with us and we set off to find the next way to sate the insatiable urge, perhaps through gambling or drink or drugs or maybe a fresh challenge in a new job.

Often, people will say ‘I know that I would be really happy if only I could just get this or that particular job’. Exchange job for the word partner, house, holiday or some other longed for experience and we see the futility of the situation. Other people often say to me ‘I’ve no idea what to do in life’ – what they actually mean is, nothing that I have experienced has given me that fulfillment that I know OTHERS have achieved before. But of course, they are wrong, especially about the others.

Should we give up our dreams, our desires? Should we stop wanting entirely and just be happy with our lot? Not at all. We are improved and developed by the challenges in our lives. But the job itself will not, cannot make us complete. We can feel the temporary buzz of success, we can enjoy basking in the sweet glow of victory, but this soon turns bitter as the feeling of fulfillment ebbs away.

When I was young, I went backpacking in Australia. I met many people, experienced all kinds of new things and wholly enjoyed exploring this new country. I learned a great deal, connected with people, visited amazing places and that really made me feel good about myself and excited. One day, I sat by myself on a rock on an island looking out over the warm, calm ocean. The sun was drifting downwards and the shadow of a bird of prey soared overheard. I looked at all of this, I breathed in, I literally became inspired by the sea, the heat, the smells of the forest behind me and I thought to myself ‘This is the crowning moment of my life so far, I am so lucky, it is wonderful beyond compare, if only…’ Even the dramatic magnificence, the sensorial splendor of this moment in a place thousands of miles from home could not make me feel complete, it could not fulfill me.

Did you ever experience the sense that although you were happy, something was missing? Imagine if you will, a plastic container that has been punctured in some way, so that it has a hole in it. You pour water into the container, but it just leaks away. The container cannot possibly keep the water. You can keep trying to fill the container over and over again but unless you fix the hole, it’s going to just keep pouring out. Fulfillment is exactly the same.

There is a more dangerous and harmful search for fulfillment. We call this a vice or a sin. People gorge themselves on food, they use porn, wager their money, abuse alcohol, sleep with prostitutes, sleep with strangers, overspend or indulge in illicit substances. They are ancient issues, they are not contemporary, they have been with us forever, because their cause has been with us forever. However, we lose our grip on them and they have us in their grip, they are abused to plug our endless desire, our present absence.

All of these sensational pleasures, these apparent satisfactions cannot keep the hunger away. They become addictions and they becoming harmful. The excitement of the casino fades, leaving us with unpaid bills. Pornography leaves us disconnected from real love. The quick temporary thrill causes these extreme measures to become compulsive. But inside, we experience emptiness, we try to fill it with these powerful pleasures and it does indeed work for a while, but then the emptiness begins to creep back in and we must indulge again in our harmful attempts at completeness, each time more extreme. We do not overeat or over-drink to feed ourselves, we do it to satisfy our ancient craving, and of course, it does not work beyond the sensory thrill.

If all this is true, I know that you are wondering. How is fulfillment possible? How can I become happy and sated? The solution is unexpected. For you to feel fulfilled, you must take the focus off of yourself and place it on others. That is not to say look to others for your happiness. As we have discussed, another person will never provide this for us in the long run. To feel full, to feel that you have everything, you must give something of yourself to others.

The path to feeling true fulfillment is removing the selfish fixation with yourself and start paying attention to the needs of others. To act unselfishly fills us like no selfish act can. For this to work, we need to do something for someone else’s happiness. The fixation and fascination with self, the primal selfish urge is not easily tamed, but by facing this challenge with the goal of improving someone else’s lot, we lose our self-centredness and become replete.

Does this mean give money to charity or helping out in a homeless shelter? Perhaps. That’s a nice idea, a good place to begin but it’s likely to be temporary. Couldn’t anyone give away money to the poor or unfortunate? To buy the homeless girl a warmer coat, to go to the shop and purchase it yourself, to battle with the issue of size, colour, warmth, all on her behalf, this requires that you give up your previous time and it takes real compassion, thoughtfulness and the selflessness to act with another’s benefit in your heart and mind.

We are goal-oriented. We want to know how to know what actions to take. Which particular unselfish acts will produce the best results? That’s the great challenge of achieving fulfillment, you won’t know it until you feel the absence of absence and even then how does one become aware of lack of nothing? It is not a conscious experience; you feel it long before you are aware of it. In fact, when you feel it, you will not even be concerned with knowing it. You will be full, and when we are full, we do not contemplate filling. To find fulfillment, true fulfillment, we must stop looking to ourselves, to our own needs and see its possibility in everyone else around us.

Not my usual, but I hope you enjoyed it.

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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Do NOT Let the Director Near the Lighting Board

I was lucky to begin my theatre career in tech.  I was originally an LX technician at the Edinburgh Festival.  It was challenging and I was well trained by graduates of RADA and Central.  One of the very last things they taught us, which has been echoed through time, is do not let the director near the lighting board.  Control freaks like us directors, we would love a push button option.   But directors are not only unqualified to go pushing the buttons but it’s doing someone else’s job and one we’re not particularly prepared to do well.  Push a button YES, sure, who can’t? Deal with the consequences, takes a technician.

