On Staying Inspired
An Artist Date is an idea that has taken off in the years since Julia Cameron
In an older episode of one of my favorite podcasts, Kimberly Wilson, issued an Artist Date Challenge. Always up for a little competition, I’ve been reaching down deep to make my Artist Dates both regular and interesting. What has surprised me is how helpful they are, and how short they can be. When dedicating yourself to a weekly Artist Date, suddenly you free yourself from making it SO VERY IMPORTANT!!! Suddenly, it is just a little alone time wherein you answer the question, “What do I want to do?”
A recent Artist Date was particularly helpful because I had begun to lose sight of the bigger picture. I decided I needed to stop, step back, and remind myself of why I do what I do, to connect to that bigger picture.
GUEST POST BY BEN HODGE: The 3 C’s of Great Acting
Please welcome Ben Hodge to the blog today! Ben is an actor, director, and acting coach in York, Pennsylvania.
3 C’s of Great Acting
We all love a good performance. Whether we are sitting in the house of a live show or sitting in our own house viewing a film or TV show, the respect, awe and joy transferred from stage or screen to audience is a palpable and desired effect for all actors. But what really makes a performance great? What makes an actor great? Is it training? Skill? Look? Luck? In this post, I posit that great acting has its foundation in three key areas: COURAGE, CHARISMA, and CONNECTION.
COURAGE
I start with courage because I feel that this is truly at the very core of a great performer. Most of us think courage has to do with bravery and a deep strength of will. While bravery and strength are crucial aspects of an actor’s life, I want to look deeper into another meaning of courage. The word courage comes from the french word ‘coer’ which means heart. The word was originally used to mean ‘one’s innermost feelings.’ To me, a great actor has to be able to find courage in order to be effective. An actor has to tap into their innermost feelings and be okay with sharing them with audiences everywhere. As we all know, most people struggle have a hard time understanding their feelings. Many people have a hard time with their emotions and how to effectively communicate them. Actors in many ways are the emotional experts of our society. Great actors have to find the bravery and strength to share their inner most feelings in their performances. Great acting should literally come from the heart, play on audience’s heart strings, break hearts and MOVE the audience. This takes courage at its purest and simplest definition.
To be a great actor, find ways to discover and share your innermost feelings in your acting. This is not to say we should share everything with everyone in our real lives. Performing is perhaps the best way to find creative outlets for emotional expression. John Patrick Shanley says it best: “The theatre is a safe place to do the unsafe things.” Great actors understand this. Great actors have courage and are able to showcase it in their performances.
Nice work if you can get it…or not.
I have recently been struggling a lot with the predicament of knowing which projects to work on and which to turn away. I suppose I have always struggled with this dilemma, but it seems to be more prevalent recently. When I was a kid, my Mom taught me to look for one of three key factors in every job. These factors were (in no particular order):
- Good pay.
- New reel material.
- New experience. (For example: Working with a green screen, ear prompter, etc.)
This seemed like a surefire way to pinpoint good jobs when I was a kid, because my Mom was basically managing the projects I didn’t get through my agents. Now, I am the one who manages the projects I take on when they are not found by my agents. I have tried to use the three guidelines to rule out the good from the bad, but I seem to keep failing. I am continually ending up in projects that just aren’t worth my time/energy.
Self-Producing: A Solo Adventure #6 – It’s a Wrap
As the proverbial curtain fell on View from the Pews last week, I felt victorious – I had done it! A journey that began six years ago finally found its footing and launched into an exciting new phase of its life.
It was a small house, made smaller when four people walked out in the first ten minutes – the first ten minutes are rather inflammatory, and designed to be so. Fortunately, the festival producers were excited that the show generated a response visceral enough to prompt multiple walk-outs. They had forgotten to arrange a talkback, but asked that I scurry out to the lobby to chat with the audience because they were eager to talk to me about the piece. Boy howdy, were they. I had forgotten how much this piece inspires people to tell me their own stories about feelings of rejection by the church and/or its people. I got an earful about Vatican II, something which helped inspire the direction for some of the changes I want to make on the script. It was a lovely and encouraging reception.
And then I packed up the show, got in the car and —
Well, our indiegogo campaign officially ended last week, and I cannot thank all of you enough for your support.
We did not reach our total fundraising goal of $10,000, but I still consider our campaign to be a GREAT SUCCESS, as we raised over $7500 in just over 30 days, an incredible sum and an awesome 75% of our goal. I think that’s pretty impressive for someone who was mostly promoting this herself 🙂
I’m also very proud that we spent nearly the entire month as the #1 theatre fundraiser on indiegogo, and we made it onto the homepage of indiegogo.com, a feat only achieved by a rare few crowdfunding campaigns:
As promised, I’ve written up a post sharing what I’ve learned about crowdfunding by running my first campaign, and what I would do differently next time.
Here are my crowdfunding tips for theatre producers:
How To Achieve Your Acting Goals By Being Uncomfortable
I’m a fan of Joel Runyon, creator of ImpossibleHQ. His purpose it to push and inspire people to live bigger lives and do everything they once deemed “impossible.” As actors, this is pretty up our alley don’t you think?
This morning I watched his TEDxLUC talk on a philosophy he loves called Cold Shower Therapy. It’s all about making a habit out of being uncomfortable. The link here explains the approach and below is the TEDxLUC Talk; if you have a few minutes, I hope you check it out.
The gist of the approach is this:
- Make the choice to take a cold shower – he’s talking freezing-cold, as-cold-as-your-shower-goes-cold, tundra-cold if possible.
- Stick it out for five minutes.
- Do this for thirty days and see what happens with your mindset.
Counting Down to G-Day in 365
May 17th, 2014 is my G-Day. Graduation Day. I’m three years down, senior year to go before I graduate with a B.A. in Theatre, double-minor in Writing and Stage Combat. It doesn’t seem real—wasn’t I just a freshman? Regardless of my warped perception of time and how it passes, G-Day is coming. Although I am really excited for my senior year (moving off-campus! More stage combat! Working on an original piece with a friend!), I only have this year to figure out and put my post-college plans in motion.
What are my post-college plans? Well…I’m working on it. In my dream of dreams, I aspire to create (or recreate the old) new works of theatre by performing, fighting, writing and devising. I want to act, continue performing stage combat as an actor-combatant and write plays and poetry (do something with my minors). I know I can also work for theatre companies in House or Stage Management as well as use social media. Seemingly, I have useful skills and experience that could get me work where ever I go and besides that, could support my ambitions? At the very least, I can bring my tarot cards out and charge for readings.
Adaptations!
Now that I’ve finished my master’s and almost done working on four shows at one time (which I would say never again, except I know at some point I will), I’ve started thinking about what shows I really want to work on and how I want to do them. Since I do mostly new works and my interests are plays that focuses on social issues, I thought adapting a classic play to focus on something that’s important to me would be an interesting way to do something new while still doing what I love. So I decided to take my favorite Ibsen play “Hedda Gabler” and start adapting it to place it in the Israel/Palestine conflict.
For those of you that don’t know, “Hedda Gabler” is about Hedda’s life as a newly wed to professor George Tesman, who is competing with his academic rival (and Hedda’s former lover/admirer) Eilert Lovborg for a chair position at the university. I won’t give too much away (so you can read it or see a production to find out more), but my plan is to make Lovborg Palestinian while keeping all the other characters Israeli, while placing it a few years in the future of our time (around 2020) so see not only how relatable the play is still today, but to show the damages that the conflict causes between people.
The Green Room 