Disrespect for Acting

performing Pippin

Wait What?!?

Yes, I have in fact decided to name my eventual memoir "Disrespect for Acting." It is a play on Uta Hagen's book "Respect for Acting."

The trouble with the mainstreaming of liberal arts education is that every college has a performing arts program. This has created a vacuum which requires educators. Unfortunately, supply and demand are well out of wack. There are not enough qualified acting teachers to educate the masses of students who have decided to pursue a performing arts life.

Why not a "Performing Arts Career?" Because being an actor in the 21st century cannot become a career. It is a lifestyle. As the money has gotten sucked up to the top it has disappeared from the masses.

Most performers now spend their entire lives taking jobs for no pay, little pay, credit, copy, and deferred pay. These things do not put bread on the table or provide a roof over one's head.

HAIR at East Carolina University

College Training

(an excerpt from my manuscript)

I was a young undergrad acting student in my first year of what we called “Baby Meisner.” I had been admitted into the Musical Theater program but did not get accepted into the two year intensive Meisner training. It was fine because I was still able to study under a professor who I greatly admired. That was the thing about being an acting student. Our professors were our gods, the acting studio was our temple, and our scene practice was the worship and the sacrifice we made to them.

It was our first day working on a new tool. Prepping was seen as the holy grail and we dutifully listened to our professor explain the process by which we would start to practice it.

“When it is your turn to go, partner A will do an activity in the room while partner B will leave and go to my office. While you are there you will look for a strong memory, not the ‘my mother is dying of cancer kind,’ but something strong that you can relate to. Once you have that memory, focus on it and then walk back to the door. Once you have reached the door you will knock, your partner will react, you will enter, and the scene will begin. Remember, once you have this emotion DO NOT hold onto it. Just know that it is there... that it is with you.”

He looked around the room and our eyes met.

Yup, here we go again.

“Brandon, you’re up.”

I was B that day. I dutifully walked to his office. Looked for my memory, my emotion. I found it and concentrated on it. I gazed into his empty fish tank and really focused on it. Once I was secure in knowing that I had it and was ready I did the short walk down the hallway and knocked.

Silence.

Pushkin's The Feast in the Time of Plague

“I can’t feel your emotion!”

I was confused. I was angry. Most of all I was disillusioned with the whole system.

“You can come in. The exercise is over.”

I’m sure he spent the next five or ten minutes illustrating to the class what I had done wrong. I’m sure the heads bobbed in rhythm and there were copious notes taken about my failure that day. I’m sure I don’t remember a word he said because I checked out the moment he stopped the exercise.

Things like this do not happen in business school.

As one of my mentors at North Carolina School of the Arts once put it. "If you can do anything else, do it."

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Unless otherwise noted all photos used are the work of Brandon Ruckdashel or official publicity material released by the projects I have been in.