What acting teaches us about teaching
The painful truth about learning and the antidote they teach at the worlds best drama schools
I come from a family of teachers. My mum is a teacher. My sister is a teacher. My dad’s a cop (but he taught me how to shave so…) It’s no surprise that I too find myself in the classroom.
My journey to education began at Toi Whakaari the New Zealand Drama School. I studied three years there to get my bachelor’s in performing arts and that involved everything you’re probably imagining; from pretending to be an animal for a morning movement class to listening with your toes. I joke (kind of), but my actor training was profoundly useful in more ways than I could ever have imagined.
Sing like no one is watching
Imagine standing unprepared and alone in front of twenty of your peers. You’ve been instructed to mime singing into a hairbrush and dance with complete abandon like you’re alone in your bedroom. Talk about VULNERABLE.
Needless to say I fell on my face in this activity and hundreds of other times during my actor training. There’s something about acting that makes failure sting even more. It’s probably to do with our deep desire to be accepted by the pack, so being in front of a group of people DAILY and seeing them CRINGE at your work is a near-death experience for our little reptilian brains. At drama school we had to learn about failure whether we liked it or not; it was a daily occurrence.
They say whoever has the most failures wins. It sounds counter intuitive but if you think about it, it makes total sense. The learning process is all about getting it wrong; if the goal is to understand and have the ability to apply something, then not being able to do that is a key initial part of that process. We learn the theory, try it out, get it wrong, try again and continue in that loop until we get it.
The Dances of Failure
You can’t get rid of failing (wow, have you ever noticed how much it looks like the word flailing?) you just have to dance with it. Here are a few of the difficulties with failure I faced as an trainee actor that constantly recognise when I teach.
Scared to look dumb
This is approach avoidance. We’re so afraid of looking silly in front of people or feeling the discomfort of not knowing that we don’t engage fully with the learning. If we’re afraid to try we won’t fully apply ourselves in our attempts. Drama school gave me the gift of exposure therapy; each day there is a smorgasbord of ways to embarrass yourself in front of people. When I get nervous these days I often think ‘this ain’t got NOTHING on some of the failures at drama school!’
Drama school gave me the gift of exposure therapy; each day there is a smorgasbord of ways to embarrass yourself in front of people
More than I can chew
I like to move fast, so often I try to do too much at once. This is where scope and sequence are really important for me as a teacher. One of our jobs as educators is to know how much is enough. Or to have the ability to ascertain the capacity of each student individually or collectively. This takes a lifetime to develop. I struggle with this when I’m teaching: Is this too much for them to learn or will they just zoom through this? Are they even getting it..?! It’s hard to know wether it really is too much at once or if you’re just in the beginnings of the learning phase and need more reps…
“All about the reps, bro”
Sometimes you simply need to do something many many times to get good at it. I can remember one voice lesson where we were all learning to control a certain vocal muscle. For the life of me I couldn’t figure it out. Turns out its just something you have to attempt hundreds of times to map the territory and edge closer to a felt understanding of what’s going on. Those are hundreds of ‘failures’ that are necessary to achieve the outcome.
The Pit of Learning
When we were creating our own solo shows, our tutors told us about the ‘Pit of Learning’. It’s basically the part in the creative process where you feel like “everything sucks, I’m terrible and this is hard and impossible and no one will ever want to watch it and why am I an actor anyway!?” It’s when the pain of not ‘getting it’ over and over and over again crashes down on you all at once and manifests in the most unhelpful self talk you’ve ever heard. Trust me, I’ve been there and I bet you have too in some capacity. I love that they gave us such a humorous title for it like “the pit of learning”. This became a shared joke for us all at various stages of the creative process. It meant we could never get too wrapped up in this brutal self talk, because we could jokingly wallow in our own despair with each other.
It’s embarrassing, it’s snotty and sometimes it can bring the rest of the room to tears. But mostly not.
The Antidote
So what’s to be done? If we must fail in order to learn, how do we dance with it? And how do we hold space for our students to fail effectively in our class? The best rehearsal rooms are the ones where you feel safe. The idea of ‘safe’ can sometimes be glossed over because the word to some just means that something isn’t going to fall on you. While that’s important too, I’m talking about something a little less obvious. It’s environmental and psychological. There’s a bit of a ‘get hard’ mentality when it comes to this idea of psychological safety. That a bit of teasing is fine or that if someone undermines your idea, you should be able to suck it up and move on. Besides this just being unpleasant, it’s actually incredibly inefficient.
The whole point of rehearsal is to explore all the possibilities of every moment in a play. You must bring yourself fully to this process of exploration, there’s no half doing it in order to save face. If your character has to beg for their life in one scene, it’s in rehearsal that the actor pushes and explores all the possibilities of that. It’s embarrassing, it’s snotty and sometimes it can bring the rest of the room to tears. But mostly not. In order to get anywhere near the magic of a brilliant show you must have the freedom to explore and that can only come from a sense of safety in the room. The great actor Andrew Scott starred in a one man version of Chekov’s Uncle Vanya. He plays nine characters in the show and it’s utterly breathtaking to watch him mercurially shift from one to the other. In an interview on the rehearsal process he said:
I think the thing that’s really important is to make as many mistakes as possible and not to be afraid of making an idiot of out yourself and to really really explore the idea of something. To have the courage to be embarrassed in front of other people, to be like I’m going to try this and for everyone to be like (he cringes) “don’t do that” and then you really know that doesn’t work (…) then you can dive with full conviction into the next idea.
As a teacher, our great opportunity is not ‘bestowing’ some great knowledge onto our students, but merely creating the environment for us all to dive boldly and with conviction toward the learning. To fail spectacularly and celebrate our failures with as much pride as we celebrate our victories. That’s the promise of safety and that’s the magic that can unfold from it.
“How Fascinating…”
Benjamin Zander is a conductor who wrote The Art of Possibility. There’s a great habit he teaches his music students that is simple and you can use immediately. When his students make a mistake they’re instructed to throw their arms up with a smile and say “how fascinating!”. This gives a clear signal to the brain: “Hey brain! You know that thing that just happened that didn’t go as planned? Yeah, that was cool aye? What an interesting piece of data we get on our journey to learn this thing!”
I was teaching a magic course to kids a few years ago and we were working on a bit of sleight of hand that was pretty difficult and required some focused failure. One of our rules of the class was to say “how interesting!” every time we messed up. My favorite memory of that class was toward the end when I’d all but forgotten our rule. This eight year old boy excitedly came over to show me his trick and after about five minutes of lead up we finally got the all important “is this your card moment?”. Needless to say it wasn’t my card to which the boy said in a depleted and unenthusiastic tone “…how interestinggggg”. We both laughed and he tried again.
It’s funny, as I wrap up here I’m romanticising failure as this old friend I’m completely comfortable with and who I can’t wait to see again. It’s all well and good to say this in theory… but when the red-faced-sweaty-armpitted-self-doubting-flailing friend visits you, it’s a different story. That’s when we must remind ourselves what it’s all for. That growth is on the other side of this discomfort. If we can remember that enough and encourage it in those we work with, real magic can happen.
