Good morning.
I was at a very interesting meeting yesterday about forging new partnerships, and with a specific emphasis on music education.
I have banged on repeatedly in my blogs about the different disciplines of singing, dancing and acting. My recent first experience of working across these disciplines in the co-creation of the pantomime was very revealing. The technical disciplines of singing and dancing are clear. If you want to perform in these disciplines you simply have to learn and repeatedly practise the skills and techniques required. And these are not learnt overnight. Indeed you also need to learn them systematically, like building a house from its foundations. Its not a pick and mix thing.
The writer Malcolm Gladwell, in his book Outliers suggests that it takes 10,000 hours to master a skill. His conclusion was based on observing Andrew Wiles who solved Fermats Last Theorem in 1994 (sounds clever - I have no idea how it works!). On a rough calculation that is 10 years, or 5 if you spend a full working week on practising and reflecting on the skill.
So there you have it, its not a fact of course, but a hypothesis born out of observation. But in any event its quite a useful yardstick. I found it helpful when talking a few years ago to my daughter's boyfriend who is a professional golfer. At times the repetitive daily activity he has to do on the driving range in all weathers can be tough, sometimes boring and at times dispiriting. But what keeps him going is the thoughts of the European Tour and the Ryder Cup. He has a clear destination in mind. And he knows that the only way to get there is to build his skills cumulatively. He found it helpful to think about that accumulation in terms of the 10,000 hours and we even did a rough calculation at that time as to how many he had clocked up! ( I think it was about 3,000 then).
10,000 hours or 50,000 in a sense doesn't really matter, but what it does indicate is the principle of practice. I believe that it applies to most areas of mastering a skill.
This brings me back to the point about the different disciplines, perhaps uniquely needed in Musical Theatre and Opera and in some dance works.
The discipline of acting is the poor relation here. Without a clear, progressive and explicit system for learning acting skills it makes it difficult to know where to start. Of course there are examination systems such as those offered by LAMDA and the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. These do indeed have a systemic approach through the acting grade system that children can embark on from 7 or 8. However these are rarely available in a school setting and have to be undertaken through a stage school or individual lessons. I did mine through the latter.
Because of its nature of course unless you plan to only ever perform solo, you need a group to work with alongside the individual lessons. Drama is not fundamentally a solo activity. Its about characters and dynamics and as such the actor has to have the skills, emotion and an understanding of dynamics and text.
So in Musical Theatre these three disciplines must come together, each in their unique form, but also and more importantly they must be synthesised. And the thing that brings them together is story and character.
When the acting skills are significantly less developed than the other two, it is in danger of weakening the overall synergy of the piece. This particularly applies to children of course. Most professional actors have had at least some good training, and coupled with innate and intuitive ability, talent and experience can use their skills to make a piece whole. But the skills bit is even then sometimes on the back foot.
So acting training is a must for any aspiring actor, and the sooner its started the better. The advantage that young children have is that they possess fertile imaginations and as such are able to jump effortlessly into character. Its just play after all. However as I have talked about before, the adolescent years are critical, and at this point other pressures and influences can take hold. So this is a time to be particularly vigilant in the life of a young actor.
The process of creating a piece of musical theatre requires that all these skills come together through characterisation.
Once off the starting block in a rehearsal its possible to up skill talented young performers in acting techniques. And I mean concrete acting skills that include breathing and voice work, movement, timing etc; all of which can be learnt.
So given the ongoing training process through any rehearsal period, the meat of the making is in the storytelling, characters and relationships, and of course in the changes that these go through in the narrative arc.
Finding character unlocks the story and glues the whole thing together. So whether you are singing, dancing or speaking there is a fully expressed character through all the forms.
How do you go about finding and creating character? This is always a thorny one, and there are as many different ways as there are actors. But if they have the core technical skills, they can go through many different processes. Hence most actors respond well to different directors' ways of working. They may certainly prefer some directors over others, but in my experience I find actors to be largely generous, open to experiment and willing to play and learn. There are many ways to skin a cat.
The ways into character are many and fascinating and often driven by the individual and group needs. I will come to this is a later blog when I will talk about the power of using archetypes in the creation of character.
Have a good day.
