There’s an unwritten rule when it comes to talking to actors:
“What are you doing at the moment?”
DON’T ASK THAT. It seems harmless sure- but there’s a lot going on in that question. Actors don’t always get to be hired to do acting, so this question can trigger this fact. Worse still, there is a habit amongst actors to equate their self worth to their work.
So when you ask what they’re ‘up to’ at the moment or if there’s anything ‘in the pipe line’ you could be accidentally triggering a series of thoughts that lead to the actor saying to themself “I am worthless”
Yikes, what a mine field.
Instead, I prescribe asking a different question. One that not only dodges any existential crises BUT it also forces both parties to be present, really present with that very moment.
What is your favourite thing right now?
It’s open enough to be a bit of a pick your own adventure for the person being asked, but it’s also specific enough to begin a good conversation.
It’s not perfect- I’ll keep playing with this one and see if there’s something even better.
What I like about it is it gives the power to the other person, gives them status. It allows them to find something that they’re actually interested in, something they’re excited about; their favourite thing.
With that kind of kindling you’re in for a fire of a conversation!
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
Ouch
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”
“It’s all the about 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 andover 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
Lift Off
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.
Andrew Scott in Vanya
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.
In the last post on this subject, I talked about how a key step to entertaining is to loosen our expectations about what the group of people we are working with need to be like.
They say great parents have few rules. This doesn’t mean that they let the kids run rampant, but it means that they give more space. A parent with more rules might see a rowdy group of kids, get stressed and yell at the kids. Not fun for anyone.
A parent with fewer rules might see the same group and decide that this is a highly energised group of kids. They might then make some new decisions about how to work with that rather than fight it. There’s less yelling and (most excitingly) less stress for the parent.
Instead of feeling stressed that the kids aren’t acting the way they ‘should’, they become interested in how they might work with the way they are.
As an actor, I also find this an effective way to entertain. To go on stage with a preconceived notion of how an audience should react, how they should listen and (worst of all) where they should laugh, is a death sentence. Not only will you go out there and not be ‘in the moment’ but you’re also in danger of beating yourself up after the performance.
The same is true for teaching or delivering any information to a group of learners- there’s no right or wrong in the way they should be. Here’s a belief I invite you to adopt as you experiment with entertaining to engage:
New Belief:Any behavior my learners display is perfect. Everything is an opportunity for me to explore new ways to engage.
The alternative of course is that there is a ‘right’ way to be and there is a ‘wrong’ way to be. This is the kind of rigidity that makes entertaining difficult and certainly is the antithesis of empowering anyone.
When people trust us, it means they can get to the work sooner.
Trust then isn’t a ‘nice to have’, it’s a necessity. Humans are ineffective when they feel unsafe. We cannot do our greatest work when we are in fear of being rejected or when there is the niggling feeling that our best interests aren’t taken care of.
We simply want to have a sense of certainty that the people we are working with have ‘got our back’. It’s as simple as that.
And simplest of all is how to build trust:
Simply have the persons best interest at heart. Give them good reason to trust you, not by telling them- but by believing the things about them that will build it. People can feel that.
Build trust not because it’s the right thing to do, but because it helps us all do our best work.
One of my favourite games to play when I’m teaching is searching for the thing that makes the lesson content make sense for my students.
Content: Finding a way in via content is simply using specific learning that seem to light up the student. If I want to teach a song in Te Reo for instance, I might have greater success using a translated Disney song rather than another one. It’s win win, I get to teach the desired outcome AND we get to deliver it using content that lights up a particular student or class. Content could be the way in.
Metaphor: Story examples or the right metaphor can be a great unlocker for some students. When I was teaching pōwhiri once, I used the example of inviting a friend over to your house. As a class we discussed all the things we would do to make them feel welcome. We then began making comparisons between this example that they could understand and the lesson content of the pōwhiri we were learning. Metaphor could be a way in.
Wrapping paper: Sometimes the way in is purely presentational. If I present some learning in a more mysterious manner, some kids click in more. If I’m playful and throw away that might draw others in. I’m not wed to any one presentation or teaching style. What ever sparks wins! So be flexible in your presentation approach and let their engagement dictate your style. How you ‘wrap’ the learning might be the way in.
There are many roads to Rome, but again the fundamental trick is to look for the spark; what am I saying or doing that seems to light them up? When a student is leaning forward with interest or sparkly in the eye- then they can learn anything. ANYTHING!
I love improv. To me it’s like a playful conversation with your best friend. And I also think teaching is a bit like a conversation. A transfer of knowledge or a creating of connections for a student. To have teaching sessions that are as alive and vital as an improvised scene holds the potential for magic. The best improvisors will tell you it’s this playful spirit that is part of the secret. But what does it actually mean to be playful?
Listening. The first secret to great improv is listening- and there a few different ways to listen. More on that tomorrow…
STEP 4: LEAD: Now it’s time to begin leading them to the desired state. As you can imagine this should be done gradually; changing your state quickly will probably just look a bit weird and have the opposite effect you want. This is where our focus on the energy of the room is important. Imagine where you are is on one end of a spectrum and where you want them to be is on the other side. As you begin to inch your way along the spectrum, it’s important to ‘hang out’ at certain places.
STEP 5: MONITOR: There’s no use in moving along your energetic spectrum blindly, everything you do has to be in relation to the reality of the room. So as you begin to shift your energy to the desired state, you have to check how this is being received in the room. If there is no subtle energetic change, you may not have ‘paced’ for long enough. In this case, go back and match them a bit more. Truly let yourself be in the same energetic space as them before you begin to shift.
STEP 3:Match their energy. Now that you’ve got your antenna tuned acutely to the vibe of the room, it’s time to match it. This is the pacing part of the equation. It may seem counter intuitive, especially if the room is hectic and unfocussed. This is why it’s important to key into the energy of the room rather than the specifics of it. The energy may be high; quick, buzzing, high pitched, spread out… these identifiers can transcend a specific behavior. Your job is to match the energy of the room, not the literal behavior. To ‘rhyme ‘with it, not necessarily mirror it. Another reason I love this tool is it encapsulates an important belief about effective teaching:
You can’t take people where you want them to go without first meeting them where they are.
This is one of my FAVOURITE tools I use in any situation where I’m teaching or presenting to a group.
What is it?
Pacing and leading is a method of influencing a group of people to a desired type of behaviour or level of engagement. In most cases for me, I want the kids I’m working with to be listening attentively and feeling playfully present.
How does it work?
STEP 1: Desired end state. Start by figuring out what desired state you want the group to be in. For example, I want my group to be listening attentively and ready to learn. To take them there, you have to figure out where they are…
STEP 2: Read the room. Listen closely with all your senses to get a feel for the vibe of the room. Yes I said vibe, I know thats not the most technical term, but I’m hoping you know what I mean. What is their body language telling you? What does the quality of their gaze tell you? What is the general feeling of the room? Often for me, I’m starting with a group of kids who are quite scattered, disinterested or unfocussed. I find it helpful to broadly categorise the vibe as either energised or unenergised. Funnily enough a noisy room that is energised is easier to work with that an unenergised room.
