thanks, mark

chris

best
chris

But here (Portugal)you can imagine things are a bit more – let´s say delayed… No readings, no trainings, not much around here, and it´s troubling.

So your blog, posts, pratctices and references have been a great joy and source of thought.

Cheers,
Nuno

Just to add my two cents (and to some extent related to Nuno’s comment): the end-result of our performances as actors depend at least in some part on other people (e.g. playwrights/screenwriters, directors, fellow actors etc.) – and other peoples’ poor work unfortunately makes for a wonderful excuse for us actors.

The result is that when we feel the material isn’t as good as it could be, or the director is disorganised etc. we cease to do the very best we can, and say to ourselves that due to the circumstances the end-result was always going to be shabby anyway and there’s no point in investing all that energy and time to get our bit of the puzzle right. We’ll do our best when the big break comes. And of course, the big break tends not to come if we keep thinking like that, it goes to those who are prepared to do their very best with every single opportunity.

I’ve written a blog post about this particular type of excuse and how to deal with it, you can find it at http://www.alexaispas.com/?p=103 in case you’ve got time to check it out. See you in class!

relating this post to a previous one you asked why people strive in later ages to fullfild a life-long dream to be an actor (as naive as this might seem), there is the same one answer: desire. Or longing. Or an urge to do theatre, to act, to…

Some studies tell us that all children are born with it (a longing to do, see, engage, make theatre) but it goes away if not propperly stimulated.

“It” can make of us a great audience or an eagger actor, or “It” can just be taken from us for good.

The point being: those who go to your classes seeking a long past feeling, they are somewhat right; the people that tell you “sorry, tonight won´t be able to make the class/rehearsal” they are fooling themselves.

This longing is “It”. “It” makes us wait, endure, crave, fight, read, practice, wait some more, laught at the sight (not of danger but) of the stage and – let´s face it – beeing there, in the center of the world, i.e. the attention, like a child.

p.s. the Meyerhold´s Biomechanics Master Gennadi Bogdanov, when confronted once with a girl telling him she was late due to her legs aching from the (strenuous) exercice the group did the previous day, he answered:
- that´s a personal problem. (- could be translated as: I don´t give a damm)

As actors, there are thing we control and things we don´t (Declan Donnellan dixit in that wonderfull book The Actor and the Target, very similar to Mamet´s views, by the way…).

What we can control can not be called upon to take responsability on what we are afriad to engage because:
a) that´s a personal problema and no one needs/wants/cares to know
b) if the problem is too important then theatre/acting is not – and you don´t have “it”, please go home.

Nuno

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FGWvHtjemvg

seems to me an item is missing in this reflexion on the gatekeepers (nice epitet): why they and with what criteria do they keep the gates closed?

The late french sociologist Pierre Bourdieu tells us of a theory that can explain why some are “chosen”: institutions (such as theatre companies, drama schools, universities…) tend to perpetuate themselves at their own image.

One is chosen because is similar to the chooser (at the eyes of this one). That can bring some light on why we ourselves were chosen in the past to do this and not that.

For (and were is the weekspot of your post) we in fact have been chosen by some gatekeepers, so they are not an faceless enemy, they are what we are – aiming at survival.

This is my favourite blog post from Acting Blog. As it so happens, what you’re saying about bringing the gates tumbling down and overcoming the gatekeepers fits in really well with a project I’m working on right now.

Just to add my two cents worth to the other aspect of this post, which talks about not giving up – you mostly talk about the importance of ‘obsession’, ‘character’, and ‘will’ for keeping going even despite countless rejections, and of course I agree with that. But for me, the most important thing is structuring one’s life in such a way that it becomes easier on a day-to-day basis to act consistently with our long-term goal than to ditch it when other things take over (I think you might have referred to it briefly as ‘the capacity to organise oneself’ sufficiently). Such as when trying to diet, getting rid of all the junk food in your closet so the only way to get junk food is to walk to the shops.

For an actor, this kind of structure could include signing up to acting classes – so you feel bad about having to explain your absence and you turn up even on days when you don’t feel like it; or scheduling acting workouts with other actors etc. With this kind of structure in place, actors can then do what K A Ericsson and others call ‘deliberate practice’, i.e. a series of repetitive tasks where results can be improved upon through continuous feedback.

For example, the ‘repetition’ exercise you do with us in class is a perfect example of deliberate practice – it is a repetitive task (as the name suggests) where its results can be improved upon through you (as the acting coach) providing us with feedback every time. And of course, the class acts as a ’structure’ that pushes us to do that exercise every week (at least), regardless whether we feel like doing it or have the willpower or strenght of character to keep doing it.

Lots of thanks for this blog post, and see you in class

This article very much reminds me of a moment when I was an intern in a casting office and my colleague jokingly said ‘Let Olivia go through the new CVs and she can decide who goes in the bin or not!’ In essence we were joking about whose career to throw away, which was a bit surreal! Very much a ‘gatekeepers’ job?