Can Your Acting Really Improve in Less Than 30 Minutes a Day?

The Tree is the Root

By calling yourself an actor, you’ve already implied that you work disproportionately hard for the rewards you reap. However, it’s difficult to quantify how much effort is required to see tangible results since rehearsal is a very unique process for each of us.

Through my private coaching and ongoing classes, I’m constantly trying to reach the root of each actor’s personal process. The growth or stagnation I witness is always connected to the core of each actor’s process. If the tree is not strong, it’s always traced to the roots.

For me, risk is the most important ingredient in an actor’s true growth. Yet, it is so easy to convince oneself that we are being courageous in our rehearsal process when we’re in the comfort of our own home. The performing artist does not know the strength of his rehearsal process without the natural pressures of public exhibition.

The classroom is intended to be a place for process, but so many actors default to the demonstration of a final product and skip right over the actual discovery process. In a class, an actor can talk about his process to reach the result, but there is no way to gauge how much the discussion and the process really line up. In the end, a weak rehearsal process is only a disservice to the actor.

Over the last month, I have worked with a group of actors participating in a unique Rehearsal Lab. The Lab gave each actor a twenty-minute time slot to work on anything they chose in front of their colleagues. They could come in with a honed presentation or a brand new piece. Regardless, the actor had twenty solitary minutes to explore, tear apart and build from there. In this process there was no applause, notes, or response. It was a direct opportunity for each actor to test his own personal process and glean from the processes of other professionals.

With an audience observing their private rehearsal process, full commitment was required. Through commitment, discoveries were made. Through discoveries, great emotional and physical energy was expelled. It was in this naked observation that we learned the most about fellow actors and our own process because there is nowhere to hide, even from ourselves.

On every level, this Lab was extremely successful. Yet the most universal revelation for the group of participants was how much was gained from just twenty uninterrupted minutes of fully committed rehearsal.

We have all spent two or three hours considering ways in which we will work a piece, when a condensed amount of absolute commitment will yield far more. Fully committed time allows us to discover the real depth of the material. It teaches us that failure is the fertile soil of discoveries. Most importantly, it plants the roots of something that is real and not just resting on the surface of what we get away with on a daily basis.

So, the next time you pick up a piece of material, avoid hours of considering what you think it should be, and invest twenty-minutes truly discovering what it is.

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