General
Rehearsal is the Death of Live Performance
After virtual retirement from theatre directing while building the studio for almost 4 years, I am currently working on a number of projects with my most advanced students.
Collectively we are called the Spartan Ensemble and while our main focus is telling a good story (through existing plays or new writing), it is our working methodology that is our USP.
You see, I believe that live theatre loses its most important innate quality, immediacy when it is rehearsed in the traditional sense and that to be truly spontaneous and immediate, you can’t rehearse it at all. What’s good enough for improv is good enough for me.
This is the experimental starting place that Spartan are using as their point of departure.
I realise this is yet another act of heresy on my part, and I appreciate that it is counter to traditional practise. But I think that repeating something over and over kills it.
But don’t for a second mistake me. I am not suggesting that the actors turn up at the theatre and just middle their way through the play. I’m sure it would be awful.
I am advocating that we change the way that we think of rehearsal, so it is less and less about repeating something until it is ‘right’ or in line with the director’s vision (I have no problem with the director auteur) and more and more about the immediate moment to moment connection between the actors, with a respect for the script which would include leaving it the hell alone.
Blocking becomes more organic, although positioning for lighting would be acknowledged of course.
We begin with considerable time exploring the script together, an open dialogue between actors and the director, answering questions that aim to translate the written word into action.
Next we break down each actor’s script into beats of action, in terms of what the character is essentially doing and what they want the other character to do. We transform that into an achievable task for the actor.
The actors then learn the lines for that beat cold to prevent line readings.
We take the first beat and we ‘as-if’ it, we ask the actors to try to achieve their task and a physical cap from the other actor without pretending anything. However what they do to the other actor should parallel what they would do if they were trying to achieve their task from a person of a similar relationship type. All the time, the director tosses in tiny instructions, reminders, tactics to try, status or stake raising or lowering. Coaching the actors rather than telling them what to do and only stopping this process if they have come off the rails.
When the actors are in the groove of their task, when they fully embodied it, they are asked to use a full sentence of gibberish instead of their own words. This gibberish isn’t translating the words, but gives the actor something to say that represents having to speak words you do not invent yourself in the moment. This forces the actor to make the words work for them and forget trying to make them mean something.
It also encourages them to work off each other. The actors dip in and out if the gibberish and scene.
When we have a string of gibberish scenes, they work on going into the scene for longer and longer.
Very little is set in stone with this way of working, it requires actors trained to deal with this intense level of improvised moment to moment work and it really isn’t easy.
But the work it creates is very watchable because it in no way smacks of the pre-rehearsed.
Of course there is more to it than I can write in one simple blog. But this is a working method that works for us, it might not work for you and that’s cool, it’s not a competition. If you have a good way of producing immediacy with traditional rehearsal I would love to hear it. Please feel free to email me.
Pass On – a Poem by Michael Lee
I don’t often post videos, or things that aren’t related specifically to acting. But I felt so moved by this, I had to share it.
I have included the text of the poem below. It might make a good monologue for someone too.
Pass On
Pass On
When searching for the lost remember 8 things.
1.
We are vessels. We are circuit boards
swallowing the electricity of life upon birth.
It wheels through us creating every moment,
the pulse of a story, the soft hums of labor and love.
In our last moment it will come rushing
from our chests and be given back to the wind.
When we die. We go everywhere.
2.
Newton said energy is neither created nor destroyed.
In the halls of my middle school I can still hear
my friend Stephen singing his favorite song.
In the gymnasium I can still hear
the way he dribbled that basketball like it was a mallet
and the earth was a xylophone.
With an ear to the Atlantic I can hear
the Titanic’s band playing her to sleep,
Music. Wind. Music. Wind.
3.
The day my grandfather passed away there was the strongest wind,
I could feel his gentle hands blowing away from me.
I knew then they were off to find someone
who needed them more than I did.
On average 1.8 people on earth die every second.
There is always a gust of wind somewhere.
4.
The day Stephen was murdered
everything that made us love him rushed from his knife wounds
as though his chest were an auditorium
his life an audience leaving single file.
Every ounce of him has been
wrapping around this world in a windstorm
I have been looking for him for 9 years.
5.
Our bodies are nothing more than hosts to a collection of brilliant things.
When someone dies I do not weep over polaroids or belongings,
I begin to look for the lightning that has left them,
I feel out the strongest breeze and take off running.
6.
After 9 years I found Stephen.
I passed a basketball court in Boston
the point guard dribbled like he had a stadium roaring in his palms
Wilt Chamberlain pumping in his feet,
his hands flashing like x-rays,
a cross-over, a wrap-around
rewinding, turn-tables cracking open,
camera-men turn flash bulbs to fireworks.
Seven games and he never missed a shot,
his hands were luminous.
Pulsing. Pulsing.
I asked him how long he’d been playing,
he said nine 9 years
7.
The theory of six degrees of separation
was never meant to show how many people we can find,
it was a set of directions for how to find the people we have lost.
I found your voice Stephen,
found it in a young boy in Michigan who was always singing,
his lungs flapping like sails
I found your smile in Australia,
a young girls teeth shining like the opera house in your neck,
I saw your one true love come to life on the asphalt of Boston.
8.
We are not created or destroyed,
we are constantly transferred, shifted and renewed.
