A Teachers Guide for
The Actor In You, Fifth Edition
by Dr. Robert Benedetti
IMPORTANT NOTE: This guide is for the Fifth Edition. A Sixth Edition appeared in January of this year. It is much changed and I think is preferable. Is was reorganized and is now subtitled Twelve Easy Steps to Understanding the Art of Acting. I urge you to examine tis new edition.
Thank you for using the Fifth Edition of
The Actor in You. This teachers
Guide has been revised specifically for
this edition.
The Actor in You is designed for
use in an introductory college acting
course, or for a course for non-majors
in the appreciation of acting, or even
for advanced high school students. It
grew out of the ten editions of my more
advanced book, The Actor at Work,
which has been in print for over forty
years. The Actor in You
encapsulates the essence of the longer
book and writing it presented a
wonderful challenge: I had to identify
the most important elements of my
approach and find a way to communicate
them directly and simply. I learned a
great deal by doing it.
Though it was written for beginners, I
believe this book would be valuable for
advanced students and working
professionals. Our educational tradition
usually moves from simplicity to
complexity; our students move through a
discipline as if they were climbing the
rungs of a ladder, upward toward more
and more abstract and complex material.
This may be fine for many disciplines,
but in any art, the development of
mastery involves digging deeper and
deeper into the profundity of the
simple. The most advanced acting class,
I believe, should be indistinguishable
in its content from the beginner class.
As in Zen, our wish is to develop
beginners mind; as Ram Dass says, the
next door is always there when you are
ready to go through it.
The truth, I suspect, is that we all
have just one acting class in us, and we
teach it over and over in various forms;
the student receives it at his or her
own level of wakefulness and
understanding, or at that moment when we
manage to hit upon the manner of
expression that awakens them, or
triggers their discovery. How often has
the advanced student said about the idea
of action, for instance, Of course!
Its so simple! Why didnt you tell us
sooner? when, in truth, we have been
telling them all along.
The best progression of an actors
development, I believe, is to work on
basics like centering and breathing and
being in action, alternating with forays
into various kinds of material that make
various kinds of demands on these basic
skills, then returning regularly to the
basics with expanded experience and
richness of understanding. This has been
called a cyclical rather than a
sequential way of learning.
This book was written to save your
valuable class time for personal contact
with your students, to help you minimize
talk and maximize work time. It offers
exercises and principles; it does not
offer formulas or rules. Help your
students to treat the book as a source
of ideas and inspiration for their own
exploration and self-discoveries. Work
in the spirit expressed here by Joseph
Chaikin in The Presence of the Actor:
There is no way to develop talent, only
to invite it to be released. Its a
mysterious gift, no more equally
distributed than bright sunny days over
a year. The teacher of the actor is like
the teacher of small children. He looks
for the right steps for each student,
and when the student is about to make
his discovery, the teacher must
disappear. [page 154]
For a fuller understanding of this
concept, read Eugen Herrigels Zen in
the Art of Archery. If I had to
choose a single book for acting teachers
to read, this is the one.
TIMING OF THE SEQUENCE
As in the previous editions, this fifth
edition was intended to offer one full
semester (sixteen weeks) of beginning
course work, one Step in each week.
However, the material is so distilled
that I think the experience would be
even more valuable if it were stretched
over a full year.
This edition has been reorganized, and I
believe the progression of work is now
correct and would urge you to maintain
it. In a full-year curriculum, I would
suggest spending half of a semester on
each of the four parts, with perhaps a
bit less time spent on the first part.
Some of you, however, may choose to
start with Part 2, which begins core
scene work, especially if your students
have other classes that address the
voice and body work covered in an
admittedly cursory way in Part 1. In any
case, do not rush! It is more important
that what is done be done well than that
the entire sequence be completed. Let
the work take its natural course.
Some steps will take longer than others.
The first and second, for instance,
could be combined as a single weeks
work, whereas the basic exercises for
the body and voice in Steps 3 and 4 are
more beneficial if they are repeated
over a period of time, and should be
revisited regularly even as the class
proceeds through the remaining steps.
Likewise, the fundamental concept of
action presented in Part 2 is the
central concept of the entire book and
ties all the other material together; I
could imagine devoting an entire year to
Part !.
