top of page

Inspiration
New (to me) thoughts and ideas that inspire.


Sacks and Barba: A Constructed Dialogue on Memory
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

Stephen Atkins
1 day ago4 min read


The Batman Effect and Actor Training
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:

Stephen Atkins
Jun 22 min read


Embarrassment is the Mask Your Power Wears
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

Stephen Atkins
May 293 min read


No Method is Acting. It's a Telephone.
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

Stephen Atkins
May 133 min read


Intersection
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

Stephen Atkins
May 62 min read
bottom of page