Everything we are is given to us.
Death does not come when a body is too exhausted to live
Death comes, because the brilliance inside us can only be contained for so long.
We do not die. We pass on, pass on the lightning burning through our throats.
when you leave me I will not cry for you
I will run into the strongest wind I can find
and welcome you home.
Mark Westbrook
Senior Acting Coach
ACTING COACH SCOTLAND
Like What You Read? Want to Read More? Mark's eBook is available here
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 2011
At Work with Gibberish
Stanislavski used to have his actors paraphrase the scene, to put it in their own words. It helped them personalise what the author had written. The trouble is that it’s not the character’s words that bring us to life because what they say isn’t really that important to actors. It IS really important to the audience, but to the actors, the words are gibberish, they’re lies and you don’t intend them and every attempt TO make them sound like you sincerely mean them results in insincerity of varying degrees.
So how to bring the page into being if not through the words of the character?
None of us speak but for a reason. We are intention, action and reaction, a very simple process. Something in us, some desire, some need sparks an intention, a desire to achieve something, to get something done. This intention bursts into life as actions we take, some of which come out as verbal communication. But the intention burns through every word.
To bring the words to life is your goal but to do that means leaving them alone, the words and lines have meaning of their own, forged by someone far better at that job than you.
That’s where Gibberish comes in, rather than personalising the words, we get behind the intention. In a Gibberish exercise, two actors have a single line of dialogue each, something useless because it refuses to mean anything like ‘one dot red dash’.
Now they attempt to achieve their Task, but not by trying to communicate something or transmit some emotion, not by trying to make this stupid rubbish phrase mean something to the actor but that they must DO something to the other actor.
As they work, the actors become aware that since the other actor’s words are meaningless, they only have their behaviour and tone to work from. Now their sensitivity to what the other actor is actually doing in each moment heightens, they are aware, and react not to what has just been said, but to what has been done to them.
The actors learn to pay less and less attention to the content meaning of the other actor’s utterances but to how they are bending those utterances to their purpose. Now a non-verbal ping ping occurs with both actors acting and react to the truth of each moment and the scripted words are enslaved to that purpose and not spoken earnestly to answer ‘correctly’ the previous line.
All cues are physical signs.
Sometimes the lines come out strangely, not how you would intend to say them, but entirely authentic nonetheless, appropriate to this moment because it was caused by the behaviour exhibited.
Once you see this exercise truly working, once you see it in action and the actors then moving into the scene and still doing the same thing, then, you witness the power of action and you will never be able to listen to another actor sincerely trying to mean their lines again.
Shakespeare Monologues: 5 Mistakes People Make with their Drama School Auditions
Just a brief one today, but an important one:
ONE: PROSE
The most obvious mistake is that people choose a PROSE speech instead of a VERSE speech. What’s the difference? Well, one is poetry and the other is simply the ordinary written word. While I’m sure his PROSE is excellent, I believe that drama schools want to see if you can handle VERSE drama like Shakespeare, and if you choose PROSE, what are you showing them that is different from the contemporary or modern piece that they’ve asked for?
TWO: IGNORING THE VERSE
Apparently CENTRAL don’t want you to work out the Iambic Pentameter these days, funny, cos I’ve always thought that you can’t really get away from it, it would be like playing Chopin but ignoring the time signature – it would be all wrong.
THREE: NATURALISING
We’re so used to acting for film and television that we want everything to be small and natural. There’s no reason that you can’t use heightened performing that is authentic, or what you might consider natural in playing style, but you can’t naturalise Shakespeare’s verse (or anyone else’s for that matter). If it’s heightened language, it needs a heightened performance.
FOUR: POOR CASTING
Make sure that someone might cast you in that role. I’m sure that the Drama Schools would say that as long as you did it well, it doesn’t matter what you choose. But the point is that if they can’t imagine you in that role, you’re fighting a losing battle. On the flip side of that, if the part is for a girl, then sorry, but only girls can play it! Drama Schools don’t want to see your amazing inventiveness in playing a female Hamlet or a male Juliet, they want to see your acting, don’t make yourself look like a weirdo who can’t follow instructions.. which leads me to…
FIVE: FOLLOW THE INSTRUCTIONS
Every now and again I come across a fellow or a fellowette who just can’t follow instructions. We’re not talking about obeying anyone here, but when the drama school has issue audition advice, they mean it. They’re tired of seeing pieces that don’t contrast, pieces from off the telly when they want a theatre piece, pieces of Marlowe when they specifically asked for Shakespeare, pieces of Shakespeare when they specifically asked for non-classical, pieces from 1850 when they were looking for a modern piece! FOLLOW THE INSTRUCTIONS, or you end up looking like 1) you can’t read 2) you can read but you don’t care to follow their instructions 3) you’re a pain in the arse.
To You, The Best!
Mark Westbrook
Senior Acting Coach
ACTING COACH SCOTLAND
Like What You Read? Want to Read More? Mark's eBook is available here
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 2011
Truth in Action eBook
I’m not going to bang on about it so consider this the first and last blog specifically about the launch of my eBook Truth in Action. It’s taken several years to bring together scraps of writing, blogs, class notes, quotes and exercise descriptions.
