Crosspoints is an actor training and rehearsal system Stephen Atkins assembled from decades of experience with a wide range of acting pedagogies and training methods. In its most recent rendition, crosspoints use a deck of cards to help actors explore multiple fragments of a role simultaneously. Behaviour, scene structure, relationships, desire, and emotional tone can be arranged, synthesized and reassembled in clear ways without dictating outcomes.

Is Crosspoints an acting method?

It is better understood as a post-methods system. It does not replace Stanislavsky, Meisner, Viewpoints, Suzuki, Chekhov, Grotowski, or Practical Aesthetics. It helps actors bring different methods into conversation.

What makes Crosspoints different?

Crosspoints turns acting choices into visible, moveable elements. Instead of keeping everything in the actor’s head, it lets actors arrange, test, question, and revise their choices with specificity.

Who is Crosspoints for?

It is for actors, directors, teachers, students, devisers writers, and rehearsal rooms that want a practical way to generate choices and free themselves from interpretation as a first step. Exploration and emergence is key.

How does the Crosspoints deck work?

Actors draw or select cards from different suits, then arrange them in relation to a scene, role, or rehearsal problem. The layout can follow a pattern in the guidebook or it can be the actor's own assemblage. The pattern is a form of actor’s score. It can introduce randomness by shuffling and drawing a card. It can also promote the meticulous reorientation of connections and insights, a bit like a tarot card does. You can work broad and messy, or tight and precise.

How did Stephen Atkins get to this point?

Alongside a varied career in new theatre, devised performance, independent film, performance art, as well as stage and screen work, Stephen pursued academic research into actor training, eventually completing a PhD. His research focused on acting systems and rehearsal processes, but from multiple perspectives grounded in lived experience. Over time, he became increasingly interested in the gaps between methods: the places where actors struggled to translate ideas into living performance, or where one training system solved a problem while creating another. Stephen developed a flexible system designed to help actors navigate relationships, attention, atmosphere, image, embodiment, and action across many styles of performance.

Is Crosspoints only for theatre?

No. Crosspoints can support both stage and screen acting. For stage, it helps build repeatable scores. For camera, it helps actors prepare flexible choices that can adjust to framing, edits, and direction. However, the secret super power in Crosspoints is that they help singers, dancers, composers, writers, and more. Even stand up comedians.

What ideas influenced Crosspoints?

Crosspoints draws heavily from Stanislavsky’s Active Analysis, Demidov, Viewpoints, Suzuki, Meisner, Michael Chekhov, Practical Aesthetics, and performance art. There are a number of connections to be found in philosophy and sociology such as; Bakhtin, Deleuze, queer theory, and embodied cognition. You can read about some of these influences on Stephen Atkins's Substack.

Why use cards for acting?

Cards make the invisible parts of acting easier to discuss. They give actors a shared language for intuition, relationship, atmosphere, action, resistance, and change. You can lay them out and have a common reference for creative reflection and discusson. Traditional margin notes often lock the actor into linear interpretation too early. The cards allow actors to hold contradictory impulses, alternate rhythms, emotional shifts, and different tactical possibilities side by side without collapsing them into a fixed answer.

How does Crosspoints support intuition?

Actors can quickly score options by laying out cards in different arrangements, shuffling, remixing, and reconfiguring them as rehearsal develops. The process encourages intuition to roam across relationships between cards, images, and ideas. A layout can be photographed on a phone, revisited later, or rebuilt in new forms. This creates a more fluid experience than written annotation.

Does Crosspoints replace text analysis?

No. Crosspoints works alongside text analysis rather than replacing it. It proposes that understanding often emerges through action, counteraction and interaction rather than only through analytic interpretation.

Can Crosspoints help with devised or collaborative work?

Yes. The system is especially useful in collaborative environments because the cards externalize choices. Actors, directors, and ensembles can see and discuss relationships, choices, and possibilities together instead of relying only on private internal processes.

FAQs | Stephen Atkins | Vancouver BC

Stephen Atkins is a performer, director, acting teacher, and practice-led scholar with over 35 years of experience in actor training, theatre, film, and performance research. He is motivated by a passion for intercultural work, actor training, and the belief that performance can help people become more fully and authentically themselves. His work treats acting as a vocation rather than a professional skill. Crosspoints grows from this commitment to help actors sustain curiosity, courage, craft, and personal truth across a lifetime of practice.

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