When Actor Training Stops Assuming One Kind of Mind

What struck me about Daron Oram’s work on dyslexia, dyspraxia, and psychophysical actor training went beyond accessibility. It was that he is brave enough to say that the studio can become confusing in ways that are mistaken for depth.

Actor training often asks students to surrender certainty. I do this myself, by often suggesting that tolerance of ambiguity is a strength. For me it's also when a scene starts to find its feet; in manifesting the expectation that each character will soon make sense to each other and themselves. This mindsets asks them to enter sensation, impulse, imagination, breath, contact, the unknown. Basically all the things we can't describe effectively; only do. At its best, this is freeing. It takes actors out of control and into discovery. But Oram’s work shows that the same conditions can become disabling when the training assumes everyone processes language, space, sequence, imagery, and physical instructions in the same way.

New work in actor training is almost always seen as a resistance to inherited training systems rather than a compassion ate deepening of it. What Oram points out is how the systems reward one kind of actor. The actor who can instantly translate metaphor into action, retain long and complex verbal instructions, and enact them, is successful. 

Confusion is framed as part of the process. Sometimes it is. But sometimes confusion is simply confusion. Sometimes the student is not resisting the work. The work has not given them enough handles, or too many without context.

Oram doesn't dismiss psychophysical training. He respects its value. He just asks what happens when methods create barriers for dyslexic and dyspraxic students. Closed eyes, abstract imagery, implicit instructions, rapid sequencing, and the phrase “just see what happens” can all sound open-ended and liberating. Yet for some students, they create anxiety, self-monitoring, and disorientation.

Crosspoints began from a similar unease with invisible assumptions in actor training. I wanted to know whether actors could work with complexity without being trapped in vagueness. I wanted to create a system that supported instinct without pretending instinct appears out of nowhere. The actor should not have to choose between freedom and structure. Good structure can make freedom more available.

In Crosspoints, the actor works through modular points of attention: desire, emotional atmosphere, behaviour, partner, focus, prize, and the framing event. These are not rigid psychological labels. They are entry points. They give the actor a way to locate the work. Instead of being told to “be more open,” the actor can ask: Where is the desire located? What atmosphere am I inside? What kind of partner do I imagine I am facing? What behaviour is being rewarded here? What am I trying to bring into being?

This is where I find the connection to neurodiversity especially important. A visual, relational, and modular system does not reduce the actor’s imagination. I believe it helps protect it. It gives the actor several ways into the same problem. One actor may begin with an image. Another may begin with rhythm. Yet another may need a spatial marker, a card, a diagram, a partner dynamic, or a concrete behavioural task. None of these routes is lesser. They're different doors into the same room.

Oram’s work also helped me think again about power in the studio. Often the teacher says, “There is no right or wrong,” but we all know this is a tacit deception. The students know they are still being assessed, and interpreted. That contradiction can be especially difficult for students who are already trying to decode hidden expectations. If there is no right answer, why does it feel like everyone else knows what the teacher wants?

We are trying to make some of those hidden expectations discussable. It turns tacit judgment into shared language. Instead of the teacher holding all interpretive authority, the actor can point to a choice and say, “This is the frame I am working from.” That does not remove mystery. It makes mystery playable.

The deeper inspiration I take from Oram is ethical. His work suggests that inclusion is not a support service added after the “real” training has been designed. Inclusion asks us to examine the design itself. What does the exercise assume? What kind of cognition does it reward? What kind of body does it imagine? What forms of attention does it privilege? What kinds of uncertainty are productive, and what kinds merely obscure the task?

For me, this does not weaken actor training. It makes it more rigorous. A method that can only function when students already understand its hidden codes is not as generous as it thinks it is. A method that can be entered through multiple pathways has more artistic reach.

That is why Oram’s work feels so important. It confirms that the future of actor training will not come from abandoning embodied practice. It will come from making embodied practice more legible, more flexible, and more responsive to the many kinds of minds and bodies that enter the studio.

The actor does not need to be rescued from complexity. The actor needs tools that let them meet complexity without disappearing inside it.