It’s part manifesto for a new kind of acting in a new kind of understanding of performance and part practical acting manual. And the support of my friends, family, (even my own Mother text me this week to ask when the eBook was coming out!) students and colleagues has undoubtedly spurred me on to deliver an eBook that meets the demand. The reaction has been phenomenal, over 300 people are now signed up to receive the first news of the launch. By the time you read this, many will have already bought their copy.
Of course it is not the end of the story. It represents a moment in time, a point in the journey, and as such it spells out my theory and practise as an acting coach as clearly as I can for now. A life in the arts is one of shift and change, so writing anything down is dangerous, it’s easy to look back later and see how much your thoughts and your practice have changed.
Not everyone will like what I have to say. But if you read the blog and enjoy being provoked to think about acting, rehearsal, directing, characterisation, and actor training, you may enjoy the somewhat radical approach to acting found in the book.
The eBook represents my thoughts and feelings after a twenty year obsession with how actors do what they do. I’m not famous, I haven’t coached many famous people, but the actors I have trained are working, either for others or forging their own companies, building a type of theatre or a performance style of their own based on the ideas in this book.
I value truth and authenticity in life and acting. Like me, the eBook isn’t perfect, I think the search for perfection is flawed. Only those who don’t know me might be cynical about my motives. This eBook was written because people asked for it, a brief summation in 180 pages of an exciting way to work.
You can download it from today, or read my blog some more and decide if you’d like to learn more about Truth in Action.
I don’t like to use my blog to advertise but to be honest, frankly I am excited!
To You, The Best!
Mark
My Top Ten Tips for Actors
To You, The Best!Mark Westbrook
Senior Acting Coach
ACTING COACH SCOTLAND
Like What You Read? Want to Read More? Mark's eBook is available here
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 2011
Guest Post: Jeff and Julie Crabtree
Today’s blog post is a guest blog from my friends Jeff and Julie Crabtree, the authors of Living with a Creative Mind. They are two remarkable people, a musician and a psychologist, who have written the most important book on the way that Creative People think and work. And trust me, Jeff and Julie know their shit, so you’re going to want to read this blog through thoroughly, then you’re going to want to buy their book. I could not recommend it highly enough. It’s the kind of book where you start nodding along very quickly, recognising yourself in the behaviour described. Enjoy the blog post and buy the book.
* * *
We are the authors of the book Living with a Creative Mind, a survival guide for creative people and their friends and colleagues. We are all about how creative people work, and how to help them become more productive. For the performing artist (lets call him Adrian), this means understanding and managing the unique pressures of performance. His journey (an extract from Chapter 2 of our book) helps us understand how the pressures of performance affect the performer.
Adrian has just come off stage knowing he nailed opening night. The crowd was with him and he knew that he had them with him the whole way. It was electric. He is buzzing, feeling the euphoria of the release of pressure and tension that built up before the performance. Smiling and elated; his friends are laughing at all his jokes. He is thinking, “I am so good.” He stays up until four in the morning. Performance number two is the next day but he doesn’t want to lose this feeling. Plus he is young, full of energy – he can make it happen.
Next day, during the second performance, he misses a cue, stumbles over a line and his leading lady makes a comment as they pass each other on the way to the dressing room: “What happened to you tonight?” The applause was not quite as electric as last night. Adrian begins to feel a little sick in the stomach, like he is losing his grip. That old black doubt creeps into the back of his mind and takes hold: you are a fake, you knew all along you never had real talent, they’re going to get rid of you, they’re probably all in the pub now talking about how terrible you are. What starts as twinges of doubt is reinforced by some old thoughts and is soon developing into paranoia.
Adrian’s mood plummets. Suddenly he is obsessing over small aspects of the show. He phones a friend and makes them come round and rehearse a scene over and over. The smallest details are issues for him. Adrian has become hypersensitive. Self-assurance has become self-doubt, and he starts looking for little clues in the way others react to him that will confirm what he now dreads but secretly believes is true – it’s over for him…
How would we help Adrian?
The main thing would be to help Adrian realize that the natural state of the creative mind is tidal. So for a performer – the ups and downs are normal. You don’t overcome the cyclical or tidal nature, but you learn how to navigate it. So how do you do that?
If we were working with Adrian we would help him become aware of his sleep/ wake pattern. When he is in his up/high energy – wired phase – particularly after performances- it would be easy to begin a pattern of getting to sleep very late – feeling like he needs little sleep. Actors with longevity learn to respect their sleep/wake cycle and work to discipline and train their physiology to get sleep – despite the highs of performance.
We would also begin to explore his self-talk (the constant dialogue in our head, at the threshold of our consciousness, that forms our view of who we are in the world). The tension between the need for perfection and attention to detail produces fear and cripples a performance. The idea that “everything has to be perfect for me to be good” is in fact a lie that destroys the creative mind. Introducing the gift of imperfection to our self-talk will help Adrian embrace those times when his performance is not the way he would like it.
Finally, Adrian needs affirmation more than anything else after his second performance. An actor’s social world can be ruthless. Having one or two friends who will affirm Adrian without any agenda is crucial. Actors will always have bad shows; bad reviews and off nights – but having friends who can affirm you is essential to coping with the highs and lows.
