No acting, please.

My friend Nik randomly gave me two acting books the other day during our oh so stimulating AMT class. He told me to skim through them because there were a lot of useful exercises inside that help actors. It was 9 o'clock in the morning and I was half asleep so I didn't really think about just how random the whole situation was but fuck it right?

In one of the books entitled "No Acting Please", there was an entire chapter devoted to the idea of "Being". Basically the entire idea behind acting is being. You don't pretend or imply or indicate emotions on stage but rather go for as close to the real thing as possible. Thats not to say that you relive your worst memories while on stage but you enter a state where you can be as free as possible to go with the flow of the playwright's words along with your fellow actors.

After reading pages and pages of all this great info about how to achieve this state, I realized how far I had strayed from the "the way". The acting atmosphere at Dean is not perfectly conducive to perfecting the craft of acting or at least doing it the way I believe is the most honest and truthful way. We take too much time to go over petty insults and he said she said crap without actually focusing on the reason we go to school. Acting problems are usually life problems. If you have difficulty exposing some aspect of yourself off stage, you'll have even greater difficulty exposing it on stage. I block myself repeatedly when I perform with all kinds of outside obligations and shit that doesn't have any place on stage. Did I do all my homework? Did I study? Did I eat too much? Too little? Shit did I have dairy and now I'm going to be singing? Car payments. Work. Papers. Friends. Family. And on and on and on.

Thinking about all of this is really what has been holding me back. I'm a pretty cerebral guy and can usually think myself to death which helps in some cases. In this case it gets in the way of BEING. Too much thinking and not enough doing in life. Too much dishonesty and representational crap in performing on stage. Richard Burton once said that he was more concerned about the odyssey of Richard Burton than he was about his acting career but I think he knew the truth: it's all one and the same.

The point is, I need to just free myself from these restrictions and focus on the doing rather than the thinking


Time to go do stuff. :)