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 a way of approaching the actor’s work. Each gives us language, professional habits, exercises, provocations, and structures. But none of them is the living act itself. Acting happens in the charged space between performer, material, partner, audience, camera, room, history, body, and imagination. The method helps us make contact with that space, ideally in all of those directions at once. Light light, it will shine in every direction available to it.

But what happens when a method becomes an idol?

Actors are often encouraged to see an approach as the destination. These are good aims because in order to master something, you must be fluent in its language; in its heuristics. But the language can become territorial. One perspective insists that everything begins with an objective. Another says the answer is impulse. Another says it is action. Another says it is listening. Another says it is the body. Another says it is the image. Each may be right in a particular room, with a particular actor, with a certain performance, on a particular day.

So you have to be open to questioning your own opinions and avoid dismissing things too quickly.

A method works best when it opens a line of communication. It lets us ask better questions. What is happening here? Where is my attention? What changes in me when I enter this circumstance? What does the other person do to me? What is the rhythm of this exchange? What image has taken hold? What am I trying to complete? What is resisting this? So I still want what I thought I did?

These questions matter more than the brand name attached to them.

The actor does not perform the method. It seems that way because you get graded. The actor performs the event. The method is useful only insofar as it helps the actor meet the event more fully.

Not all actors are built the same way. Some actors find freedom through structure. Others need to get out of their heads. One might need sharper thinking while another needs to stop explaining and move. Some need permission. Some need self-reliance.

The best actor training gives the actor a broad set of working languages to respond to the many working environments we have. So much of the work is tacit. It happens before the actor can explain it. Methods help us catch these things. They give us buttons and dials.

But a button on a phone is not the call.

So we keep several lines open.

The actor’s craft lives in the ability to move between systems without becoming owned by them. To use structure without becoming mechanical. To use freedom without becoming formless. To use analysis without losing sensation. To use sensation without abandoning thought.

Acting is not a method. Acting is the living event toward which methods point.

The method is the telephone.

The actor trains hard to be able to make the call.