Latest update: 29 January 2022

This is an ongoing collection of writings, essays, and lessons to accompany actors of The Hollywood Actor Lab.

The word act, as in action, means do, not read or think, so with that understanding, this is to serve as nothing more than a guideline for the WORK. The work is to be done in class, rehearsal, and on set. I find the time in between thinking about and processing information is useless without actually having the experiences and hard work that is to be done regularly with your fellow actors. This collection of writing is merely a way to organize those thoughts and experiences and a way to categorize some of what we come to call CRAFT. I cannot emphasize enough how little this reading material matters without being in class and rehearsing and DOING. So don’t make pondering, wishing, hoping, or reading your only productive act in pursuit of your goals. Act now.

Hollywood Actor Lab

Prepared by James Huang

Teaching Guidelines and Principals of Acting for our Students

Craft is an attempt to create structure in the chaos of Art.

“Living truthfully under imaginary circumstances”

Sanford Meisner’s universal definition of acting. All schools of thought have same basic roots and foundations and principals for acting. It’s helpful to write this on a post it note. Look at it frequently. The meaning is so succinct, it applies differently week to week.

Connection with Truth

We can’t easily define an honest moment but it’s easy to spot a false one. Connection with your imagination and the ability to connect with your childhood sense of play and make believe is key. Using imagination as a tool for creating your new world, reality, relationships is crucial in crafting the imagined circumstances and stakes that play out from scene to scene and ultimately the entirety of the play, show or movie. The more viscerally connected you are with your circumstances, life, details, the more the viewer will feel your truth and connection to the role. Most drama and comedy will show a character on their most important day so having access to our most extreme emotions and being able to tell a story with the most extreme versions of ourselves is an actor's job.

Listening and Reacting

The simplest way to find truth is to listen. From Stanislavski to Meisner to Uta Hagen and all the founding teachers who crafted and refined techniques from stage to film, this tenant is paramount with beginning an actors training and will be the ever-present core to what makes an actor successful before an audience or a camera lens and scene partners. Acting is reacting and listening is what will connect us all to each other and ourselves on stage and screen. We listen with our entire bodies and all of our senses. Be a dry sponge at the start of a scene and let each action, word, and gesture soak us. The ‘pinch and the ouch’ is all about listening and reacting truthfully. And honest reactions are what the audience is paying to see because Today is the Day!

 As actors we must listen to our scene partners with everything we’ve got. We’re not just ‘hearing’ them… we must listen to their spirit, their essence, their soul. All the non-verbal communication and energy they give beneath the dialogue and words is what we must soak in to truly connect and have synchronicity. Whenever two people aren’t willing to listen and take in the other, it results in a disjointed connection and often will result in what audiences call a ‘lack of chemistry’. Improv exercises are great for listening as many of them force the actor to really hang on every single breath, gesture, facial expression, body movement, inflection, tone, word, syllable, and breath from their partner as all you have to go on and inform your spur-of-the-moment improvised reaction. It forces actors to listen deeper and react more impulsively and less intellectually with behavior. It forces actors to get out of their heads and into their bodies. Listening is everything.

Child-like theater games connect us to our sense of play

We tickle the muscles that we have long neglected so we can connect with our instincts, our imagination, and our impulses. As adults we’ve created mechanisms of being well-behaved grown ups. To be an actor means we are operating on the most important day of our lives. We must have the ability to access the most extreme emotions and truthfully tell the story. Stories are life with the boring parts cut out. Playing make-believe is something we all mastered from the time we could run around and play. We were all inherently master actors as children.

The athletic nature of acting

Whether you’re a guitarist or a basketball player, you will spend less than 1% of your time actually performing for an audience. So you must LOVE the work if you want to be an actor. That means you must love the practice. An athlete spends 99% of their time practicing the game. You must love the work and cultivate a relationship and practice with the craft of acting. That means being in class. Constantly being challenged to grow and enrich your experiences navigating one scene at a time.

Mind/ Body/ Spirit

Our voice, face, body are our only tools as actors. We must treat them like our instrument. Tension is the enemy. Voice and breath are connected to the pool of emotion in our gut. Our voice register must be exercised to connect with the range of vocal qualities just like our range of emotional qualities. Performing tension, violence, angst, rigidity means to be completely in control of our instruments and connection with our breath and spirit. It is an imaginative performance so we must understand our instrument when performing in every sense. To make it truthful is to connect with our imagination and to use our body and voice as a vehicle and instrument of storytelling. We avoid immersion for promoting mental health as an actor and rely on our imagination and craft.

Substitution and the ‘As If’

I much prefer Meisner’s term, the ‘as if’ instead of the more familiar ‘substitution’ for a few reasons. It immediately inserts imagination based thinking, rather than pulling or replacing something from your life directly. We always want to relate to moments and core emotions, but most situations in film and television won’t be something you can directly ‘substitute’ from your life experience. But the terminology ‘as if’ I feel is more easily connecting the dots with a core emotion and imagining something ‘as if’ it were the character’s moment or dilemma or playable action. 

Relating to your role by utilizing imagination and exploring your creativity when you can’t fully relate to circumstances or characters is a challenge when the role isn’t something you immediately connect with. Bend the character through you and your personal experiences that are in line with the demands to tell the story. Using ‘as if’s’ are helpful when you can simplify the moments to core emotions that are human and universal to pear the scenes down for an actor to better understand and empathize with. For extreme circumstances, relationships, and situations that are foreign to your life experience, if you can dig deeper and uncover what the core emotions and motivations behind the circumstances are to a universal human experience, it will help you as an actor to stay rooted to the heart of the matter. With extreme emotion, there can even be circumstances that connect you to truth and honesty even if you’ve not been the one to directly experience the pain, trauma, love, elation, or euphoria. But when you can so deeply relate to the experience in your own world, you can use that collective experience because we are empathetic people. Their pain is your pain and their joy can be your joy. Using imagination to fill in the blanks just like children are so able to, gives us endless possibilities of how we create our imaginary world to play in. This is how we make-believe.

Core Emotions

There are several different lists on Google from various psychology websites that list core emotions and what they are. Regardless if they’re listed as 7, 8 or 21 core human emotions, you can be guaranteed they are universal human emotions that we all have experienced by a fairly young adult age in life. So these core emotions are something we all have knowledge of and some understanding of how it affects our psyche, behavior, voice, body, and just everything about our energy and essence. For any given scene, there is usually a core emotion underlying the scene that an actor can and should relate to, even when they aren’t able to relate to the circumstance. 

