John a valued and excellent member of our cast of "Three"
It's often suggested that the best way to learn a language is to immerse yourself in it - that is, should you want to learn French, move to Par-ee and parlez Francais. The idea roughly extends to just about any hobby; for example, after a week locked in a room with nothing but a guitar, I should imagine you'd be able to ring out a vaguely tuneful Smoke on the Water. There doesn't, however, appear to be a means of becoming an actor via immersion. Locking yourself in a room and maintaining character for a week sounds more like a horrific psychology experiment than a means of learning. The closest reasonable analogue for an amateur actor then, would be something along the lines of Connections week. Every year, the National Theatre takes scripts from established writers and distributes them to youth theatre groups up and down the UK, in a scheme called Connections. At Yew Tree, once we have one of these scripts in hand, we will hash out a rough version of our show in preparation for a week of intensive rehearsal in the February half-term - more snappily known as Connections week. Serving almost as a boot camp in preparation for our local performances, lines learned and scenes blocked, we polish and obsess, and practise and revise, and emerge as young actors at the top of our game. The beauty of this practice is not in the end show, beautiful as it may be. In the sense laid down by JFK, it is less a matter of what the actors do for the show, but what this show does for the actors. I write this the night before our performance of Three by Harriet Braun. In roughly 20 hours, I will be stepping off stage (to applause, hopefully) and going for some fresh air. This does mark some personal significance, incidentally. It was after the performance of Hacktivists in 2015 that a few friends and I, on a whim, asked Sarah if we could join Yew Tree. Tomorrow therefore marks my rough two-year anniversary of deciding to try my hand at acting, and if I may, I'd like to use this to segue into a slightly more personal take on the whole experience. Some people collect coins, others fancy philately, but I like to think of myself as collecting hobbies. There are countless instruments, half-finished paintings, watercolours, acrylics, sketching sets, electronic components and notebooks that I can see littered around my room from where I write this. Most of my hobbies get left by the wayside after a few weeks of obsessive interest in them. Since I started acting, however, I've not passed up a single opportunity to do so. The following, to the best of my understanding, is why. The reason there is no way to learn to act by immersion, and the reason I keep finding myself coming back to it, is because acting does not reward the obsessive, or the perfectionist - it punishes them. Try to improve by rehearsing excessively, and become overrehearsed and lack spontaneity. Rehearse the bare minimum to preserve spontaneity; you will miss a great many dramatic possibilities. Analyse the script all you may, but if you intellectualise too much you will lose emotion, but act without thought and you'll lack understanding. You may throw yourself at this brick wall until you are at the brink of walking out, cursing nitpicky directors, bad writing and impossible characters but the barrier to a better performance is, and always will be, psychological. If you want to be a better actor, the answer lies at least in part within your psyche. Therein lies why I love acting. Two years ago I found the creative outlet I needed, and which has shaped me. No other pursuit has forced me to so closely examine who I am, or to be more self-aware. This week has demanded I allow myself to experiment, that I overcome a fear of falling flat to find interpretations of scenes that I hadn't considered. I have been dragged out of my own head, asked to consciously be unconscious of my thoughts and opinions and react in real time to what happens in front of me, to give greater credence to my intuition and emotion in a way that I could not do before. Intelligence and empathy, analysis and emotion, confidence and self-criticism are all required in equal measure to act. Qualities we all hope to possess have been earned, through hard work, by actors, and pursuing them is surely a constructive way of spending a half term. To summarise in a pleasantly smart manner: acting builds character. I consider myself fortunate to have been able to pursue a passing interest in acting to this point. I am fortunate that institutions like the National Theatre run schemes like Connections, and fortunate that groups like Yew Tree exist for people like me on weeks like this. This string of good fortune can be traced back directly to deciding on a whim to see Hacktivists that day. And so, should you happen to come across a show near where you live, I advise you to go see it. You never know where it'll take you.
It's often suggested that the best way to learn a language is to immerse yourself in it - that is, should you want to learn French, move to Par-ee and parlez Francais. The idea roughly extends to just about any hobby; for example, after a week locked in a room with nothing but a guitar, I should imagine you'd be able to ring out a vaguely tuneful Smoke on the Water. There doesn't, however, appear to be a means of becoming an actor via immersion. Locking yourself in a room and maintaining character for a week sounds more like a horrific psychology experiment than a means of learning. The closest reasonable analogue for an amateur actor then, would be something along the lines of Connections week. Every year, the National Theatre takes scripts from established writers and distributes them to youth theatre groups up and down the UK, in a scheme called Connections. At Yew Tree, once we have one of these scripts in hand, we will hash out a rough version of our show in preparation for a week of intensive rehearsal in the February half-term - more snappily known as Connections week. Serving almost as a boot camp in preparation for our local performances, lines learned and scenes blocked, we polish and obsess, and practise and revise, and emerge as young actors at the top of our game. The beauty of this practice is not in the end show, beautiful as it may be. In the sense laid down by JFK, it is less a matter of what the actors do for the show, but what this show does for the actors. I write this the night before our performance of Three by Harriet Braun. In roughly 20 hours, I will be stepping off stage (to applause, hopefully) and going for some fresh air. This does mark some personal significance, incidentally. It was after the performance of Hacktivists in 2015 that a few friends and I, on a whim, asked Sarah if we could join Yew Tree. Tomorrow therefore marks my rough two-year anniversary of deciding to try my hand at acting, and if I may, I'd like to use this to segue into a slightly more personal take on the whole experience. Some people collect coins, others fancy philately, but I like to think of myself as collecting hobbies. There are countless instruments, half-finished paintings, watercolours, acrylics, sketching sets, electronic components and notebooks that I can see littered around my room from where I write this. Most of my hobbies get left by the wayside after a few weeks of obsessive interest in them. Since I started acting, however, I've not passed up a single opportunity to do so. The following, to the best of my understanding, is why. The reason there is no way to learn to act by immersion, and the reason I keep finding myself coming back to it, is because acting does not reward the obsessive, or the perfectionist - it punishes them. Try to improve by rehearsing excessively, and become overrehearsed and lack spontaneity. Rehearse the bare minimum to preserve spontaneity; you will miss a great many dramatic possibilities. Analyse the script all you may, but if you intellectualise too much you will lose emotion, but act without thought and you'll lack understanding. You may throw yourself at this brick wall until you are at the brink of walking out, cursing nitpicky directors, bad writing and impossible characters but the barrier to a better performance is, and always will be, psychological. If you want to be a better actor, the answer lies at least in part within your psyche. Therein lies why I love acting. Two years ago I found the creative outlet I needed, and which has shaped me. No other pursuit has forced me to so closely examine who I am, or to be more self-aware. This week has demanded I allow myself to experiment, that I overcome a fear of falling flat to find interpretations of scenes that I hadn't considered. I have been dragged out of my own head, asked to consciously be unconscious of my thoughts and opinions and react in real time to what happens in front of me, to give greater credence to my intuition and emotion in a way that I could not do before. Intelligence and empathy, analysis and emotion, confidence and self-criticism are all required in equal measure to act. Qualities we all hope to possess have been earned, through hard work, by actors, and pursuing them is surely a constructive way of spending a half term. To summarise in a pleasantly smart manner: acting builds character. I consider myself fortunate to have been able to pursue a passing interest in acting to this point. I am fortunate that institutions like the National Theatre run schemes like Connections, and fortunate that groups like Yew Tree exist for people like me on weeks like this. This string of good fortune can be traced back directly to deciding on a whim to see Hacktivists that day. And so, should you happen to come across a show near where you live, I advise you to go see it. You never know where it'll take you.
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