* * *
If like me, you were thinking “yeah, a book on creativity, I need that like a hole in the head”, you’ll know from this blog post that Jeff and Julie are no bullshitters, they really know their shit, they’ve done their homework and this book can actually help those of us that struggle with the perils of having a creative mind, being a squiggly line in a world of squares. Buy the book folks, buy two, one for you, and one for the people in your life that don’t ‘get it’, because this book is closest I’ve ever come to feeling okay about being a freak.
To You, The Best!
Mark Westbrook
Senior Acting Coach
ACTING COACH SCOTLAND
Like What You Read? Want to Read More? Mark's eBook is available here
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 2011
eBook Update
Let me start by wishing you all a Happy New Year. Yesterday’s blog was a bit fire and brimstone. I’m fired up about 2012. We can all get what we want if we break it down into small pieces and commit ourselves to action.
It’s easy to make excuses. For ages, I made excuses to myself about a whole lot of things, then I broke those things down into manageable chunks and got on with it.
Well, if you’ve slept through the last few weeks, I have written my eBook on acting Truth in Action, the other book Approaching Shakespeare is already written and will be launched in April this year too!
I’m just finishing off the final touches to Truth in Action and it will be available very soon now. If you’d like to be one of the first to find out when it’s released, you can fill in the little form below. I’m not going to push it, but I know some of you were asking to know the MOMENT it comes out. So okay dokes, sign up and I’ll tell you the moment it goes live.
Anyway, here’s to 2012, we’re going to nail it this year, yes we are!
To You, The Best!Mark Westbrook
Senior Acting Coach
ACTING COACH SCOTLAND
Like What You Read? Want to Read More? Mark's eBook is available here
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 2011
Xmas Update
Merry Christmas to All of You!
I am rested after a brief holiday in Newcastle, NSW and now I’ve returned to Sydney (to see the Picasso exhibit) before flying back to my beloved Scotland.
I’ve managed to move the eBeBook on Actingook Truth in Action on a great deal and we’re onto draft 3 now. It’s an exciting time for me, I’m stoked about all the cool stuff coming up in 2012, although a little sad about leaving Australia.
Normal blog service will resume soon.
Building a Character
It’s easy to see how the mistake was made all those years ago. You read a play and your imagination brought all the pieces therein together and made the characters seem like real people, particularly as the dialogue and style became more psychologically real.
Then, if you were playing a character in a play like that, it made sense that you would attempt to impersonate that character to the highest degree possible.
Here’s the trouble: impersonate means to assume the character of a person, to personify them, to pretend to be them.
But a character is not a person, therefore they cannot be impersonated.
Seen from the outside, an audience’s perspective, they SEEM like people, but people exist beyond the temporal limits of a play’s duration and people exist outside the space of a theatre or the confines of a page or screen.
Characters do not.
Characters are actually just a set of lines, fictionally they appear to have goals, actions and defining characteristics but actually all they are is a set of signs and symbols, think of them as… potential energy.
Now you ARE a person, and you have a character (your own persona) and when your character is asked to represent this set or series of signs and symbols, these cyphers fuse with you and your endless and constantly changing behavioural possibilities and creates the appearance of a third thing. Synthesis occurs and an audience sees this third thing as the character personified.
But it’s 80% accident and 20% design. And that’s what makes it special, it’s changing, evolving like a person, constantly and continually in flux.
The script and the requirements of the play, along with the director’s suggestions/demands/requirements provide the design element that prevents it from simply being an open ended improvisation and ensures that you fulfil your obligation to the author, who if they had anything important to tell you, should include it in the script rather than expecting you to achieve it by clairvoyance.
You cannot impersonate a fictional character, you can impersonate a fictional character representing a real person, but this IS an act of impersonation and not one of acting, they’re different skills. And for the most part, you will be studiously copying gesture, manner and voice in an attempt NOT to act well, but to ensure that you give an accurate impersonation.
But the basic doing, the ‘acting’ that happens in the present, in the here and now of the actor’s moment to moment existence, that’s what brings this synthesis alive for the audience. Not some mistaken attempt at embodying the fictional.
So yes, I guess I am saying that those schools and styles and methods and techniques that have the creation of a role as a separate intentional activity are wrong.
Someone has to say it.
You’ve got it wrong.
Training actors to create character is wrong. Forcing actors to do the job of creative writing and calling it characterisation or building a character is wrong. And blaming actors when they can’t do it is a mistake. Or when they can’t fuse with this creative writing project on the theme of the play, it’s a mistake. And it just gets in the way and makes the actor’s job not difficult but impossible.
And all the games and all the exercises and befriending the character and going outside yourself and all that well-intentioned voodoo is just a placebo because they won’t admit that they have no fucking clue what to do.
They are still labouring under this same old mistake. Are you? You can change things. You can.
To You, The Best!
Mark Westbrook
Senior Acting Coach
ACTING COACH SCOTLAND
Like What You Read? Want to Read More? Mark’s eBook is available here
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 2011
To You, The Best!Mark Westbrook
Senior Acting Coach
ACTING COACH SCOTLAND
Like What You Read? Want to Read More? Mark's eBook is available here
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 2011
Rewriting History with Hollywood
The long disputed Shakespeare authorship debate gets fresh blood with director Roland Emmerich’s latest film ‘Anonymous’, a play that posits that Shakespeare was a dumb and greedy provisional actor and just a Beard for The Earl of Oxford, the erm ‘real’ writer.
