The Great Acting Blog: “Being Adaptable”

The Great Acting Blog: “Being Adaptable”

One of the key lessons learned while making Noirish Project has been adaptability, adjusting our plan to deal with the actual situation in front of us. This was especially true of locations, where very often the actual location used was very different to what was in the script. At first, it might seem like a failure because you are altering your original vision, but after a while it becomes pleasurable to try to figure out how to make the scene work in the new situation. Further, I often found that trying to answer these new questions generated new creativity which lead to more interesting and provocative results, results I probably never would have thought of at the scriptwriting stage.

Adaptability gets easier the more you have to do it. It’s a mental skill about being able to quickly assess the situation, deduce how you can achieve your goal and then act accordingly. It’s very useful for actors to be good at adapting, since we are almost constantly being placed in situations where something unexpected is coughed up and we just have to deal with it. Yes you have your preparation but you shouldn’t be all at sea when that preparation is confounded. I have come across actors who become neurotic in auditions – they practice the scene at home but are then thrown in the audition when asked to do the scene in a way that they were not expecting (and I’m not talking about anything radical here, it can be something as simple as doing the scene standing up when they practiced it sitting down). Clearly this is not a productive mindset.

Practice being adaptable, seek out situations where it is needed and observe yourself doing it. You may even find that it becomes one of your most valuable tools.

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