It’s not that they couldn’t work a board, it’s just, that’s not their role. They are intelligent, skilled people, and they should clearly stick to their best subject.  As a director, I’ve been called upon on tour (and sometimes volunteered) to run the show on the LX desk BECAUSE I have considerable experience doing it.  Once on tour in Irvine, I did just that, gave us my seat in the audience and sat perched high in the lighting box, running lights.   But it WAS my job that night.  It WAS my role that night.  It’s when the director begins to interfere in areas that they are not responsible for, that we start to get into trouble.

Similarly it is with academics and the arts.  Academics can give stunning and enlightening insight into the arts, but unless they’ve actually had REAL practical experience of the arts, of doing the thing, they remain a critical commentator, perhaps very useful, but essentially, they should steer clear of practice.  More and more the academic has found their way into the conservatory, perhaps by some backdoor known as ‘Research’.  But there are few academics without considerable professional experience that have the capacity to advise on ‘the doing’ of theatre, film and television.

I do not denigrate the director that can run lights.  I do not denigrate the actor who has a gift for writing radio, nor the academic who has served their apprenticeship and is an experienced professional.

I do question the life-long celibate, giving out relationship advice and teaching Sex Ed.

This person has found themselves teaching the arts.   This person is deadly to the teaching of the arts.  They know LESS than their neophyte students and their inexperience will either mis-prepare a generation or embarrass themselves.  We need the academy.  But the academy should remain in the academy and the conservatory in the conservatory.  The two have no business swapping roles.

Whilst I would be interested in discovering WHY my pipe has burst, I’m only letting the experienced plumber, not the plumbing theorist near my kitchen.

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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A Few Good Resources

Hey All

In today’s blog, I wanted to offer you a few resources that I’ve found across the web.

STINTON TALKS MAMET: The first is for people in the UK or for those who can listen to the iPlayer or catch Radio 4 somehow.  Tomorrow evening (Monday 8th February), Colin Stinton will be reading some of Mamet’s work on Emotions, The Rehearsal Process, and The Play and the Scene.  It would be good to hear Mamet’s close collaborator Stinton expressing Mamet’s ideas before Mamet’s latest book ‘Theatre’ is released in April this year.  This was meant to be a permanent resource, but check it out before it goes…

APPROACHING SCRIPT ANALYSIS: I was looking up some stuff on the web, and wanted to seek other perspectives when I found this interesting article on Backstage, it compares several acting teacher’s approach, one of which is Practical Aesthetics, take a look here. I’m interested in what you think of the OTHER approaches mentioned.

CASTING THE UNKNOWN: This is a great Radio 4 (finite) resource on the show FRONT ROW is taking about acting, using REAL people, non-actors, casting straight from the street.

It’s only a few resources, but I’ll bring more too, let me know your thoughts…

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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The Wood for the Trees

Often when we’re working on a new scene, we find it difficult to get to the heart of it.  Our acting techniques have been almost crippled by asking too many unnecessary and possibly academic questions and this really ends up with us missing the important parts of the scene, the actable bits.  Not all of it IS actable to the same degree.  When you find out that your character has been married twice and has two children, there’s nothing actable in there.  Oh yes, but surely a man twice married behaves in a certain way.  Maybe he’s MORE nervous around women than normal, maybe he’s over-protective of his daughters.  Sure, they’re reasonable thoughts.  But they’re not actable unless there’s a part of the script which allows you to reveal something of this.   And here lies a small problem actors have, they get an idea and they want to force it onto the script.  But that’s not how it works, it usually just makes for very bad choices, occasionally it will work, but more often than not, it’s just rubbish.

Pare back any scene, pull right back and get to see the most basic view of it.  This will prevent your initial (sometimes wrong) view of the scene from colouring the potential for the many different ways to play a scene.  Work to understand the basic human fundamentals going on within the scene, this will reveal to you the actable parts.

We must aim to get a clear understand of what we must DO in the scene.  DO is the important word.  DO is the essential word.  Because acting is doing.  It’s not thinking, it’s not pretending, it’s not creating, it’s just ‘doing’.  And doing is acting, being in action.

To get to the heart of a scene we must ask:

QUESTION: What’s LITERALLY happening in this scene, in the most basic sense.  Strip away all the detail, because it ends up confusing us.  Within the scripted page, the simplest answer is there.  Something simple and basic and universally human.  This is the actable core of the scene.  This leads to the next question:

QUESTION:  What does your character WANT from the other character in the SCENE (AND what does your character want them to DO).  This is a simple define the goal of the character, but place it in the other character (or the other actor) in practice.

QUESTION:  What is the ESSENTIAL ACTION? What is the essence of what the character is doing in the scene?  The WANT will lead you to this answer.  When you have this, you have all you have to do in a scene broken down into something terribly simple, but compelling, that has its core in the other character, and then the other actor.  It something so simple and yet so challenging that you will be able to immediately act upon it.

Now you can see the Wood.  If you still can’t see it, let me be your guide.

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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