I will hold my hands up and say that the film looked a gorgeous, vivid, colourful sexy romp on the trailers, but.. I so disagree with the premis, I was worried I might dismiss the whole film out of hand.
There were 12 people in the audience for this showing. If you don’t count the Cineworld usher who kept watching us with her night vision camera. (apparently the audience don’t get to be anonymous).
The film is gorgeous, well-written, oozing with vibrant colours, and factually inaccurate beyond measure. Attempting to challenge the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays by inventing a fictional alternative is daft (Marlowe was silenced for informing against the conspiracy) but it may well convince some excitable American kooks or those unfamiliar with history or the vast tide of real evidence of Shakespeare’s authorship. Instead they present the authorship debate against political intrigue and the failed rebellion of Essex, mixing real history with bubble headed bollocks.
This film makes a mockery of my nation’s greatest poet and from a German director and an American screenwriter, based on conjecture, it is an insult. The Shakespeare’s Birthplace Trust devised a great 60 minute argument against this bullshit, check out their website.
It’s very entertaining, the acting is great, the film is fun, I do encourage you to see it, but don’t expect any kind of reasoned argument, it is presumptuous from the beginning, a ludicrous rewriting of history for entertainment’s sake.
I’m off to write a film about how Goethe’s works were really written by a highly literate spaniel and Abraham Lincoln’s best speeches by a particularly intelligent woodchuck.
I’m sorry I can’t write your essay for you… But
Once a week (sometimes more), almost every week, I get a very polite email asking for help with an essay, dissertation or thesis. I love getting emails, I like to help, I welcome it but…
Some of you may know that I am engaged myself in a 100,000 word doctoral project of my own and I am heavily involved in the long dark journey up my own arsehole, which is a PhD.
I appreciate that you have chosen an exciting topic and are now engaged in finding source material and I do want to help you, but if I replied in detail to all those requests, I wouldn’t get a single piece of my own work done.
So here’s where you need to start, The Library. Not Google, not Yahoo. Your Library. Read books on your topic, you can’t shortcut it by speaking with me, I do want to help, but only if you have specific questions, and only if I think you’ve actually exhausted the other options. I don’t answer broad questions. I will answer specific ones relating to Practical Aesthetics when I can.
If you have a question about Strasberg vs Stanislavski, you need to read Strasberg and about Strasberrg and you need to read Stanislavski and about Stanislavski, you need to go to the academic journals, and particularly TDR which has plenty that can help you. But I didn’t spend all those hours reading that stuff to summarise it for you. You can search on this blog for lots about Strasberg, Stanislavski, Mamet and Practical Aesthetics, but you need to help yourself.
If you want to know about Practical Aesthetics, you can read my blog, read True and False, A Practical Handbook for the Actor, Robert Bella’s chapter on PA in The Training of the American Actor (called The Handbook of Acting Techniques in the UK) and Karen Kohlhaas’ book The Monologue Audition, all of which deal with Practical Aesthetics in detaill. Once you’ve read all that, I’ll help you further.
Please understand I’m not trying to be mean, and I’m trying to help actors to navigate and negotiate the difficult business of our profession, and I also want to help people know more about acting in general. But I can’t answer all those emails unless you’ve done all that you can already. There’s 502 blogs here. Start with the books and journals, move to the blogs. After that, you can persuade me to help you.
To You, The Best!Mark Westbrook
Senior Acting Coach
ACTING COACH SCOTLAND
Like What You Read? Want to Read More? Mark's eBook is available here
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 2011
The 500th Blog – Theatre. Is. Rubbish.
Today is the 500th Blog. Wow. How did we get here? I’m amazed. Pleased, but amazed. So what do I have to say for myself after 500 blogs, I have to say that in the words of my old friend Joseph – Theatre is Rubbish.
Why do I think that? Well, it’s expensive to go to and often the story is poor. Many times the quality of the acting is weak and the direction misleading. Half the time I’m not convinced that the director and actors understand the play and the rest of the time I don’t think the play is up to much good.
Worst of all. It’s boring. Yes, I said it. It’s boring. BORING. Can you admit it?
I sit in the theatre waiting for the tedious rubbish to end. Indulging the actors with their overly acted performances, spelling everything out to me, as if I’m an idiot – they forget I’m not a TV audience member – OH – that’s another story, for another blog, on another day…
Who defends the theatre? Generally actors, directors, writers etc. In other words, people who earn their living FROM the theatre.
Okay, alright, so perhaps I’m just being provocative, but basically there’s a world of difference between plays like A View from the Bridge, Further than the Furthest Thing, Girls and Dolls (Yes, not the musical) or Oleanna and a lot of the boring rubbish that is pumped out at the minute.
Somewhere along the way, someone forgot that it’s meant to be entertainment. Instead, it’s become a bastion of the liberal middle classes, a way of ensuring that they get their cultural fix, but I cannot fathom for the life of me what they see in it.
Even worse, I find it SMUG. And Boring. Smug and Boring. Is this the profession that I pledged my life to? This smug and boring waffle? I hope not.
I can’t stand plays that don’t seem to give a shit about whether they keep the audience interested and entertained. The artist as entirely abstracted from their audience. I hate it.
