Checking In: Acting and Reacting
You’ve probably heard the old saying that good acting is all about reacting. And it’s not untrue: you are at your best as a performer when you communicate with others in a scene. However, this...
You’ve probably heard the old saying that good acting is all about reacting. And it’s not untrue: you are at your best as a performer when you communicate with others in a scene. However, this...
You may have noticed here at StageMilk that many of our articles are titled with questions: “Is acting easy?” “How to act drunk?” “Should I stay in character?” That’s because we like to try and...
Abandon all hope ye who enter here… That’s certainly how it can feel to label (or be labelled) a “bad actor”. There’s something so damning, so final about the term that makes it seem like...
“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” “Is this the face that launched a thousand ships?” “Awake, arise or be forever fallen.” Iambic pentameter has flavoured some of the greatest writing in the history...
When I took my first leap into the great unknown of independent theatre, the teams usually consisted of the following: a director, a designer, the cast, a stage manager and a mysterious fifth person… They’d...
It’s a good question to ask. It’s an interesting question, for that matter. The funny thing about a question like “What age do people go to drama school?” is that everybody has an immediate answer...
“Yeah, that last take was fine … but can you loosen it up, a bit?” It’s a bummer of a note to get, isn’t it? Worse still is when the note comes from within: the...
For a whole lot of people making not a whole lot of money, actors are strangely obsessed with the lovely, horrible stuff. To some, it’s a symbol of status; to others, money signals a degree...
A wise man once said: they can’t all be winners. Eventually, in a long and illustrious acting career, you’re going to take on a job that you start to really resent—even actively despise. First of...
Emotions and acting are a dangerous combination. While you can’t really have one without the other, both concepts constantly threaten to overwhelm its counterpart—resulting in an acting performance that feels either totally unhinged or far...