YES…we stand on the shoulders of giants. We owe much to the great teachers of the twentieth century: Stella Adler, Sanford Meisner, Lee Strasberg, Robert Lewis…Sonia Moore, Uta Hagen and the rest. They were pioneers of our craft and the value and genius of the work they did for all us actors is inestimable. We stand on their brilliant shoulders, just as they stood on the shoulders of Stanislavski. But…acting teachers…WAKE UP! We are deep into the 21st century. We know so, so, so, so much more about our craft than those teachers ever could have. They lived in a simplistic post-Freudian- based fear and greed concept of humanity. They taught a hodgepodge, confusing, guess-work system based on the limited tools that they had. They did their best banging around in the dark. And though they set the foundations for what actors do today, they were WRONG about MUCH of what they taught. To study and base all of your acting and teaching on Stella Adler is to be like a modern geneticist who has never read anything except “Origin of the Species”. Those teachers developed their ideas in the 1940s and 50s. Take a look around…the world has changed a little since 1950. Acting is the art form of life…and we KNOW things about life these teachers never had access to. The advancements in the last twenty years alone in psychology, neuroscience, anthropology, linguistics, philosophy, intelligence and all the cognitive sciences have been astounding (even the very discipline of “cognitive science” post-dates those teachers). What we now know about memory, and imagination, emotion, behaviour, perception, charisma, living-in-the-moment, relationships, talent, connectivity, and a many more vital-to-actors studies in humanity that directly affects our art form, could never have even been guessed at by those early teachers. Not only has our “knowledge-of-being” evolved exponentially in the last two decades, but LIFE itself has changed radically since 1950. We have taken evolution out of the hands of genetics and placed it firmly outside ourselves into digitization. People THINK differently, COMMUNICATE differently, and ACT differently. Again, all in ways Stella Adler could never have foreseen. Acting is the art form of life…a reflection of what true life looks like. “Holding the mirror, as ‘twere, up to nature.” It is our responsibility to be on the very edge of understanding what life is as we currently know it, and reflect it back to those who are living it. Film has changed. Television has changed. Stage has changed. Acting has changed. The great actors know it and work from an advanced model and understanding of what it means to act. But THE ACTING TEACHERS are still teaching from archaic notions and ancient ideas…and they are holding back a generation of actors who could be succeeding at affecting positive change through their craft. YES…we stand on the shoulders of these great teachers… But, for god sakes, keep reaching up to the sky. -Matthew Harrison actorsfoundry
Posted on: Thu, 08 Jan 2015 03:31:33 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015