And yet, I’ve had some of the most thrilling nights of my life at the theatre. Blackwatch at the Armadillo, Oleanna at The Gate, The Far Side of the Moon – Lepage at his magical best at Tramway. What did they have in common, they had a fucking story! They knew how to keep the audience listening, interested.
So okay, theatre isn’t always so rubbish, but a lot of it is crap. But perhaps the risk is why we go, because we might, or might not like it, it might or might not be rubbish. But somehow I can’t go with that. I want quality, I demand it. So should you.
To You, The Best!Mark Westbrook
Senior Acting Coach
ACTING COACH SCOTLAND
Like What You Read? Want to Read More? Mark's eBook is available here
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 2011
The Literal
The ‘Literal’ is the first question that we use to approach a scene using the tools of text analysis. The question is:
What is my character literally doing in the scene?
The trouble is that many people get stuck with the Literal question and end up making a lot of common mistakes. The most common of these are:
*Being too literal. For instance: John is talking to Jill about having a baby (all scenes are talking in general about something)
*Not making it about your character. For instance: John and Jill are…
*Asking the wrong question: for instance: what is literally happening in this scene?
*Getting metaphoric: for instance – Sam is talking Chris down from the ledge (in a scene where Chris is only metaphorically on a ledge)
*The ‘getting’ trap: for instance – Dave is getting Selim to give him a break (this is a confusion of the literal with what the character WANTS).
The reason that answering this question is so important is that it provides, or forces us, to make an objective starting point before interpret the scene, actors always want to interpret but the Literal question makes us articulate our understanding of what the character is doing on an essential level, without interpretation. This brings us closely in line with the writer’s intention for your character in the scene.
The most common format for demonstrating your objective understanding of the writer’s intention through the literal is to answer it like this:
YOUR CHARACTER’S NAME+VERB+THE OTHER CHARACTER’S NAME+BLAH DEE BLAH.
Mike is convincing Jenny he deserves a second chance
Kay is ending her relationship with Sarah
John is forcing Steven to hear him out
Bill is confronting his boss about the stolen microchips
This format helps you to show that you understand the scene on an essential level. Since you see what the writer has your character essentially doing, you can build the rest of your analysis on this, and not just interpret the scene before you understand what’s actually going on.
I hope that helps iron out a few confusions on the literal. Use this when you first read a scene to help you cut through all the confusing and often misleading information. This prevents you from basing your entire work on the scene on your first impression of the scene, or on the part of the scene that took your attention, or chimed with you.
Finally thanks to all those people that braved a Saturday night in Glasgow to help us celebrate ACS 3rd Birthday with us
Busking
Most of us are buskers, I say this with the greatest love for actors. Our training provided us with nothing of great value more than the experience of learning how to busk it. We’ve been to school, taken classes, maybe even attended exorbitantly priced workshops, where the secret of acting was revealed to us, but we were fucked if we could glean what it was from the instruction given, and after the fun ended, or the trauma subsided, you couldn’t make out what the point was. And so you learned to busk.
What do I mean by busk it? I mean play it by ear, improv what you were going to do in the moment, having no workable approach to rely upon, we simply busk it.
And those who are very good at busking make a career out of it and make it look easy on the camera. And they get paid the Elephant bucks, appear on Inside The Actors Studio, spout crap and look wise.
Busking is the actor’s counter-measure against the fear of screwing up. You’ve been doing it since school, since someone introduced you to an exercise you didn’t understand and guiltily, you complied and pretended it was ‘quite useful’.
There is no shame in busking if what you were taught was bullshit, nonsense and crap. And if you cannot apply what you were taught to the honest business of acting a scene, then either you didn’t listen, you didn’t understand, or more likely, it was bullshit to begin with.
So far, you’ve been busking. The problem is that sometimes you were lucky and sometimes you were not, for busking is hit and miss. But since you know no different, what could you do? You found a way that works for you -sort of – and why risk time, money or reputation on changing that.
That’s the main reason many good actors will never be great actors, because busking is always limited and limiting, because it’s a protective behaviour. And acting is about being in the zone of risk, the improvised spontaneity of the moment. No busker wants to be there because that’s actually what it is not, we want to do just enough to get us into the next scene, safely, and we will be as conservative as we can to get there to avoid harm.
So what do I think you should do. Well first off, don’t worry your secret is safe with me, I won’t tell the world you don’t really have a clue what you’re doing. Second, there are small things that you can be taught that will really help you to move away from reliance on busking, the question is…are you brave enough to learn them?
Who Wrote Shakespeare?
I know it seems a tautology, but people such as Freud, Mark Twain, Charlie Chaplin, Mark Rylance, Derek Jacobi and most recently the director Roland Emmerich believe that someone else did. The candidates range far and wide but most have settled on Francis Bacon and Edward de Vere,the 2nd Earl of Oxford,
And they’re in good company. For hundreds of years, since a man called James Wilmot first decided there wasn’t enough evidence to prove that the man from Stratford was the writer we all know, people have been questioning the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays.
Next month, Emmerich’s film Anonymous is released in the UK, which suggests that Shakespeare was nothing but a Warwickshire oaf and the real writer was de Vere.
