Today’s marketplace of acting classes confronts students with an array of offerings including cold reading, audition technique, on-camera, comedy intensives, improv, and many other offerings. Scene study is still around, but actors hear messages from all directions that they need to take the “biz” classes listed above because, as actors are told, this is what the business demands.
A common piece of counsel actors hear about scene study is that it’s unrealistic. In the real world, you don’t spend weeks or months on a single scene. You won’t meet with your scene partner to rehearse a scene. In fact, on a gig, you might not rehearse your scenes at all. Therefore, actors are told, scene study is an outmoded and artificial approach to learning to act. Audition and cold reading classes more effectively approximate what actors are going to be facing in the real world.
I take a different view. To lay it out, I’d like to call on a guy named Josh Waitzkin. At age 13, Josh won the title of National Master in chess. He also became a student of Chinese martial arts and went on to win world championships in two categories in the form. He noticed there were common things between his study of both
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