For example, any Marvel superhero movie or Star Wars film may seem out of this world or super-human, but I promise you that all the scenes have a universal, human, relatable core emotion underneath the space age and magical circumstances and mise en scene. When we analyze a script, actors can discover and utilizing these core emotions to connect with the real heart of the matter at hand and humanize their performance. One example of 8 core emotions are: anger/ sadness/ fear/ joy/ love/ surprise/ disgust/ shame. 

Relationship

Immediately connected with your ‘As If’ is the relationship you embody your scene partner with. Cultivating the relationship isn’t always so cut and dry in that they’re almost never going to be scenes that match your real world life relationships. You may have a loving father, a divorce, no siblings, etc. So cultivating the relationships in the scenes with how they affect your character will almost always require a degree of imagination, relating your ‘As If’, and crafting appropriate triggers and scenarios that connect the scene to your experiences. Getting to the core of the dynamic of the relationship is key. If the father figure character in the scene is in a position of power and is using power over your familial relationship, one could perhaps find parallels of authority figures taking advantage of their personal relationships from their past bosses, teachers, principals, guidance counselors, uncles, whomever. Understanding the root or core power dynamic and circumstance is usually a very human conundrum regardless if they’re your direct blood relations or not. That is where the truth can begin with any given actor and from there, you have a tinder; a starting point to light the flame that can catch like wildfire and take on a life of its own that is fueled by your imagination and creativity. 

The Arc or ‘The Turn’ of the scene

Every story has an arc or journey of a protagonist from beginning, middle, and end. And this overall story arc in screenplays or teleplays or stageplays will have a series of scenes that make up the whole. Each scene is typically written as a stepping stone or chapter that brings our story closer to the overall arc. With each scene there is also a clear arc; or beginning/ middle/ end. Often these arcs are an evolution or turning point or smaller step towards the end journey. They should always be connected to the throughline of the entire story, otherwise known as the ‘Spine’ of the story. These scenes are like vertebrae connected to that spine and should always be connected as such. Oftentimes superfluous scenes that are weaker in connection to this spine will be either edited out of the writing process or end up on the deleted scenes and cutting room floor, so to speak. Actors should not only be connected to this understanding that each scene is a piece or even a microcosm of the entire story, but should also understand that each scene will often have a ‘Turn’ or turning point of the scene. 

From the start of the scene to the end of the scene, the characters should usually be in a different place mentally and emotionally with new information, a change in power, a dynamic shift, or a plot twist, or higher stakes, etc. Whatever the turning point of the scene is, the emotional turn happens very quickly. It’s not very natural or even realistic at times with how quickly these emotional swings happen in a script. But this is the very reason why people love turning on the T.V. or watching movies. As Alfred Hitchcock phrased it, ‘Movies are life with the boring parts cut out.’ So an actor is responsible for taking on a character’s life during their most important day, their best day, their worst day, and so on. 

Actors must relate to and have the storytelling ability to act out their most extreme moments of the character’s experiences from any given scene, and repeat it for multiple takes and coverage. These scripted emotional swings and turns typically happen within any given 2 to 4 page scene, or 2 to 4 minute scene. An actor will be responsible for being able to perform this again and again on any given film set, or night after night on the stage. While actors are always striving to be ‘realistic’ and ‘natural’ in their acting, there’s nothing realistic or natural about this process or display. Often the emotional swings and resolutions that happen in any given scene take 90 seconds whereas in real life they’re more likely to process and resolve in a matter of hours or days. 

So understanding the big emotional swings, relating to them, owning them as if they were your own, acting them out repeatedly, and doing it unnaturally quickly is something an actor will have to learn to do in order to be the best, reliable storyteller possible. As with all the contradictions with the craft of acting, this ability is a superpower and strength for acting but is born entirely of vulnerability and submission to empathy and the most intimate human experiences within and around you. 

Text & Sub-text

Good writing will always have deeper meanings behind and underneath the words we use. Surface behavior and veiling our inner monologue and intentions will help create a friction, or dynamic performance. Characters are almost always in turmoil or conflict with themselves and others and understanding the subtext of the script will help you get there too. Everyone is usually ‘up to something’ deeper than our words allow. Whenever you get a scene, naturally you’ll gauge the tone of the language and intent of the characters. Well written scenes will have an opportunity for a hefty amount of sub-text beneath the superficial dialogue. People rarely say exactly what they mean and only sparingly do actors get to say something that is completely unfiltered and overt.

Anytime you read dialogue, consider the subtext that is driving the words and explore the possibilities of what other opposite intention or supporting intention can be injected to give the scene more tension and dynamic. Understand the text and subtext and you’ll better have the freedom to create moments and underlying intentions. Create friction between what you want and what you’re saying. There’s always a duality to good writing. There should always be a healthy dose of ‘covering’ what your secret intentions or subtext is. Many great scenes have a cover up or secret. 

It’s always effective to be at 150% emotionally charged so that you can suppress or veil or cover up your bursting emotions. That cover is the text and your emotions are the subtext. You can’t fake this so actors must commit to being 150% bursting with their emotional content. Then in the scene you can actively try to suppress or downplay these emotions creating a strong internal struggle, duality, conflict for yourself and scene partner. People normally really are only showing about 50% of their true emotions by adulthood with manners and etiquette or secrecy so this mirrors real life and gives you plenty to do and plenty to craft behavior from. We are often downplaying what is bursting inside our hearts and minds so having a full emotional life to suppress as an actor can lend itself to internal conflict within the life of your character. 

Knowing who you are

Beginning with the basic jump start of ‘The moment before’ is understanding your character moments before the scene begins; But what about the days, months, and years before? Deep diving into your own ‘who, what, when, where, why, how’ of your character as a whole as well as scene-by-scene. Character development can be journaling, meditating, improvising, writing your own backstory, assigning triggers and even talismans – go as deep and fun and productive as you like to get a handle on the role.

Context and audience

Knowing your genres, audience, story telling, arcs, peaks, transitional moments, devices, expositional tropes, purpose of supporting characters, and so on and so forth. Knowing the story as a whole and knowing your part in the storytelling process is a responsibility to effectively tell the story in the best way possible. Is your one day role supposed to be heroic, or do you perish because we’re supposed to give the hero motivation to save more lives? Are you in service to the plot and exposition or are you there to further the desire for our hero to find true love? Knowing your role also means to know what the audience should want and feel by your scenes. It’s important to consider the context of your role beyond just your designated scenes.

Emotions

There’s a lot to say about emotions. You can find volumes of psychology journals and encyclopedias of PhD essays to learn all about them. You could read rows and rows of bookshelves filled with romance novels that tickle and explore and titillate. You could absorb self help books that likely make up one of the most successful genres of literature in the last half century. With regards to acting, this also is a long, open ended topic. One thing I will say about it is that emotions travel through the body. They are connected to breath. Breath connects everything from the pool of emotion deep within your gut and externalizes past your vocal chords and out of your mouth in the form of voice and sound and through your face which informs your expression as well as your body movement. Emotions live and breathe with your physical and spiritual self. Some actors have a deep connection and others may experience resistance. This is human.