Well, let me tell you what I think about this. There is not a scrap of evidence to prove that Shakespeare was anyone other than Shakespeare, just a load of conjecture, guessing and fantasy. It’s entirely ridiculous and yet that hasn’t stopped people from searching for the Real Shakespeare.
James Shapiro has written a wonderful book called Contested Will, which is a marvellously rich book explaining who has contested Shakespeare’s authorship. But more than that WHY those people did so, which is in many ways much more interesting.
Recently the lovelies at the Shakespeare’s Birthplace Trust, released an amazing 60 part audio counter attack on the authorship debate, where academics, actors, directors, Stephen Fry and other experts give their opinion. It’s well worth a look, as is Shapiro’s book btw.
The main claim against the man from Stratford seems to be that he could not have written the works because he didn’t have a life that reflects what was written in the plays and poems. (whereas apparently De Vere and Bacon didn’t, it is an elitist argument that maintains that only a university educated person could have written these multilayered plays) But this error comes from looking for the man in the work, as if he is always writing autobiography.
The debate will rage on, regardless of a significant lack of evidence to contest the authorship. But people will always need to be heretical, and indeed we should question things, otherwise we would still mistakenly believe that Homer wrote the Illiad and that the gospels were written by the disciples. The diffence? These have been conclusively proven, in the Shakespeare debate, it is merely a need to rubbish the man from Stratford, to reduce his achievements and to attack our greatest writer. BUt despite a few hundred years of attempting to disprove the authorship, no one has.
The film will misinform and miseducate those that watch it, but it won’t change the fact that Shakespeare was not anonymous, he was the son of a Warwickshire glover, who through his own hard work, became the great dramatist the world has ever known.
Just for Fun
Hey folks
As we approach our 500th blog (wow!) I’m minded that I’ve been a bit ranty recently. Let’s have a bit of fun with today’s blog and just go through a few fun facts that are good to know, especially on this significantly sad day:
- The word DRAMA comes from the Greek word meaning ‘to DO’. Therefore drama is doing, not feeling, not acting, not plays, just doing.
- In Elizabethan England, people said they were going to HEAR a play, whereas today we say that we’re going to SEE a play. Similarly, we sit in an AUDI-torium, a hearing place!
- If your theatre is haunted, it is considered lucky.
- A playWRIGHT writes plays, just like a cartWRIGHT made and mended carts. I once had a colleague insist I should change the name of a course I was teaching to Playwriting and not Playwrighting. The writing part is a mechanical activity, plays are WROUGHT!
- Telling someone to ‘Break a Leg’ has nothing at all to do with their limbs. A leg is a curtain that the actor must pass when walking onstage.
- The business of preparing the lighting for a show is stilled referred to as ‘rigging the lights’, the earliest theatre techs were sailors!
- Actors have 2 saints. St Gensius (who was tortured and murdered by Romans after refused to continue to make fun of Christians) and St Vitus (who was placed in a vat of boiling water for saving the Roman Emperor’s son with sorcery <read Christianity> – but I’ve no idea WHY he’s a saint for actors)
- If the theatre is closed for a period, it’s called ‘Going Dark’.
- In Japanese theatre, the backstage is called ‘The Shadow Side’
Hope you enjoyed those, back to serious business tomorrow 
To You, The Best!
Mark Westbrook
Senior Acting Coach
ACTING COACH SCOTLAND
Like What You Read? Want to Read More? Mark's eBook is available here
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 2011
Return to Mecca
There are three places in the world where I consider myself at total peace. The first is the Drama Bookshop in New York, the second is the National Theatre Bookshop in London, and the last is the twin theatres of the Royal Shakespeare Theatre and the Swan Theatre in Stratford upon Avon, where I am today.
I came here as a teenager, as a university student, as a graduate, a drama school trainee director and many other times. Today I’m here to inspire myself as I work through a second draft of my eBook – Approaching Shakespeare.
I’m here to walk through the fields, revisit the tourist attractions and tonight I saw Philip Massinger’s The City Madam at The Swan. I’m curious to learn about Massinger, he wasn’t a contemporary of Shakespeare as such, he was 20 years Shakespeare’s junior, but the production is directed by Dominic Hills who is soon to be Artistic Director at The Citz, in Glasgow, so I thought it might be inspiring.
Now Massinger is no Shakespeare. His verse is looser, the language ever as rich or teeming with intelligence, the wordplay and tools of rhetoric less subtle. Massinger’s plots are not tidy, with minor stories that appear and disappear quickly, arriving only for a moment of bawdy in an otherwise intelligent drama.
And yet. It held my attention for most of 3 hours, which frankly is a bloody miracle. It was very funny and well acted, great fun, and the lead actor playing Luke Frugal impressed me most, because he really was ‘playing’ – working the heightened text with a heightened performance, truthful but larger than life.
Massinger’s work is very much about his own time, with many contemporary mentions of Virginia and the New World. Shakespeare work is also about his own time, but never set there. Always subtextually commenting.
My favourite moment in the entire play was the curtain call, the moment when actors and audience exchange something, a thanks. I love it. But what was a bit disappointing was how the company were quite straight faced with their thanks, very business-like, bordering on superior. But there was the wonder actor who played Lord Frugal (Luke’s elder brother), he just beamed out to all of us, he was clearly enjoying it.
