#actorblog

[anactorsprocess-blog]

Rules for Living

“Because acting’s just a hobby, isn’t that right General? Definitely not a viable career option! No, Sir!”

On our first day of rehearsals, Jayne asked us what we wanted to get out of this project. My main goal was, in the final performance, to be ‘in the moment’ when performing and just play the scene, not the research. A hard task it seemed. It would require me to let go of all of my worries, inhibitions and fears and just completely relax into the scene. Did I manage to do it? I’ll talk about this again at the end of the blog...

I’ve talked a lot about what we’ve done in rehearsals over the past 6 weeks so i’ll keep this blog away from that and more about what I got out of this project and what i’ve learnt from it.

1: Get out of the house more

This is on of the first things that I learnt from this project. One weekend we’d gone to the Trafford Centre for the day and i’d got no money at the time (I never usually have money) so I’d decided to bring some work with me. I went and sat in my usual work place when I work outside of my bedroom, Starbucks, and began to work. Within the space of an hour, and fuelled by coffee, I had learnt how to bowl a cricket bowl, learnt the rules of cricket and what all the terms mean, researched Glen McGrath and done some lovely highlighting of my script.

I’m terrible when it comes to working in my bedroom. I think it’s too informal of an environment. There are so many distractions in my bedroom and I always find myself drawn to them and never to my work. So I think the best thing to do is to get out of the house. Go and find somewhere to work in public. Starbucks is always a good choice. There’s lots of interesting people to watch and interact with, there’s good music, good coffee and big tables. They have WiFi too! Whenever I need to focus and have a clear head, from now on, i’m just going to go somewhere like Starbucks and work. I’ve found that it works better for me than in my own house.

2: You can only play one emotion

This might sound obvious and I know it is but let me explain it and it will become clearer. For too long i’ve been plagued by the idea that you as the actor need to play this mix of emotions to clearly show the audience what the character is feeling at one time. This isn't possible. It might sound stupid that i’ve only just figured this out but trust me, it’s not. I’d had so many inner thoughts to myself about trying to convey to the audience what was going on inside my character as for most of the third scene, I sat in silence and said nothing. Trying to show this inner life was kind of important to me. Not in the sense of ‘I want to show the audience that i’m capable of layering as an actor’ but more in the sense of ‘I want the audience to see the internal struggles of this character’. It was only a couple of weeks ago that i’d come to the conclusion that this can’t be shown on your face. You’d end up just ‘showing’ and that’s never good. So I settled with playing a single emotion. Being in the moment and not trying to present the characters internal struggle to the audience. Just letting it happen instead. Playing one emotion and relying on the inner life that i’d developed to provide the rest. If i’ve done the inner work, it will show without me trying to force it. 

3: Find the truth

In the first week of rehearsal whilst we were still playing around, I made the silly mistake of reminding everybody that we should make sure that everything we did was based in truth. Although this is true when it comes to all acting, it probably wasn’t best to be brought up in the first week of rehearsal whilst we were still playing around with the piece. I think not limiting yourself in the first week is a good thing. Not putting any restraints on yourself and just saying ‘fuck the rules’ is good as you’ll probably come across lots of interesting things. So do don’t that in week one.

Now i’m going to go on and completely contradict that point. 

I think finding the truth in everything is so key. Especially in the absurdities of Rules For Living. My character had to speak in different accents and voices to mock other characters. The character of Mathew had to sit down and eat when telling a lie. The character of Edith had to clean to calm herself down. Carrie had to stand and dance around to tell a joke until she got a laugh. We all had to do things that were verging on the absurd and for them to work, we all had to find the truth in the impulses to do these things and the reasons why they do these things. Only by doing this would we be able to create believable characters that the audience could invest in. I’m happy to say that I think I did find the truth in my character through all his insecurities, his past, his marriage and his family relations. After 6 weeks, my perception of Adam shifted completely from what I thought I saw on the surface to the sad man underneath. 

4 Be in the moment

Yes, I managed it. I was surprised at first because before we performed, I found myself to be quite nervous. We’d switched performance rooms last minute, I couldn’t find the lines in my head, everything started to go west! But maybe these distractions helped. From what I remember, I got up and started talking and that was it. Everything that was being said was being driven by an impulse and a need to say it. This sounds quite self congratulatory right now and it is because i’m proud of myself for achieving this. It’s a large step in what’s been a 4 year process so far since college. To finally be able to do this for a prolonged period of time in front of an audience was liberating. To rely completely on all the impulse work i’d done, it made me feel good. I feel good talking about it. 

In conclusion:

I’m very happy with how this project went overall. It’s been a fun one in which i’ve had the pleasure of watching my class develop fun and layered characters. I knew after doing Lorca that I needed some comedy in my life and i’m blessed that i’ve been able to do this project. Our director has been lovely and guided us all to a place of security and enjoyment. I’ve had a lot of fun playing Adam and will be sad to see him go.