A jolt of emotion is helpful at times when an actor is open to the idea. If an actor is stuck or unwilling or unable to get past their natural self defense mechanisms, it doesn’t always hurt to jolt the actor into any emotion to shake them out of their mental blockage. Of course when it is respectfully and mutually agreed upon that an actor is able to experience a jolt of emotion, they may find themselves more capable of taking that jolt of emotion and allowing it to travel towards their desired emotion to fill the scene. For example, if an character is meant to grieve and the actor isn’t able to truly access and connect with that feeling, it’s because their mental state is prohibiting them from that dark place. If the actor gets jolted with emotion from, for example, a shock to their nervous system such as a fright or a ‘pretend’ insult or embarrassment, that adrenaline shot to their bodies now has something moving and traveling that they can work with. Emotions don’t stay static, they move. With each passing breath, emotions evolve and turn and are channeled. An actor can then direct that energy and point it toward an emotion the scene is calling for. The actor can then take that vibration in their bodies and tightening in their chest and that sweat from their palms and that shake in their breath and apply it towards the character’s grieving process and fill the scene with the elusive traveling emotion that is all part of our human nature. It is important to communicate with actors what your intentions are when deploying a jolt of emotion. There are plenty of inappropriate examples of how this can occur as well as effective and respectful and agreed upon examples that can be utilized. Proceed with respect and caution for all parties involved.

Art is therapeutic

Everyone struggles. We all have demons. Lean into your weakness rather than shy away and hide from it. Put all your emotion, pain, angst and suffering in the world of art. Use it. Defy it. Put a spotlight on it. Use all your pain, passion, glory, humor, darkness, lightness, and vibrancy to resonate with your audience. Stand proud and be a beacon of light for yourself and others who struggle too. Art is cleansing and defining. Let it shine.

It should also be noted that Martha Graham famously penned the ‘Divine Dissatisfaction’ artists cope with. 

“There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep yourself open and aware to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open. As for you, Agnes, you have so far used about one-third of your talent.”

“But,” I said, “when I see my work I take for granted what other people value in it. I see only its ineptitude, inorganic flaws, and crudities. I am not pleased or satisfied.”

“No artist is pleased.”

“But then there is no satisfaction?”

“No satisfaction whatever at any time,” she cried out passionately. “There is only a queer divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.”

It is real and it only pushes us to do our best. Hopefully as an artist, we can enjoy much of life as well as be tortured by our own feeling of inadequacy. Finding a balance is important to our own happiness and coping with our suffering.

Know your audience

David Mamet wrote an essay that was for artists to distinguish their work as an artist versus their work as a business. He echoed the sentiment, ‘Know your audience’. The audience you crave and seek is a vast world beyond your eyes and ears and home and are the nameless, faceless people you feel the need to reach with your message. Your painting, poem, script, performance, film, show… your aim as an artist is to reach far and wide. What a shame it would be for you to live and die by a few business people who deem themselves the ‘gatekeepers’ of Hollywood or your career. When you set your sights beyond the few before your face, your trajectory will be to the stars and not live die by one or two people’s approval or judgment of you and your work. We have allies in acting teachers, agents, managers, casting directors, etc. even directors, producers, critics -- but don’t let them define your career. You define yourself and career and reach your audience. Know your audience. Do the work for yourself and for them.

Love the work

There is a misconception that all actors are seeking fame, celebrity, fortune, and status. Luckily for actors, reality television give those people a platform to achieve that. Actors, dare I say, true actors love the work and are passionate about the work. That means we love the practice and the art and craft of performance. We love taking a script and finding truth in characters and tasking ourselves with telling stories. The opportunity to do so for stages far and wide is a privilege, honor, and thrill. And for every blockbuster movie or studio TV show that feels out of our reach, there is always a community playhouse, short film festival, or even Youtube channel that gives people an opportunity and stage to perform! It’s the work that we serve and with commitment, time, persistence and passion, the work will serve us. That first step which should remain a constant throughout your career and journey, is acting class.

Philosophy

Developing a relationship with the craft of acting. Understanding the role you play with each audition and role you get to perform. The process you’ll undergo each time you work should be a fun, explorative and creative use of time, imagination, craft, script analysis, character building and crafting out a performance that is sharp, daring, charged, connected, elegant, etc.

Be daring. Art is bold. Communication is electric in cinematic form. We have the opportunity to teach as well as entertain. Enlighten others through our electrified selves. Super charge your own sense of self so that others may be inspired by your bravery, boldness, truth, honor, courage, strength, vulnerability, love, etc. etc. etc. 

To inspire others is to be inspired. Always surround yourself with stimulation and find the beauty and inspiration everywhere. If you’re feeling great, your work will feel great. If you’re struggling, let the work elevate you. If you’re miserable, get yourself right and don’t allow work to make your self esteem suffer more. Have a relationship with yourself. Have a relationship with the work. 

The Practice of Study followed by Playing

Utilizing the left and right sides of your brain: the creative and the analytical/ the imagination and the mental/ the playful and the intellectual. No other art really has to be so dual minded as acting. From studying and script analysis to letting it go and allowing yourself to play and make believe. This muscle requires practice and workouts and fine tuning from every kind of scene and genre to work out and exercise and practice of bouncing back and forth between the brain hemispheres is the process. From thinking analytically and studying the script to letting go and playing with freedom and operate purely instinctually is the only way to go from ‘they acted it correctly - to they acted it AMAZINGLY! This is where magical and entertaining things happen from behavior. But the work has to be instilled in your head from the script analysis so you can create a tango of a dance. Know your steps, but then let go and feel your way through the performance. The art of letting go of the work and acting raw and unhinged is where great performances are born. Get out of your head and into your heart when ‘Action’ is called. You’ve done the work, now let the work do you. All acting should be improvisational in spirit and feeling. When you let go, it can be. Don’t bring rehearsal into the performance. Make it new and real -- in the moment.

Strengths and Weaknesses

It is equally important to cultivate and develop your strengths as an actor as it is to explore and train your weaknesses. For example, if you’re a natural at playing a charming, charismatic lead suitable for a romantic comedy, it is important to practice and strengthen those traits. Equally important and perhaps more difficult emotionally and mentally, are to explore and dive into the realm which you may not be so natural in. Ample time should be spent not just strengthening that which suits the actor, but also that which evades the actor’s natural tendencies and instincts. 