Also be sure your students read and
understand the introductory section for
each part; we all know the tendency to
skip prefaces and other introductory
material. (And please be sure that each
exercise is read as well, even if it is
not used in class.)
STEP BY STEP TEACHING AIMS
PART ONE: The aim of the first five
steps is to introduce fundamental
concepts and information, and to prepare
the students body, voice, and attitude
for the work in the later steps.
Step 1: This first step was intended
for those with no previous experience of
acting. However, it raises some issues
about the qualities and ethics of good
acting that even advanced actors may
benefit from considering. It sets
priorities about what we want to
accomplish in the course of study as a
whole.
Step 2: This presents a brief history of
western acting, and is worth considering
even for somewhat advanced students.
Steps 3, 4, and 5: These three steps
present a mini-course in relaxation,
centering, voice, speech, collaboration,
and the proper frame of mind for the
actor. The aim is to integrate and
prepare the students organism to
respond as fully as possible to the work
that follows.
I think nearly all teachers of voice,
speech, and acting would agree that
relaxation and centering are good places
to start. This step presents time-tested
exercises to set the student on the
path, but this work must be repeated
with regularity for the rest of the
course.
If your students are also taking classes
in voice and movement, you might skip
Steps 3 and 4; at least discuss my
approach with the teachers of those
classes to ensure coherence.
The trust exercises in Step 5 are meant
to open the student to interaction with
his or her fellow actors. They have all
been in use for many years, and are a
fond echo of the sixties and seventies.
PART TWO: Steps 6 through 10 are the
heart of the book. Here we develop the
idea of action, making the critical
point that it takes both internal and
external forms. We also stress the
fundamental idea that dramatic action
occurs between characters. The
aim is to experience the flow of give
and take that moves a scene.
In Step 6 we discuss the actors state
of mind and present the important
concepts of dual consciousness and
public solitude. However, it matters not
whether a student understands these
concepts unless they can experience them
and if they can, Id skip
conceptualizing abut them altogether.
Helping them to understand indicating,
however, can be very useful in
critiquing their work later.
In all, Part 2 tries to direct the
students attention away from
emotion and character and toward
action, which produces both. I try very
hard, in both teaching and directing, to
avoid even talking about emotion and
character. Step 7, in particular,
introduces the critical idea that
entering into a full experience of the
characters action and circumstances
produces transformation. This is the
real value of stressing the idea of
action and is central to the entire
book.
In Step 7, the students must pair up and
choose a short scene to which they will
apply everything that follows, and this
is a crucial choice. See the section,
SELECTION OF MATERIAL, below.
Step 10 hopes to help the student
understand the way in which dramatic
action is structured, and seems to me a
necessary prerequisite to being able to
break a scene down. This step is a quick
course in Aristotelian structural
analysis. Again, this must live as an
experience in the muscles, not as an
idea in the mind. I was ambivalent about
whether this Step should be part of Part
3, but since it appears consecutively to
Part 3, it works as part of a
mini-course in script analysis.
PART THREE: These three steps continue a
mini-course in script analysis, and
develop the central idea of action in
greater detail.
Step 11 is a basic mini-course in
Aristotelian character traits as taught
to me by my mentor, Oscar Brockett. This
Step also presents the loaded idea of
emotional recall: I believe that
emotional recall happens automatically
if the actor is truly experiencing what
is happening in a scene. Therefore, one
scarcely needs to use it as a conscious
technique, and as I point out,
Stanislavski eventually abandoned it.
The argument about it divided Lee
Strasberg, for whom it was paramount,
and Stella Adler, who returned from
later observation of Stanislavski saying
that it had been abandoned. I was unsure
of whether I should mention it at all,
in fact, and did so only because it is
expected by so many teachers and
students. I present it only as a last
resort sort if an actor is unable to
empathize with the character, or has
trouble entering into the work in a
personal way. But in general, I don't
like it and stress, as Stanislavski did,
that it must never be used in
performance. Besides, I think some
acting teachers misuse personal material
from students lives and tread
dangerously close to the edge of
psychotherapy. Yes, the student as I
say often must invest themselves in
the material personally, and internalize
the action and given circumstances, but
the specifics of how this is achieved
must be the students private business.
Step 12: Learning to experience the
characters needs, action, and world
personally is, of course, the
greatest step, and can, all by itself,
produce wonders. And yet, this is
perhaps the most contentious area among
different schools of acting technique.