Now we move onto the Shakespeare project next term...

There will be no blog next weekend as there’s nothing to blog about. I’ll do a term 2 summary during the holiday that we have and then the blog will start again, weekly, from term 3, week 1.

Thanks for reading! 

Stuart

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[anactorsprocess-blog]

Week 9

This past week has been my final week of taught lessons at ALRA for term 2 so the week has been mainly rounding things off that we’ve been learning over the term. The pressure is still on though in terms of our performance of Rules for Living and our character voice assessment. 

One of the biggest things that has happened this week was our ‘preview’ performance of Rules for living to the foundation group. I say preview, it was more of a rehearsal performance just to test if what we’d done worked in front of an audience. I think we were all surprised with the positive reaction that we got from them. I think it’s easy for things to become stale in rehearsal after repeating things time and time again. It was really nice to see the work that we’ve all put in be appreciated by outside eyes and I think it’s put us in a place of confidence before we perform on Tuesday.

Note session with Jayne after our preview run.

This week we did an interesting exercise with Kieran which built on what we’d worked on a couple of weeks ago which was working via sensation and impulse. We started with the same movement exercise we did last week and then moved on to working with clay which was interesting to say the least. We moulded the clay whilst focusing on sensations that we felt and then moved on to working with a partner, sitting back to back, and continued to mould with sensation. I’m still trying to process this exercise to writing about it is proving to be hard. We then moved on to working with a developed version of the text we worked with a couple of weeks ago. This time we began by working with imagery and words cut out from newspapers to map out a visual journey for our characters. it was really interesting and I found that working with the imagery and words really helped ground the emotional journey of the character. We then got up and started walking around the space and interacting with others. Like I said, i’m still trying to process this work so i’ll probably talk about it more after our catch up lesson with him next week. 

I’ve found that the lessons, over the past term, with Gary have really helped me develop my vocal warm-up to a place where I can comfortably get myself warm within a short space of time. This has made limbering up in the mornings so much easier. I’ve sometimes found limbering up in the morning hard to bring myself to do and I know I should do it but sometimes I can’t help but not do it. That’s down to pure laziness. Over the past couple of weeks though I’ve made the conscious effort to do it and it’s really improved my mood and attitude in the mornings. It grounds me and focuses me and it’s always satisfying to comfortable shout ‘Heeeeeey’. 

Kate’s movement lessons have been rounded up for the term. I’m always sad when we have to finish working with Kate for the term because I feel like her lessons always open me up to play and allow me to re-connect with my inner child and my imagination. I’m going to make the conscious effort this holiday to attend her pilates classes in Manchester just so that I can stay connected to my breath and body whilst not in ALRA. We talked about this on Wednesday about how, in third year, you don’t do any movement and how, by not doing it, you lose connection to things you didn’t even know you were connected to. I’m going to try and continuously attend her Manchester classes in third year too. 

We also filmed our acting for camera scenes on Friday afternoon. This was a really interesting experience as we had the entirety of the afternoon to act and then be on the film crew. I think myself and Emily managed to do well on our scene from Black Mirror. We filmed it quite quickly as it wasn’t too technically difficult and we’d already had a couple of rehearsals with it on the Thursday. I’m excited and slightly nervous to see how it looks. Here’s a couple of pictures from the afternoon -

Mark, Megan, Ian and Patrick’s scene.

Megan, Harriet and Charlotte’s scene.

Maddie and Charlie’s scene.

I’m in two minds about writing a blog for week 10. I don't know whether to do a summary in week 11 of both of the weeks or do two separate blog posts for week 10 and 11 along with a summary of the term. We shall see.

Thanks for reading the blog this week. As always, it’s appreciated. Thank you for coming on this journey with me.

Stuart

X

[anactorsprocess-blog]

What is success to me?

I’m currently sat in Euston station in their Starbucks. I’ve already had a latte and a white coffee today and I can’t justify a third if i’m totally honest with you. I feel bad about not buying anything, especially considering how dedicated I am to Starbucks. My train isn’t until 20:25 so I thought i’d write a blog to pass the time. 

Today I had my first professional headshot session with Wolf Marloh in London. It was great and I couldn’t have asked for a better first session of my career. He was knowledgable, honest and very passionate about his craft. One of the things he did best was relax me and make me feel comfortable in front of the camera. To do this, we just talked. We talked about anything and had many great conversations. One of the ones that stuck out was a conversation about social media and success. 

Everybody has a different opinion of what success is. Some actors think that success is winning an Oscar, some think it’s performing on the west end and some think that success is just working consistently. Some people may also judge how successful they are based on their Twitter followers or if they have a blue, verified, tick next to their name. 

Wolf described Twitter as a bunch of people in a dark room talking and hoping that somebody else in the room is listening. I thought this was an accurate description and I laughed. It’s true though. I’m guilty of posting things and hoping it will get some sort of response from people. When you want it, it doesn’t happen but when you’re not bothered about it, it usually comes. 