The contradictions of Art/ Acting and learning to cover your emotional life

The never ending contradictions and oxy-morons in teaching acting will be constant. That is because people are complex and have a never ending duality that is their conscious mind, physical bodies, and spirit which are often at odds. Performances will almost always be more dynamic when you understand the subtext of the scene and play towards the behaviors and spirit of what is truly being communicated over what is said. 

Another way to approach this is to always be feeling - truly feeling the emotional content of the scene at 150% and as people, we suppress the emotional feelings physically and mentally to somewhere around  50-75% which can result in a nuanced performance that is bubbling with more than meets the eye or literal language. I often encourage actors to invest more in the emotional connection than anything to do with the language of the script. It’s almost always about how we feel rather than what we say that is the magic of a performance and what connects two actors together in a scene. That’s chemistry. How people synchronize, not how people are speaking towards each other. 

The duality and contradictions are rife throughout acting scenes and will always be present. You have to find these moments and themes in the script and story lines. It’s up to you to connect truthfully to those underlying emotional wells while speaking something else, often quite the opposite of how you’re actually feeling. You can’t fake this. You have to invest in the emotional content first and foremost and commit to it so that you have something to fight against. This conflict and inner turmoil and tension can manifest in interesting ways to create a dynamic performance.

Self Consciousness

Often felt by anyone performing. Some perspectives I always resort to is that self consciousness fades when you put all your focus on your scene partner. Rather than thinking about your results or your image, keep focused on your character’s objective. Focus on what you want and how you achieve it. What are the obstacles before you doing to affect your behavior and how do you strategize when you’re not getting what you want? When you are not in the moment, you’re thinking either ahead or behind the present. You can always find a way to plug into the scene by listening to your scene partner. Take them in with every ounce of your body, mind, spirit. Even in an actor’s perspective, as I got older, I felt far less concerned about what people might say about my ultimate performance, and much more concerned about what my scene partners and castmates would have to say about the scene itself. So on two levels, I put all my focus and attention onto making my scene partners the most important element in acting a scene and I find this helps eliminate any self consciousness or even nervousness about me as a whole. The body is known to betray performers with nerves and shakes and upset tummies and tension. I find this goes away in most scenarios from the audition room, rehearsals, and all the way to the on set performance. Make it not about you.

Simple Approach

Story structure and script analysis can get complicated. An entry into the scene should start simply. That way you can see the shape of a scene and start filling the shoes of the characters from that simple approach. First, what do you want in the scene: Love or Power? What is the relationship? There is a protagonist who goes through a change and antagonist who initiates the change. This is an entry point into understanding how to approach most scenes in a basic peared down way. Get more specific as you etch out the details and define these things more and more as you read and rehearse it.

Script Analysis

The nature of script writing is essentially formulaic in that there will always be drama unfolding for the audience to enjoy. The barest breakdown of drama lies in conflict and in turn, problem solving by our protagonist and antagonist. The simplest understanding of protagonist/ antagonist is the protagonist is the one who is affected and changed. The antagonist is the one who affects change or inserts conflict. Virtually all scripts have this base dynamic between two or more characters. For the duration of the story, we will be entertained as they try to solve problems and achieve a rewarding goal that has stakes, urgency, and meaningfulness. 

This formula is the only real structure an actor needs to recognize. So from any given scene as well as the entire arc of the film, the characters have a clear goal - sometimes the same goal, sometimes the opposite. They will have obstacles that prevent them from achieving this goal easily. It is the actor's opportunity to have a wide variety of actions or strategies to achieve this goal. From any given moment, action, piece of dialogue, sentence, word; everything and anything – the actor has that moment to craft an intention, behavior, attitude and point of view to convey the action to demonstrative behavior. 

Another way to think about it is that the audience should be able to recognize what the actor is doing to the other even with the mute button on. That’s not to say the actor should be playing obvious or superficial emotions with every line, but the actor should always be either reacting to or trying to affect the other person with an evolution so as to not have a flat scene or to have repetitive beats. The actors should clearly be affecting the others in a specific way, and a variety of ways to create a dynamic, rich, and evolving character and story arc.

While there may be structure in this script format, it is also the actors' opportunity to insert as much chaos and emotion and humanity into this structure. Acting is always going to benefit from a raw, unleashed, and emotional trigger pull. Pull the trigger and let it fly. Don’t attempt to control it. You can’t. Just let it fly.

Goal, Action, Obstacle

Character is defined by BEHAVIOR; not words, costumes, props, hair, makeup, appearance, sound, or inflection. As film is first and foremost a visual medium, character’s are defined first and foremost by behavior. Audiences should know who’s up to what and what is happening in any film whether the film is silent or in a foreign language without subtitles. Actors should always be defining their performance by demonstrative behavior. This is shaped by your goals, actions, and obstacles.

With the universal and formulaic nature of scenes, we have problems to be solved. Setting your goals, actions, and defining the obstacle is an actor's simple approach to understanding that they’re after something, something or someone is standing in their way making it difficult to achieve, and they must attempt different ways and actions or behaviors to achieve their goal. Some find it helpful to etch their defined goals/ actions/ obstacles out in stone through the script analysis and homework phase. You can write down really specific sentences and phrases to encapsulate your points to then deploy from moment to moment or line by line. You can also make it really simple and universal if that helps your process, but explore everything and find out what resonates strongest with you. We don’t always have to over intellectualize these but having a base understanding of what you’re up to and what you’re after is important. Specificity is important and will only make your acting that much more solid and clear. 

It will only serve the actor to simplify your goal to a specific sentence that resonates with you. It can be something simple if that helps, such as ‘my goal is love’, or ‘my goal is power’, or the goal can be more specific if it helps, such as ‘my goal is to avenge the death of my lover’ or ‘to reclaim and possess the family farm’. Having a clear goal in mind helps the actor stay focused on their motivations and purpose for any given scene or story. Their goals should always be in line with the throughline or overall theme of the larger story. When the actor is vague or unclear in what they’re doing, I promise you, it shows to the audience and then they’re unclear about you now too. To best tell the story, you must know what you want at all times and communicate with conviction from every single moment to moment; Every single line to line of dialogue.

The nature of script writing and any drama for that matter places characters on a path towards some greater goal. Film and TV is meant to entertain us and more often than not, it means the characters we’re watching are having either the best or worst days of their lives. Something is happening that has high stakes, something to gain, something to lose, and there’s a sense of urgency. This creates tension and the need for our characters to have goals. Sometimes it’s the same goal between characters, sometimes it is the opposite. And so to make it fun and interesting to watch, these goals have an obstacle so as to not make it easily attainable. Again, this obstacle can sometimes be a shared one between characters or different depending on the circumstances and situation. 

