I Get It Now!

It finally clicked for me tonight, I have to stop trying to direct the shows I'm in! Arrgghh! After more than a year of the Maestro telling me this, my instructor Brian finally said it in a way that clicked. (Luckily it wasn't directed at me! You'd be so proud of me Maestro!)

Tonight was the last night of my acting class for this cycle. We once again performed the two person pieces that we have been working on for a couple of weeks. Tonight's performance = not so great, but growing. It definitely wasn't the experience of last week (to see what I'm talking about, scroll down!), but I had some growth. One of the hardest challenges of this exercise is that when our scenes are filmed, each person has their own camera, and it is an extreme close up! This means, that every little detail is seen by the viewer, Brian constantly tells us to view this as if we had a 52' head. The challenge with this is to remain still... yes, you read that correctly, still, also known as "as little movement as possible". Anyone who knows me, knows this is a challenge, and that is what showed through tonight. Brian made the comment of "at times you could tell you were really and truly listening, and then you start moving again", I told him that was because I stopped focusing on holding still, and focused on my partner (just say focus with a Germanic accent one time, it'll make you laugh). I was going to ask for advice on how to just hold still without thinking about it, but then I thought back to the book Mastery by George Leonard, and had my answer. There is no short cut to mastering a skill, people who look for them are not on the path to mastery. The solution is to just keep practicing it, do the same practice hundreds of thousands of times, and then do it another hundred thousand times. Eventually you will no longer think about it. That is my solution.

Back to the first part of my Blog, after we all perform our scenes, we then get to watch them on the television. It was in this review that Brian said something that just made all my "directing" frustrations clear up. I don't remember exactly what he said, but it made me realize that Actors don't direct, Directors do. What this means is that no matter how well meaning and good intentioned a piece of advice is, actors do not give advice or criticism to other actors. It's not our place, we are not the director. What always bothered me was what you were supposed to do when someone asked for your advice, and what finally clicked is that we shouldn't be asking other actors for advice and feedback, we need to ask the... DIRECTOR! Thus it is not rude to say: It is not my place to give advice, if you truly want feedback, ask the Director.