The argument can be summed up by
considering the matter of
identification between actor and
character. Stanislavski always urged the
actor to "experience" the characters
action and world, rather than to
become the character. He spoke not of
identification in the sense of the actor
losing himself or herself in the role,
but rather wanted the performance to be
a fusion of actor and character.
He even sometimes used a hyphenated
phrase to identify a role, like
Stanislavki-Trigorin. My desire, then,
is to stress that the character becomes
a new version of the actors self, but
one which meets the demands of dramatic
function. This is, for me, the most
important single step in the book, and
presents the heart of the acting
process. If the student can be helped to
experience the specific flow of
arousal-strategic
choice-action-objective, we will have
achieved our aim, for this is how the
Magic If becomes real, transformative
experience. The inner monologue
exercise, by the way, is one of those
dangerous ones that can mislead more
students than it helps. Use it
cautiously.
Step 13 in particular is a woefully
brief attempt to awaken the student to
the psychophysical implications of a
good text. My own background in Oral
Interpretation convinces me that
internalizing a good text that is,
achieving organic congruence with
it can be the starting point and basis
for the actors work. However you can do
it, try to move the students
relationship to the text out of the left
brain and into the right. The work of my
friend Cicely Berry is very good for
this I recommend especially her book
Text in Action and I have been
able to incorporate more of this in my
longer book, the tenth edition of The
Actor at Work.
PART FOUR: The remaining three steps are
a mini-course in the day-to-day acting
process itself. This could be an entire
semesters (or years) work by itself,
following what has gone before.
Step 14: This extends the previous
moment-by-moment into the larger
patterns of the through-line and
superobjective. It is difficult for the
student to experience these concepts
when working only on a single scene;
perhaps attending a performance together
and then discussing these concepts as
they lived in the performance would
help.
Step 15: Many users stress the
usefulness of the practical matters
introduced here, and you may want to
make more of it than I have.
Step 16: Again, there is a lot here,
but I think we do want the work of the
course to result in some kind of
closure, and it is valuable to end the
term by presenting the work as a short
program of scenes for an invited
audience. This step makes that possible.
By the way: I have sometimes been asked
about my injunction against cheating
out: I don't like cheating out because
the weight of the body is carried at the
center, and it's what you do with your
center that establishes relationship;
cheating out diffuses the
character-to-character onstage
relationship in favor of the
actor-to-audience relationship. If
actors need to cheat out to keep open to
the audience, there is something wrong
with the blocking or the groundplan. The
trick is to provide a justifiable reason
for actors to deliver important speeches
downstage, and I always design my
groundplans so it will be easy for there
to be a downstage focus in the reality
of the space when needed. In a class
situation, however, this is scarcely a
concern.
GLOSSARY OF TERMS: I urge you to require
that students read the Glossary. Beside
familiarizing themselves with common
theatrical jargon, there are some
valuable tips imbedded in it.
SELECTION OF MATERIAL
When dealing with people who have never
performed before, it may be useful to
start off with simple storytelling
exercises or short solo speeches.
However, I feel strongly that all actor
training should involve the give and
take of scene work or transactional
exercises as soon as possible; we want
to discourage insular performance in
favor of an interactive sense of shared
action.
Scenes or scene segments should be
relatively short for class purposes,
probably not more than three to five
minutes in length. Longer scenes usually
do not repay the class time invested in
them (until advanced work, of course)
and a shorter piece can usually be
critiqued more effectively.
It is best, of course, if the scene or
scene segments have a clear shape (that
is, they contain a crisis, however
minor) and preferably a single central
focus. Take the time to work over your
students selections with them at the
beginning; this time will be handsomely
repaid later.
While it is understandable that we
usually start beginning students on
realistic scenes involving characters
close to their real selves, the level
of the material chosen has never seemed
to me to be as crucial as many teachers
think. Depending on the intelligence and
literacy of the student, I have, for
example, successfully used Shakespeare
in beginning classes, as long as the
focus is on the human dimension and
actions embodied in the scene, and not
on poetic delivery. In any case, the
material selected should have sufficient
literary merit to repay the investment
you and the student will make in it, but
this may well include scenes from
reputable commercial products. The
indispensable key is that something in
the scene or character must touch the
student in a personal way; this is
far more important than the style or
genre of the material.