The obstacle is a clear indication that whatever you’re after isn’t coming easily. Whether this obstacle is represented in a person’s opposition to you or an immediate circumstance like a bomb is about to explode, your obstacles will then shape your actions that you take to solve the problem. Create metaphors for your obstacle. Is it a difficult task like threading a needle, pushing a boulder, dodging bullets, confronting a bully, or brain surgery? Use metaphors to help shape your struggle and behavior. Have a wide variety of actions to get what you want and you’ll never be accused of being flat or one-note. Have a singular sentence to define your goal so you can simply use it as a mantra entering each scene. 

Actions are an actors opportunity to nuance their unique and individual persona, bringing their own spirit, personality, essence into the role. For this is where an actor’s behavior is shaped and demonstrated. This is where the audience really sees an actor’s behavior come to life in specific and relatable ways. The language we use to create actions serve us as tent-poles or lily pads for navigating and leaping from moment to moment is part of script analysis and is a key tool for informing our acting choices. Using the right verbs to direct our performance is paramount in knowing where our convictions lay as we set goals to win, defy, love, fight and so on. It is important not to think of actions as moods or feelings that can’t be ‘played’. For example, ‘being more cocky’ is not an action but rather ‘trying to impress someone’ or ‘pretending not to care’ and ‘showing off’ is a playable action. ‘Be sexy’ or ‘be annoying’ is more of an idea and less of an action whereas you could instead say ‘seduce them’ or ‘turn them on’ or ‘get the upper hand’ or ‘reduce them to smithereens’ or ‘control them’ are playable actions that will help drive you with a more informed reason behind your words and behavior.

We’re not just saying the lines on the page the way we think they should sound, we are enacting the impact of what we’re doing to the other characters through behavior to support this dialogue. We are inserting behavior through actions to affect those around us. We are striving for our goal with actions and friction and tension is caused by the obstacle. Actions allow us to always be ‘doing’ something connected with our intentions and point of view. Enrich your lines with playable actions so your behavior goes beyond just memorizing and reciting lines with a hollow delivery or with a line reading in mind. Strong choices are key so refining and narrowing down playable actions are an imperative part of script work as well as making the role and motivations of the character yours to claim and own. 

If an actor is instinctively employing a subterfuge in their demonstrative behaviors, they will be telling a story with behavior behind the language. An audience should be able to know what each character is up to and what people are all about even with the mute button on. This playable action and behavior should be rooted deep within the character’s point of view, attitude, and spirit. So when they’re speaking to each other, it isn’t just about words, it’s about what you’re doing to affect one another. For any actor who is making a natural progression of actions to go after their goal will never fall victim to a flat or one-note performance.

Improvising the scene can be a powerful and informative tool to help you unlock the instinctive actions that you may naturally feel in your gut. Using your own words and allowing your emotions (and not memorizing lines) to drive you through improv can help you discover what you naturally and impulsively are triggered to think, feel, and DO when you’re faced with the obstacle at hand. If you start off trying to ‘convince’, you may soon find yourself ‘educating/ reasoning/ shaming/ demanding/ pleading/ begging/ or threatening’ the other with a natural progression of actions that you felt when improvising the scene with your own language and focusing on your intentions and not the written dialogue.

Context to Audience

Understand the context of the scene in relation to the audience. What function are you playing and what function does the scene play to tell the story for the audience. What do they need to glean from this scene? Deliver that storytelling as interestingly as you can.

Creating a Character and Behavior

Do character work to craft behavior. Answer your character’s: Who, What, When, Where, Why, How. Know or create their backstory from years ago right up to your ‘moment before’ the scene starts. Know where you’ve been, know where you’re going to tell the story and make your arc effective and with dynamo. Practice walking and talking and find your own dynamic range with behavior. How far across any given spectrum does this person live and behave? What makes them tick and what can you find to define and craft specifics about your role? What is your point of view on everything? How do you react to everything? What are your triggers? What is your achilles heel?

Action, Cut, Reset back to one

These words need to become Pavlovian. Automatic ability to reset and let go of last take. Find neutral to go again and have a fresh, clean slate to start anew. 

Things to cover in the first months of classes before doing scenes

• Childlike theater games and improv games each class. 

• Improvisational games and using the ABC's as a script

• Start with verbal and social bonding ‘Tough thing/ Good thing’ to get garbage out of your head. Be neutral!

• Storytelling exercises - repeating true stories of classmates as your own

• Repetition exercises. 

• Body work. 

• Voice work.

• Learning your lines flatly.

• Breathing through - get out of your head and into your body.

• Understanding moments. Find them and make them.

Dispelling ‘Method Acting’

METHOD ACTING does not equal COMMITMENT. How can I put this simply? So (BIG AIR QUOTES) “Method Acting” is a term that originates from the Russian director and founder of the Moscow Art Theatre, Konstantin Stanislavsky. This was popularized in the golden age of Hollywood from the 40s to the 70s with film becoming a major form of Art and culture and teachers like Adler and Strasberg becoming big. The simplest way I can differentiate “Method Acting” and “Modern Acting” is that method acting was and is designed for an actor to perform 2 hour plays from start to finish. It was never designed or intended for 15 hour film and television sets where you’re trying to perfect and cover 5 to 7 pages of isolated scenes per day. The reason Hollywood has roots in method acting is because they just used what was there (theatre trained actors) and smooshed it all into the process of filmmaking.

There’s been a gross misrepresentation of romanticizing and spreading mythological tales of an actor’s commitment by the lengths they’d go to embody a role. But method acting was only ever designed for a stage play. The way it’s been used in the history of film acting is nothing more than trial and error; it is a hiccup, a misinterpretation, an accident. Yeah sure great actors did great performances but there’s a reason it’s largely gone from the process across the world. I see this hiccup as growing pains of the culture and process which took decades for the industry and actors alike to grow out of this old school mentality and usher in newer ways of thinking from Sanford Meisner branching away from this total immersion mentality, and into *imagination based acting*. This branched into Hollywood studio teachers like Roy London who fully embraced imagination and script analysis to the point where it’s acutely simplified. Actors (*cough* Jared Leto) who seek further attention to gain notoriety for their performances in my opinion are overcompensating for a need for accolades and attention and praise for their process instead of what should just be about the work. It’s like they want even more praise for not just their performance, but also for their process which would defy what the baddest boss lady UTA HAGEN would ever tell you. The perfect example being when NPR host Terry Gross asked on the air about her process, Hagen famously replied, “You’re not an actor, what business is it of yours?” Boss lady.

