Looking back on my experience of drama school, it seems a lot of the initial training was about getting us to focus on the right things.
There’s this thing people say about actor training where they “break you down and build you back up”.
I’ve never really liked this saying- it seems kind of negative or unnecessarily fear inducing. From my years of training it’s more about discovering patterns and building new ones.
And that’s just the learning process. But I guess people like making things sound dramatic and scary when it comes to acting.
It’s confronting, sure, but so is meeting your edge in any arena.
One of the main focuses I needed to undo in my training was this thing of trying to be liked. Of monitoring in an audience or in a director- am I doing the right thing? Do you like this?!
It makes sense, of course; my only frame of reference for learning was the school system that was all about being ‘right’. But of course acting isn’t about being ‘right’ it’s about being true.
Even that is a tricky metric- true according to who? Looking elsewhere for how truthful your work is is just another way of outsourcing your certainty.
Instead, as actors we must become experts of placing our focus. One way of doing this is to give your character an objective:
To make this person stay
To make them leave
To make them understand me
You get the idea. This is how we pursue truth; to what extent did you fight for your objective?
I love this way of thinking because if I’m feeling nervous I can ask myself, what is my objective?
And more often then not in those nerve wracking situations my objective has accidentally become “to make these people think I’m clever or funny.”
You lose when this becomes the objective, you really do. And this is what can happen if you’re not clear on your objective as an actor.
Trying to be clever or funny or attractive will always set you up for failure. Those things MIGHT come as a result of what you do in pursuit of an objective (emphasis on might, haha).
So in life, I think we should practice the same thing; give ourselves objectives that get us out of our own way. Objectives we can fight for, use our full selves to pursue them.
That’s playing big and that’s where the real magic is.