So few students have an adequate
grounding in dramatic literature that
the selection of material is usually a
real problem. I suggest that you create
a short list of representative plays
which, over a period of time, your
students will read in their entirety.
Draw your examples from the plays on
your list and allow students to select
exercise material from them as well; in
this way you will avoid the common
problem of students doing speeches and
scenes from plays they have not actually
read. I mistrust scene books because
they invite students to work on scenes
out of the context of the whole play.
Help your students to feel an obligation
to fulfill the dramatic function of the
character and the scene within the play
as a whole.
TIP: When doing scene work, I like to
ask the students to begin by briefly
telling the story of the play, and then
to describe how this scene fits into it.
A good question is: Whats the one
thing that happens in this scene that is
most important to the entire story?
Asking them to review this just before
they begin work helps them keep their
priorities clear and focus on the
dramatic function of their characters.
WORKING CONDITIONS
Few schools offer the acting teacher as
much class time as we would all like. I
have found six hours per week of acting
class time (assuming additional time for
voice and movement work) to be optimum
for a professional conservatory
situation; most schools get along with
much less. If you have a choice, I
suggest that fewer but longer working
sessions are preferable to the same
amount of time split into standard
fifty-minute hours. I have found ninety
minutes to be a real minimum for an
acting class, with two full hours even
better. In most situations we would be
very happy with two class sessions per
week, each two or more hours long. This
schedule gives the class sufficient time
to develop momentum while also giving
the student time to prepare work between
classes.
Few schools offer spaces which are
appropriate to a serious acting class;
certainly the traditional classroom
(especially one with fixed seating) is
nearly useless. Look about your school
for a space which can be your home and
which has (or can be provided with) any
of the following:
1. A sprung or wooden floor, or
tumbling or yoga mats.
2. A modicum of stage-type
lighting when needed, even if this means
simply mounting two or three spotlights
or PAR lamps on the walls.
3. Basic rehearsal furniture and
a cabinet, box, or closet full of basic
hand props and costume pieces.
4. A changing room nearby and
lockers for clothing and valuables.
Use your ingenuity let the class help
to create and maintain its working space
and dont depend on the janitors!
The actors should wear loose clothing
when they do the exercises. You might
consider a simple rehearsal uniform to
enhance the sense of discipline. If
conditions permit, I advise working
barefoot or in ballet slippers to get a
more direct feel of the floor. Long hair
should be worn back, out of the face, to
discourage that annoying unconscious
fiddling with the hair that is so
distracting in a performer. As a matter
of safety, avoid wristwatches and
jewelry; glasses should be secured with
an athletic band.
MOTIVATING THE WORK
At some point early in the work, I
encourage my students to consider why
they want to study acting, to identify
the personal energies that bring them
into the class. Part of this
consideration can be a preliminary
inventory of their most basic needs as
actors (such as the need to learn to
relax, to overcome inhibitions, to
rediscover the joy of storytelling or
role-playing, and so on.) On the basis
of this inventory, they can select one
or two growth objectives toward which
they feel personally motivated, and to
share these with the class. It is
wonderful when everyone feels
responsible for respecting and
supporting the specific growth
objectives of everyone else; this
reduces competitiveness and enhances the
value of class critiques.
CLASS CRITIQUES AND EVALUATIONS
Ongoing class critiques are essential,
but they must be kept within reasonable
limits. Dont fall into the trap of
talking one three-minute scene to death
while twelve other students try to stay
awake. Set a time limit for your
critique and for class discussion. I
encourage the entire class to join in
discussion of exercises, so long as
these rules are followed:
1. Be a stern moderator; dont
let anyone monopolize the discussion.
2. Cut off instantly
defensiveness or offensiveness in
anyone; we seek the truth, not personal
victories.
3. Give every point of view
(within the above limits) a fair
hearing. Most importantly, put all
attractive ideas to the test
immediately. In other words, critiques
should be reworking sessions, not just
talk fests.
4. Insist, within the bounds of
respectful behavior, on honest and
direct criticisms. Your students will
quickly tune out if they see faults
being whitewashed; students want expert,
direct, and honest criticism. We must
respect them enough to assume that they
can take it; and if they cant, they are
better off out of the theatre anyway.