Bear in mind like all things, evolution is happening all around us and like all things that combine athletics, entertainment, business, and audience, training methods evolve to become better, more efficient, more acutely designed to cut through to the essentials, and far more sophisticated as we evolve as a culture. Just look at how people used to train in sports, martial arts, music, photography; everything. Actor training is no different. There is an art, culture and science behind just about everything and if you’re ignoring it and still striving to go “method”, then you look like the fighting Irish logo in a modern day boxing match. You just look silly.

Mic drop. #SorryNotSorry

Left Brain/ Right Brain

We go to the movies and turn on the TV to be entertained. Entertainment often presents extreme or heightened stories, circumstances and moments. As actors we have a responsibility to tell these stories through character. We embody character through behavior. We create behavior through a series of gestural, vocal and physical qualities - let’s call this embodiment our ‘essence.’ Our essence for any given scene is often influenced by our goal driven actions and the obstacles that cause the friction or dramatic tension. Audiences relate and connect with the characters on screen not just because of their actions, but because of their essence. 

Acting requires so much more than script analysis or line readings; it is an actor’s responsibility to give the audience a tangible or visible form of an idea, quality or feeling. This is why an actor’s process must cross over from the intellectual homework and mechanical rehearsals into a creative, impulsive, and emotional space. The analytical brain must traverse into the creative side of your brain and it is ultimately your job, as an actor, to get out of your head and into the living, breathing space that makes the character ‘alive.’ So how does an actor do that? They must channel their own uniqueness - their own essence if you will - and bend the character through their own human experience. 

Imagination is crucial and we’re all born to use it. As children we saw inspiration and embodied characters without hesitation. I see my children do it every single day. They play with foam swords or put on costumes from their costume box. I watch my son make Spider-Man fingers and within seconds he’s ‘swinging’ from wall to wall with complete conviction. Just like children, actors step into roles as a form of self expression. So even if the character’s essence seems to differentiate from the actor’s natural essence, it is the actor’s duty to embrace this new essence - to search within themselves, to find a substitution from their own life, to search the world around them in order to embody the character in a full and truthful way. 

As a coach and teacher, what I find myself regularly having to do with the actors I train, is help them understand that no matter how much they try to craft behavior, give a line reading the way they hear it in their head, or walk, talk, and gesture the way they want to present or perform the role; none of that matters until they truly believe what they’re doing and REALLY DO it. Some roles may be so close to an actor’s energy that no acting is even required to embody the essence of the character, while other times it may be a big stretch and an actor will have to dig deep and use their imagination to fill in the gaps. That’s acting - or as Sanford Meisner would say, that’s ‘Living truthfully under imaginary circumstances.’

Once an actor has done this exploratory work to find the truth in their performance, it is then time to trust that it is all there, bubbling under the surface. It’s now a malleable force that will erupt, glimmer, reveal, drive, confront at any given moment. I advise my students, and practice with them to hear the technical cues: ‘Reset. Back to one. Roll Camera and Sound. Speed. Slate: Scene (blahdy blah, take blah) Marker, CLACK). And Action’, and let it serve them as a Pavlovian response to do a hard reset, to find their neutral, and let it all go. To turn off the brain and the homework they spent all week doing and to trust the work they did will now work for them. You, actor, don’t need to work anymore, you just need to be. You don’t even need to overanalyze the director's note they just gave you two minutes ago. It is now time to move from the headspace into the heart space. It’s time to live truthfully; it’s time to act. Let it go and LET’S GO.

Let’s talk about Power, Vulnerability, and Sex

Embodying a character’s essence isn’t usually based on what the character is saying. Well written scenes don’t rely on dialogue to define character. People rarely say exactly what they mean and subtext is a very important factor in creating dynamic friction or tension. Behavior defines character and when you’re telling a story, the actor has to investigate the overall arc and scope of the story when dissecting the arc of the individual scenes. Any given scene at hand may likely have either subtle hidden undertones or blatant subtext that the actor needs to recognize and deliver. When you marry the collections of scenes together you should have the overall throughline of the entire story in mind so that you can connect the dots as an actor and the audience will be able to connect the dots as the viewer. 

What I most often find actors struggle with are the ‘big three:’ power, vulnerability, and sex. This should come as no surprise as these are three incredibly intimate, even taboo aspects of our human life, and often something we’re taught to censor or hide from the outside world. We go to the movies to be entertained, and most scripts call for an actor to tackle these big three themes. Why? Because they’re entertaining and to tell the best story, we need to consider all the subtext and contradictions within a scene. To fight for something requires power struggles, heroes must be vulnerable before they triumph, and love stories need lots of sexual tension.

Actors should always prioritize serving the story before serving themselves. Even when the dialogue may read as one thing, the subtext very often will require a heavy dose of opposite intentions or energies. Two characters could be casually talking about sports but really they’re having a power struggle or ‘pissing contest’. Two characters could be laughing and talking about their favorite memories of Dad but really they’re mourning and mending their broken hearts and fighting back the tears. Two characters could be playing beach volleyball or even arguing face to face but the entire scene is designed to create sexual tension. It’s the actors job to tell the story as best they can and you will often find these three elements underneath the superficial dialogue as the true point and design of the scene.

The very nature of these three topics can cause actors to tense up and feel their knee jerk response to ‘act’ or ‘indicate’ as opposed to ‘embodying’ these qualities. The subconscious defense mechanism and resistance to ‘really go there’ pops in and then the actor’s ‘false performance mode - activate’ is usually the first thing I witness. I’ll see the choices of a louder voice, a crackling voice, a slower seductive voice. I’ll see the brow furrow sternly, or tilt the opposite way to convey vulnerability, or rest heavily to form bedroom eyes. I’ll see all the tricks and marks of an actor performing, and that’s fine. Sometimes it’s okay to work from the outside-in and making these indications and gestures is a valid starting point. But then it’s time to go deeper. 

Crafting these physical behaviors is a natural starting point just like I see my children do after seeing a cartoon they want to mimic. But now It’s time to feel the shape and spark of the character’s essence. After absorbing the script and intellectualizing over it for a while, there comes a time to invest and absorb anything and everything around you to inspire your own belief in what you’re doing. If you don’t know what it feels like to wield power, or to truly open your heart to another, or to seduce someone with conviction, then you need to do some homework. You need to observe others, you need to play pretend, you need to fantasize, and you need to create. You can give yourself assignments in the real world to test yourself and dip your toe in the waters this character lives in. You can craft the character by doing practical, real-world actions to find the essence of the role and allow it to become part of you.