We wondered if you could make connections with people on twitter and if you could be famous based on the amount of followers you have. Do people genuinely care what you’re saying or not? Does it contribute to our career or not? Are you any more successful if you have more followers than somebody else? Does anybody actually care about the point i’m making? I’ve lost all sense, the coffee is taking it’s toll on me and i’m falling asleep at the table. Anyway, moving on...

My idea of success is working consistently and maybe working my way up to the National Theatre (one day, I hope), I’m not too bothered about awards of copious amounts of fans. I just want to do the work and meet interesting people along the way whilst living a quiet life. I don’t ask for much, only the simple things. You can’t expect to be successful straight away. God help all the people who leave drama school and expect a four month run at the Royal court to be handed to them and when it’s not, feeling like a failure. If you want it, you have to work for it.

Wolf told me that it took 5 years of him grinding away for him to be in the position he’s currently in. 5 years where things weren’t relatively stable but that’s what you’ve got to do and by doing this, you get your name out there, you make connections with people you might not have met otherwise and eventually, you get to a place of reasonable stability. 

Now i’m not saying I want stability. Where’s the fun in that? i’ll take anything as long as i’m happy and working whether that be making my own work or being a part of somebody else’s. 

I always think it’s good to assess where you stand with things like this. Obviously, as I said at the beginning, everybody has a different perception of what success is to them but I think it’s a good idea to be clear on your thoughts, especially when entering the industry. My thoughts might change and when they do, I’ll blog about them but until then, this is where I stand. 

I’d love to know thoughts and feelings on what success is to others. If your’e brave, let me know. 

Thanks for reading.

Stuart

x

[anactorsprocess-blog]

Week 3

This blog is coming early this week as i’ve got a busy weekend ahead.

It’s funny that one of my goals set in last weeks blog was to find more focus during the week because that is something I have not managed at all this week. At times, maybe i have achieved it but overall I haven’t managed to. Obviously it’s completely fine, things like this are bound to happen. As our Choral teacher, Tim, says - it’s fine to lose focus, when you do just reconnect to the ‘other’ and bring yourself back. That’s not a direct quote, just a loose version of something he’d say. As I said, the loss of focus is fine, i’m just not going to ask myself to try and stay focused as I did last week because, clearly, when i ask myself to try, it doesn’t work!

This week has been a decent week. We’ve just finished our last week of workshops with Box of Tricks. It has been an interesting final week looking at what an actors role is in the development of a new play and we also finished looking at the scripts we’d written last Friday in the second part of our writing workshop. I’ve been so inspired by the work we’ve done this week and i’m excited to go on to make my own work and write my own plays. I’m excited by all the possibilities out there with new writing and am hoping that, in the future, I will be able to R&D my own work.

In movement, we took another look at Laban with our movement teacher, Michael. This was a chance to take my discoveries of last week and put them into practice again and it worked quite well. We went on this big, grand journey through every single laban effort working from the imagination to action and then to emotion. The process that I’d discovered last week kind of required me to tweak it a bit to going from the imagination to the emotion and then to the action but doing this didn’t change the exercise in any way, it just made it more accessible for me. It worked nicely and i’m now back to enjoying working with Laban and am quite likely to use it in our next project.

Speaking of our next project, the next play we’re doing is Rules Of Living by Sam Holcroft. I’ve been really bad and when I say really bad, I mean really bad. For this project, i’ve gone out of my way to not prepare anything before the rehearsal. This weekend will be the first time I will have fully read the play and our first rehearsal is next Tuesday. My usual process is to read the script during the holidays and allow it to sit with me. Then I would go on to trying to build a character before rehearsals have even started and come in to the first rehearsal having already made all my choices. By doing that, i’ve found that I stop playing with the work and instead, solidifying my first instincts. I don’t want that happening this time. This time, the only bit of work i’m doing before rehearsal is the facts of the piece and the questions that I need to answer within the piece. In the first week, i’ll start slowly moulding a character but i’m in no rush and i’m very excited for the opportunities for play that will arise from doing this. 

Today I had a lovely moment of ‘my class are incredible’. We were sharing the plays we’d written over the week, some of which were really exposing and honest, and it was amazing to see how much support everybody was giving each other and also great to hear the depth at which people were talking about other classmate’s work, in a positive way of course! Today has been the first day where i’ve thought ‘I am a second year’ and that was a good feeling. 

I’m in a great place at the moment. The work that i’m doing is getting better and life in general and my relationships with other people are also getting better and stronger by the day.

 I’ll see you in my next blog update. Have a lovely week.

Stuart

x

[tiffanybrownetavarez]

My latest post!! About being consistent and having faith even when things seem slow. Thanks for reading! If you enjoy the blog, please click the Facebook like button and follow as well. I appreciate any support!