5. Help the class to create a
supportive environment by keeping
critiques and discussions objectively
balanced between positive and negative
commentary, and ensure that success is
as fully analyzed as failure. Sometimes
when we praise something, our students
are secretly thinking, Fine, but now
tell me what you really thought! Help
your students to recognize good work and
to learn from it as much as from
failure.
GRADING
Finally, we come to the painful subject
of evaluation, which for most of us
means grading. If you are in the common
but unenviable situation of having no
control over admission to your class,
you can at least grade in a way that
actually reflects the quality of the
work done. Sadly, there are many
programs in which every acting students
gets an A grade; in such a situation,
how does a better-than-average student
develop any confidence in his or her own
abilities when they see lesser students
receiving the same grade? Have the
courage to let grades reflect
accomplishment; you will quickly earn a
reputation as a serious, exacting, but
fair teacher, which will serve you
almost as well as the ability to
audition your students, and your best
students will have the pride of knowing
that your continued commitment to them
is a meaningful reflection on their
development.
In those desirable situations in which
we are teaching within a sequence of
classes, where successful completion of
one level is a pre-requisite for further
work, we must remember that the ensemble
nature of acting means that members of a
class tend to learn more from one
another than they do from us. You can
see this in the history of older
training programs where vintage years
occur; in these cases, a given class had
a magical chemistry by which the talent
of each member was enhanced by
membership in that particular peer
group. For this reason, you must
jealously guard the quality of the
continuing peer group by cutting out the
drifters and the dilettantes and more
painfully the hard-working but
untalented students.
Of course, even a very talented student
may not benefit from your particular
method of teaching. If this is the case,
be direct and honest and convince him or
her to seek more useful tutelage. And if
you are teaching in a conservatory
situation, know when it is time for a
talented student to leave the nest. I
know several stars who say that the best
thing that ever happened to them was
being asked to leave a training program!
Above all, avoid accepting every student
failure as your own. Where did I go
wrong with him or her, we ask ourselves
time after time. Spare yourself; fulfill
your sense of duty and creativity, and
insist that the student fulfill his or
hers.
TEN USEFUL PRINCIPLES
1. Never encourage the student
to please you. The students task is to
explore the problem you have defined;
the search must be his or hers, not
yours.
2. Insist on sufficient
preparation; stop any exercise which is
obviously ill-prepared. Teach your
students the importance of an actors
homework, that work which must be done
outside rehearsal time.
3. Talk as little as possible;
let the students do as much as
possible.
4. When you do talk, try to give
your notes in active terms with an
indication of an external focus; that
is, talk about the doings of the
exercise.
5. Never outline the desired
results of an exercise, as this will
ensure playing for results rather than
true exploration. Try to banish desired
results from your mind; when an
exercise is done, accept what has really
happened. If nothing has happened, find
out why or set a condition which will
make something happen. If something
happened that you didnt expect, rejoice
and learn from it. In short, be in the
Here and Now just as much as you want
your students to be. You are a guide and
facilitator, not a manipulator.
6. Never justify an exercise.
When a student demands justification, he
or she is hiding from the exercise or
has simply failed to have the experience
which the exercise offers. Dont waste
time explaining what should have
happened and why; try something else
until justification becomes unnecessary.
7. IMPORTANT: Keep the focus of
the class on the work, not on the
student. Acting students are
narcissistic and introspective enough
without being encouraged in these
largely unproductive perceptual
postures.
8. To help keep the focus on the
work, try to center each class session
around a theme of exploration: Today we
will explore the way in which we use our
bodies in the expression of
relationship, and so on.
9. Inculcate the attitude that
class-work is acting, not merely a
preparation for acting. Help the
student to know that theatre happens
whenever and wherever we make it happen,
not just on a stage when the curtain
goes up.
10. Most important, ALWAYS BE
LEARNING YOURSELF! Teaching Is the best
education available; the teacher who has
ceased to learn, to make discoveries in
almost every class, is useless to
himself or herself and to his or her
students, and to the theatre. If you
feel yourself going stale, try something
new: get out and do, get up and act
alongside your students, find something
which touches your joy in the work. You
have nothing of real value to teach
without it.
Thanks, and best wishes to you!
Remember: We are creating the theatre of
the future!