Finding a deeper connection to your actions and behavior is the difference between an actor performing and an actor living their truth under imaginary circumstances. Even if you are a highly skilled actor who can portray these qualities externally and mentally, you could pull off a perfectly ‘acceptable’ performance. The audience may even say afterwards: “That actor did a fine job and I understood everything they were going through and I heard every word they said and I think they’re an impressive actor.” OR the audience could be moved to tears and reflect on how they saw themselves in your role and were emotionally impacted by the moments you created on screen, and for the life of them they might not even recall a single sentence you said; but they felt it and felt it deeply. That will be the difference between an actor ‘performing well’ versus an actor truly living and breathing and believing what they’re doing. This is where the magic and inspiration happens. This is the difference between a good performance, and an unforgettable performance.

What I find often helps in the rehearsal process, or in class when I coach, is to help the actor discover a state of their imagination and creativity by bending their own life through the character’s life and working themselves almost into a state of self induced “hypnosis”. There’s nothing mystical happening per se, but what I find is when an actor truly commits to their imagination and convictions along with the research and homework already informing them, they’re able to use their talents of playing ‘pretend’ to a world class level. People are capable of truly committing to their convictions of any given scene or circumstance where they absolutely can become more powerful, more vulnerable, and the most sexy they’ve ever been on this earth. And when they achieve this height, something fascinating happens; They feel changed afterwards. And this was all through the power of acting a scene and utilizing your own imagination and daring.

I have personally felt this as an actor and personally coached others to embody THE MOST YOU that you can be. Believing and owning these qualities of power, vulnerability, and sex typically are the most common and most difficult to truly harness and just BE. No amount of indicating these qualities will hold up to an actor who owns these qualities. Even if it is the first time an actor experiences these heights, the first time is enough to print the take. And once that first time is established, that’s called a BREAKTHROUGH. With each new breakthrough, you now have a new superpower on your tool belt. This is the transformative nature of acting and why I believe actors all become greater empaths with experience and time. Acting is a noble profession. Actors connect the world.

A little bit about career

It’s not about dreaming, it’s about DOING. At the end of class, the question was asked: 'How did you become a working actor? How does one go from being in class to working and making a living?'

There's no correct or short answer for this. I can only speak to what I did, so here goes. First, the answer is 'I don't know' because it's hard to say what led to which opportunity and what act made the finite difference of working or not. It's a collection of efforts and practices and mindsets that either culminate in a career or not. I'm certainly not as successful as many of my friends but I also am living my dream of supporting myself and my family doing a job I love. That said, don't ever compare yourself to others. We ran out of time so I thought I'd cover it deeper here. So here are a few of the things I did that exemplified doing 'The Work' since I began my first acting class in 1994.

I was in many acting classes for 16 straight years without a break. To be in class is the most important thing any actor can do. It's where you grow, workout, fail, succeed, and flourish. It's where you plant yourself amongst your tribe and don't 'go it alone'. Class is where you'll find most of your answers over time. It's also addictively fun. I studied critical theory in film and theatre as well as performance in every aspect from acting, voice, body, movement, and martial arts, yoga, and meditation. I invested in myself and was often left without the money for that nicer car, snowboarding vacation or nice leather jacket or expensive date. Choices. Priorities.

Material is everything so to understand writing better, I read scripts and wrote every single day. From journal entries, stream of consciousness, angry scribbles, to short films, outlines, screenplays, teleplays, pilots; I wrote every single day to better myself at the writing process and create my own content. I wanted to understand script analysis for everything I watched and read, and fully grasp the dramatic turns of every scene and overall story arcs. I wanted to understand the art of story as deeply as I could. I read scripts and scenes every single day. I studied movies and shows with the subtitles on so I could read the show as I watched it. 

I could not ever turn my brain off and every single show and movie I watched as a student first and an audience second. I studied the directing, the writing, the acting, and the use of the camera to tell the story. I applied everything I was learning to my own writing and attempts at filmmaking for over twenty five years. I gathered friends regularly to do table readings in my living room whenever I felt I had a draft worth exploring. I absorbed the constructive criticism and notes and failures as stepping stones and never ever as shameful defeats. Then I would vomit my nerves out when everyone left. I learned to produce and gather artists to make films and do everything I ever wanted to do as an actor and filmmaker from the inside out. I eventually graduated from making sketches, to short films, to feature films and more; and of course I gave myself a role in almost all of them.

Asked about agents, business, and auditions, my answer was 'I don't know'. I only know that auditions never freaked me out because I was always in class and it felt like the same process.

The last thing I would mention is that patience is the most difficult thing to accept and adopt into the whole process. If you want to be an actor til you're old and grey and 90, then just try to keep a perspective that you'll be doing this a long time so don't always be in a rush.

Last last lastly, I would say that everything should always be about the work. Don't soak up a spotlight, focus on reaching your audience instead. Love the work. The work will save you.

Hope that helps. Now go get it.

- James Huang

FOUNDATIONAL WORKSHOP EXERCISES AND GAMES

CHARACTER

6 Questions

In your real life, ask the actors about themselves. What is the short answer for these: Who are you? What are you? Continue:

Who/ What/ When/ Where/ Why/ How?

Take a well known character and say you have to play them (Batman/ Fonzie/ Clint Eastwood/ Dolly Parton/ Rachel from Friends)

If they were playing that character, ask them the same questions. This is a really basic step into considering and knowing who you are and what you represent as well as your experience and point of view on the world.

Speed Dating (Not romantic)

Take two actors at a time and put 2 minutes on a timer for a speed date. Allow them to really get to know each other in a short time the same way a speed date goes. Pedigree information and the broad strokes. Play it real. How do you present yourself in real life? How do you define yourself to someone you want to make a good and strong impression with? How do you define yourself? 

Play the game again but this time play a character that may be very different than you. How did you try to make them real even though you were ‘acting’?

Expert Lecturer

Set a one minute timer for each actor to come in and be the expert speaker on a topic thrown out by audience suggestions. They must speak for one minute without pausing or filler words such as ‘um’ or ‘like’ or ‘uhh’. They are expert speakers and experts in the field. Fun game to get actors to improvise and get silly and playful and creative. Commit to the impulse and your words and attitude will follow. Make them believe you’re the expert on whatever ridiculous and funny topic gets suggested. Get out of your head and play a role and play a part that you have no time to think about. Get actors to PLAY and COMMIT.

Conspiracy Theory

Start talking and let the next person take up the microphone for a non-stop improv game that allows actors to go into complete nonsense. No pausing or stammering. Force the brain and body to go with reckless abandon. This is an awakening in your impulse and creativity under the spotlight. Get out of your head and get into your gut instincts and uncensored stream of consciousness. Have fun with it. It’s the opposite in a lot of ways to expert speaker. You can get ridiculous with your passion and behavior and not be composed or socially acceptable.