That meant something to me, like he was sharing something of his joy with me, and I was thanking him for his efforts and pains. Too many actors are afraid of the curtain call, they look bashful, even afraid or embarrassed and it shits all over our enjoyment.
It was great to be back in Stratford at the RSC, I’ll return to the studio and the business of my PhD, renewed and reinvigorated and with more excitement for my eBook ‘Approaching Shakespeare’.
Sentimental Crap
We are sentimental about acting. We really shouldn’t be, it’s a terrible job. Don’t get me wrong, the feelings it engenders are tremendous, they’re highly addictive, but the job itself in terms of being a job, it’s rubbish.
In general, we work long hours, for low pay, we have no job security, no pension, it’s a high risk, low reward employment that most people in sensible jobs think is insane. It’s hard to call it a ‘profession’ when it doesn’t really even qualify for the definition of the word.
Yet, we are compelled to it by how we feel when we do it. The thrill of it. I don’t blame any actor for that.
But I’ll tell you what gets my goat:
Sentimental crap about this being a calling, a higher soul enriching blah de blah, something that takes us beyond ourself, a responsibility.
Nonsense. Acting is the most selfish job in the world, so selfish that we even deprive ourself of income and a decent standard of living to do it.
Acting is not about the audience, it’s about our compulsion to the buzz, we do it for no one but ourselves. And that isn’t criticism! I encourage you if you love it that much, do it.
But don’t make it into something it isn’t.
It’s hard graft for little financial reward but I know you find it compelling, exciting, enlightening and exhilarating, until the Elephant bucks come rolling in, that will be your reward. It’s selfish, but which job isn’t?
But don’t be sentimental and pretend to yourself and others that this ‘calling’ is somehow more special, and we do have a habit of making it seem like we have this mystical, enthralling job, that touches on the spiritual.
I don’t blame you. Back in the day, we used to terrify people with our transformations, that actors were buried upside down at a fork in the road! Such was our ability marvelled at.
But.. We know the Sun God doesn’t bring us warmth and we understand how photosynthesis works and actors can still move us, but our audience no longer believe we are weavers of magic.
But actors still retain a little of that belief that they have a special place in society. Yes, the storyteller always will, but don’t be sentimental about it, it makes a mockery of ourselves.
Don’t downplay your graft, but don’t take yourself too seriously either.
It’s a job. It’s not a calling. We like to believe it’s a calling because it makes us feel special and that gives our life purpose and meaning.
Purpose is important, but looking to some mysticism and voodoo to make it meaningful is self delusion.
We love to call it our ‘whole life’. Yes I understand, my job also occupies me 24/7, it gives me purpose too, but I’m not pretending it’s more than it is. I love helping people achieve their dreams, but I don’t romanticise it. It’s a job, and loving my job and knowing it’s a job, doesn’t make me a hack, it makes me a pragmatist.
We love to hear people tell us we’re doing the right thing with our lives, so when someone tells you acting is special, it makes us for all the crap.
But give yourself a reality check, cut the sentimental crap, it’s a wonderful experience, a terrible ‘job’ but we cannot help ourselves, we just have to do it.
That’s love. We’re in love with how it makes us feel, and like any young lover, we’re capable of feats of tremendous self-decision.
But I admire that you want to do it. We need you to tell our stories, and that you often do it for nothing but the feeling. That’s something.
Don’t Run Before You Can Walk
… because you’ll end up flat on your face on the concrete.
Our understanding often bounds ahead of our actual ability to put that understanding into practice.
Over and over again, I see actors, inspired by our approach, rush to use it, only to fall on their faces.
Understanding it, and practising it as a habituated, unconscious competence, are two very different things.
But that’s a hard thing to hear. And you want to get out there and make your mark, I get it.
You have to serve your apprenticeship to become the master craftsman. The apprentice can make a chair after a relatively short time, but their boss makes a thing of beauty.
The trouble is that you can damage your reputation if you’re not ready. Is it worth it?
If you’re wondering if it’s time to run, you should ask someone. Someone you trust and listen to the answer.
It always saddens me when someone doesn’t complete their training with us because they are desperate to get out and prove themselves.
I understand. But this isn’t some money grabbing charlatan talking, this is someone who wants the best for each and every student, who wants you all to be the best actor you can be.
I think of my former student Joanne, who at 20 IS ready, her process is habituated, she’s highly competent, she’s ready and she’s working.
Then I think of those students attempting to work with half learned tools. How can you avoid doing a shoddy job.
Finish your training, serve your apprenticeship, raise your competence and then you’ll run with confidence and grace.
Until then, I don’t do band aids.
Recent Posts
- How to Rehearse Ichi-Go Ichi-E – PART 2
- How to Rehearse Ichi-Go Ichi-E – PART 1
- The Lines Come Last
- The Stages of Rehearsal – Tuckman Style
- What do the Best Do?
- The Shakespeare Challenge
- Acknowledge
- Circles of Presence
- Tales from the Trenches Part 4
- Tales from the Trenches Part 3
- Tales from the Trenches Part 2
- Tales from the Trenches Part 1
- Is That The Best You Can Do?
- The Beige Middle
- Achieving Your Goals – A Little More Help
- Pareto or Bust
- Destroying Obstacles
- Paid in Sweat
- Life is NOT a Rehearsal
- The Only One to Blame… Is You.
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