Stephen Atkins 

Training has been one of the recurring structures of my life. I have returned to it in periods of transition, when my circumstances changed, when my artistic values no longer seemed aligned with the work in front of me, or when I needed to recover a sense of direction. It has been a refuge, but never a passive one. Training has also been a test, an ordeal, and a chosen encounter with uncertainty. That description may sound therapeutic. I do not mean that training has healed m

Here's something I've never tried here. This is a constructed dialogue between two thinkers who never actually had this exchange. Oliver Sacks was a physician, neurologist, and writer known for books such as Awakenings and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, where neurological case histories become vivid accounts of perception, identity, memory, and consciousness. His essay “Speak, Memory” is the source for the idea that memory is not a direct recording of experience. Sac

One way to think about tropes in general is as a game that has forgotten it is a game. A game has rules. It has roles. It has things you are allowed to do and things that are seen as breaking the frame. Everyone in it seems to know how to play, but working outside of the frame can make those following the rules feel betrayed, even angry. Family dinner can be a game. Academic life, religious ceremony, dating, theatre, hospitality, politeness, masculinity, femininity, loyalty,

It Begins in the Event I love Active Analysis because it begins with the simplest theatrical truth: something happens. Not something is diagnosed or discussed. I've often seen work lose its heat and resonance that way, only to be chased and rediscovered through more rehearsal. When you start with the first silent étude, you're already into something. The people inside the scene can no longer proceed as they did before. That sounds obvious, but in actor training it is so easy

The “Batman Effect” began as a psychology experiment with children who were given a task to focus on. Researchers asked children to complete a boring task while a tempting game was available nearby. Some children were asked to think in the first person: “Am I working hard?” Others used their own name. Another group was invited to imagine themselves as a character, such as Batman. The children who adopted the character perspective tended to persist longer. The idea is simple:

When I say narrative cinema is declining, I don't mean that stories no longer matter. Although I wouldn't blame you if you think I'm contradicting my earlier post titled "Why do we keep returning to stories?" Stories still matter. Or maybe what I mean is story worlds. We still follow people, conflicts, desires, losses, reversals, and unfinished questions. What seems less alive is the assumption that cinema works best when it explains itself through a clean sequence of causes

Why do we connect to stories? And why do we connect to them differently when we grow older, or meet them again after some major shift in life? The answer has to with something that sits underneath good writing and character development. Metaphors are what guide us to find meaning, and ultimately ourselves, in a good yarn. Strong stories rarely carry only one myth. They convey several myths at once, moving through different symbolic patterns like exile, initiation, sacrifice,

Embarrassment is one of the least explored emotions, partly because it arrives so fast. Before we can take any time to examine it, we want to escape it; or at least retreat into privacy because being embarrassed publicly is statistically one of the things we fear most. We apologize for feeling too much, and shrink ourselves back into an acceptable size. A mask of muted colours, with no mouth. But embarrassment may be more interesting than that. The history of the word carries

Now is the time that many students start their training journey by auditioning for schools. Here is some advice when you're looking around. Seek variety. Specialized training is not the only way. No single acting method is acting itself. A method is a telephone. It is the device actors, teachers, and directors use to speak to the art form. Stanislavsky, Meisner, Suzuki, Chekhov, Practical Aesthetics, Viewpoints, Grotowski, Strasberg, Adler, Hagen, Spolin, Lecoq: each offers

Another summer is in the air. Pride is around the corner. A Summer of Bravery, Summer of Bedazzlement, a Summer of Belonging. In the 1980s and 90s, many of us lived in a strange double exposure. Like many other groups of people, we existed, but not in the stories our own culture told about itself. Mainstream film and television rarely reflected our lives unless we were jokes, victims, cautionary tales, or coded shadows at the edge of the frame. Meanwhile, outside the screen,

Intersection is a deeply human human trait. Not agreement. Not sameness. It's vitally important that different trajectories meet while remaining different. A rehearsal room works this way (when it's working). So does a city. So does a relationship. So does thought itself. The philosophers Deleuze and Guattari were drawn to these unstable meetings in their own ways. Their work resists the idea that identity, meaning, or culture should settle into fixed territories with defenda