I was at a very interesting meeting yesterday about forging new partnerships, and with a specific emphasis on music education.
I have banged on repeatedly in my blogs about the different disciplines of singing, dancing and acting. My recent first experience of working across these disciplines in the co-creation of the pantomime was very revealing. The technical disciplines of singing and dancing are clear. If you want to perform in these disciplines you simply have to learn and repeatedly practise the skills and techniques required. And these are not learnt overnight. Indeed you also need to learn them systematically, like building a house from its foundations. Its not a pick and mix thing.
The writer Malcolm Gladwell, in his book Outliers suggests that it takes 10,000 hours to master a skill. His conclusion was based on observing Andrew Wiles who solved Fermats Last Theorem in 1994 (sounds clever - I have no idea how it works!). On a rough calculation that is 10 years, or 5 if you spend a full working week on practising and reflecting on the skill.
So there you have it, its not a fact of course, but a hypothesis born out of observation. But in any event its quite a useful yardstick. I found it helpful when talking a few years ago to my daughter's boyfriend who is a professional golfer. At times the repetitive daily activity he has to do on the driving range in all weathers can be tough, sometimes boring and at times dispiriting. But what keeps him going is the thoughts of the European Tour and the Ryder Cup. He has a clear destination in mind. And he knows that the only way to get there is to build his skills cumulatively. He found it helpful to think about that accumulation in terms of the 10,000 hours and we even did a rough calculation at that time as to how many he had clocked up! ( I think it was about 3,000 then).
10,000 hours or 50,000 in a sense doesn't really matter, but what it does indicate is the principle of practice. I believe that it applies to most areas of mastering a skill.
This brings me back to the point about the different disciplines, perhaps uniquely needed in Musical Theatre and Opera and in some dance works.
The discipline of acting is the poor relation here. Without a clear, progressive and explicit system for learning acting skills it makes it difficult to know where to start. Of course there are examination systems such as those offered by LAMDA and the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. These do indeed have a systemic approach through the acting grade system that children can embark on from 7 or 8. However these are rarely available in a school setting and have to be undertaken through a stage school or individual lessons. I did mine through the latter.
Because of its nature of course unless you plan to only ever perform solo, you need a group to work with alongside the individual lessons. Drama is not fundamentally a solo activity. Its about characters and dynamics and as such the actor has to have the skills, emotion and an understanding of dynamics and text.
So in Musical Theatre these three disciplines must come together, each in their unique form, but also and more importantly they must be synthesised. And the thing that brings them together is story and character.
When the acting skills are significantly less developed than the other two, it is in danger of weakening the overall synergy of the piece. This particularly applies to children of course. Most professional actors have had at least some good training, and coupled with innate and intuitive ability, talent and experience can use their skills to make a piece whole. But the skills bit is even then sometimes on the back foot.
So acting training is a must for any aspiring actor, and the sooner its started the better. The advantage that young children have is that they possess fertile imaginations and as such are able to jump effortlessly into character. Its just play after all. However as I have talked about before, the adolescent years are critical, and at this point other pressures and influences can take hold. So this is a time to be particularly vigilant in the life of a young actor.
The process of creating a piece of musical theatre requires that all these skills come together through characterisation.
Once off the starting block in a rehearsal its possible to up skill talented young performers in acting techniques. And I mean concrete acting skills that include breathing and voice work, movement, timing etc; all of which can be learnt.
So given the ongoing training process through any rehearsal period, the meat of the making is in the storytelling, characters and relationships, and of course in the changes that these go through in the narrative arc.
Finding character unlocks the story and glues the whole thing together. So whether you are singing, dancing or speaking there is a fully expressed character through all the forms.
How do you go about finding and creating character? This is always a thorny one, and there are as many different ways as there are actors. But if they have the core technical skills, they can go through many different processes. Hence most actors respond well to different directors' ways of working. They may certainly prefer some directors over others, but in my experience I find actors to be largely generous, open to experiment and willing to play and learn. There are many ways to skin a cat.
The ways into character are many and fascinating and often driven by the individual and group needs. I will come to this is a later blog when I will talk about the power of using archetypes in the creation of character.
Have a good day.
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