SCRIPT ANALYSIS

Discovering Actions

ABC script - infuse your entire sentence and intention into a single letter as your ‘line’. You each have 13 lines/ 26 letters to tell a story. It’s not about the words, it’s about your intention, behavior, and your non verbal communication. Get as detailed and specific as you can. This is all about demonstrative behavior and non verbal communication to inform your intentions and actions. The audience should know what you’re doing even without language.

Assign a Protagonist/ Antagonist. Assign a setting/ relationship. 

The Antagonist must now:

• Enter with a goal they must achieve right now

• Enter with an urgent problem that needs solving

• Enter with a secret to confess

• Enter with a direct conflict to deal with now

• Enter with an apology

Now allow the audience and protagonist to guess what your secret answers are. This should inform the actor of how they’re being perceived and how they performed their demonstrative behaviors. It also forces the protagonist to truly listen with everything they’ve got and react organically and in the moment. In those 13 letters you communicated, you likely had at least a dozen different actions employed to try to get what you wanted. You operated off of each other first and foremost. You listened and reacted to one another in all the ways you could even without coherent language present. That is the lesson here. That’s acting.

EMOTIONS

15 second voice mail: rage/ love

Who is your current nemesis right now? Who do you want to tell off and curse out? Do it in a 15 second voice mail. Vent and rage all your frustrations at this person.

Reset

Now who do you want to tell that you love them and haven’t lately? Who do you miss or wish you could express yourself to with love and joy? Do it in a 15 second voice mail. Get all those feelings out and express yourself with love.

All good acting scenes have a spectrum of opposite emotions that an actor can play across. If it’s not evident in the script, an actor can create and insert it. For example, the text may be very lovey dovey. But what do humans do when we fall in love? We fear losing that which we covet. So a heavy dose of fear and vulnerability can also be ever present with the lovey language. What about if the language is very angry and aggressive? It will be uninteresting and one dimensional to watch an actor just yell and rage through a scene. So why do people get so angry we can shout at them? It’s usually because we are protecting something. We’re protecting others or ourselves and that by nature, is rooted in love and care. So when we have an angry or aggressive scene, the reality of the hostility can actually be centered in caring about protecting our loved ones. The opposite end of the spectrum is always at play in real life and so it should be real in our acting scenes. This exercise demonstrates how we’re capable of feeling and expressing opposite emotions very quickly if we just allow ourselves to. I’ve found all people are able to really get angry and vent in that first voicemail, only to go the opposite way and really express a touching and emotional real sense of love just moments later. Truthful acting shouldn’t take this for granted when you explore scene work. Human beings are always bouncing or swinging throughout a spectrum of emotions which are often opposites. That creates a strong internal life or conflict to play with as your character has friendships, conflicts, friction, or any kind of interactions with other characters. Let this internal life be ever present and truthful to the character and story.

Tell My Story

Story telling exercise. Internalize and Externalize each other’s story.

Pick a core emotion from the 8 core emotions list. Now think of a person in your life that makes you think about. Now think of a 2 minute story about that person with that core emotion at the center. It doesn’t have to stay there but it should inspire your core emotion. Tell your story to your partner. 

Now your partner must tell that story back to you in their own words with the core emotion and relationship in mind. You’re tasked with not only making the details of the story clear, but for you to encapsulate and communicate the essence of the story and character – what spoke to you and inspired you and made you feel something from their story? Was it their embarrassment/ fear/ love/ sadness/ anger? What about their story made you relate to it and how did their real honest emotions resonate with you? Now it’s your job to encapsulate and retell that story as if it were your own. The story teller is tasked with sharing something personal about themselves and be a true honest story teller. That’s a great acting exercise in of itself. When you hear your story reflected back, give them a critique about how it spoke to you and what they were able to listen to and capture in their retelling of your story. This is a great example of how we are absorbing far more than an actors language and words. We are listening to their emotional content, spirit and essence. When you can relate to that and then retel and externalize this story as if it were your own, that, in a nutshell, is what we do every week we’re acting in a scene. This is a microcosm of the entire process.

BREATHING

Meditation of breath and body. Linklater exercise connecting breath to emotions and voice and sound. Mindful meditation through emotional spectrum and connection to breath bubbles with intention and sound.

EMOTIONAL CONNECTION TO SONG LYRICS

What song do you like to sing in the car or shower? Google the lyrics sheet. Now perform those lyrics as either a song, karaoke rock out, poetry, acting a scene or monologue, or anyway you want to speak the written words. Convey this passion and meaning to the audience with as much meaning that it has to you. What does it invoke in your soul and spirit? What love or hardship does the song exemplify to you in your life? Why is this song special? This relationship to that text is an example of how you need to build and devote a relationship to your script and convey the story with as much passion and meaning behind it as you would a song.

What about the song makes you love to sing it? Is it the chorus/ lyrics/ feeling/ music? What about the song is meaningful to you? You have some kind of relationship with the song whether it’s memories, a feeling, emotions, a story. Take the lyrics of this song that means so much to you and now perform it as an actor. You can sing it, karaoke style it, recite it as poetry, act it out as dialogue, waver inspires you to communicate the meaning of these lyrics in a way that communicates your passion and point of view and feelings to the audience before you. 

This relationship you have to the song is rich and specific and detailed even if you can’t articulate it. You spent time with this song and let it enter your body and mind and consciousness and emotions. That is what you should be doing leading up to a performance with your script. You need to devote time, feelings, emotional connections, and meaning to the script and role so you can embody this performance much like you can do with singing your favorite song in the car. Now let’s see it.

MAKING A MOMENT

Open Scenes

Three Word Play

Spirit Animal

CLASSES FOR LIFE

A poignant take away from our class that I wanted to share. The really wonderful thing about Acting class is the friendships you make. I asked the group to think about how well they've come to know each other in the course of just one year. Then think about some of the friendships they've had for ten, fifteen years and ask themselves how well they've gotten to know their actor friends in class in one year compared to other friends they've had for so much longer. There's nothing like acting classes where you get to be so free to be you and share and be part of something that cuts right to the heart of the matter each and every day. It's literally a platform and venue for self expression and creative outlets.

What happens is a bond that forms in a supportive environment and artistic culture which allows the actor to go through the process. Class is where you flourish as an artist by doing the regular WORK. This safe space is a laboratory for you to try, try, and try again where you'll emerge and galvanize your strengths as an actor, an artist, as a person. This is where your actor muscles grow and this is where your steadfast confidence can grow and become a regular part of who you are outside of the classroom.

Then when you actually step into auditions and work on film/ TV sets, you're ready to bear your soul, access emotions, and make strong choices without doubt, fear, or self consciousness. You've done it so many times before and in a place that ushered your process. You've prepared and soon you'll arrive. That's the power and beauty of classes, community, and commitment. Step into the work and always be in classes.