Categories

Technique Beats Fear | The Great Acting Blog

Technique Beats Fear | The Great Acting Blog

Acting requires courage because it means dropping your guard and making yourself vulnerable, revealing aspects of your personality you may not want to reveal. You are offering something personal and it may be rejected or criticised. If it goes wrong, it does so publicly. Further, it takes courage to continually reach for the standard of work you would like, overcoming your doubts. This need for courage probably never goes away, not for anyone who cares about their work, for anyone who really digs deep and pushes themselves.

Some actors though, become gripped by fear, you can see it in their eyes. They panic when given a note, and in general their level of commitment to their work drops, they are no longer willing to give it their all. The fear damages their confidence,  they no longer believe in themselves, and their work suffers. They are simply no longer able to find the courage within themselves to overcome the barriers to doing good work.

 There can be all sorts of reasons for this shift in attitude. Perhaps other aspects of their lives come to dominate their thinking, such as a change or crisis in their personal lives. To act well requires a lot of headspace. At root however, the problem is to do with not having a caste iron technique of acting. This means that whether they can hit the required standard of work or not, is more stressful, because they don’t have that technique to help them overcome the obstacles. The fear must be avoided at all costs though, because it effectively ruins the actor as an artist, and might well spell the end of the road for him. And the only way to avoid the fear and continually face up to the demands of craft is by practicing and mastering a concrete technique of acting.

 

RELATED READING

An Actor’s Story About Fear 

James

1Comment