The Joanne Baron\DW Brown Studio welcomes back students from the holidays and would like to kick off the New Year with some resolutions.
In this coming year we want to courage every student to look at their artistic obstacles and start to reduce or remove them with renewed vigor. Maybe that way you can move on to some new obstacles. If you don’t know what your artistic obstacles are, then you have just found one. From this point forward, you want to be aware that your obstacle right now is that you don’t pay attention to what your obstacles are. Keeping that in mind, ask your teacher what they suggest the main thing for you to be aware of in your work is and what to work on to improve it.
There are obvious things you can recommit to: increased concentrated rehearsal times doing the work you can do alone, as well as that with your assigned partner; doing extra rehearsals with other serious students, doing artistics (if you don’t already know about this, ask), and volunteering to be the go-to acting partner for anything that comes up.
More than anything though, you want to get your spirit right and marry that with detailed action. Make plans for how you’re going to make time for what you know you need to do. That means sacrifice and understanding you’re not going to allow yourself those moments of weakness where you let it slide “just this time.” It means discipline.
Beyond this, you could resolve to study your art by attending the theater once a month (where you can best study an actor’s performance), or you can watch a movie for a second time with the deliberate intention of observing a particular performance: Is the actor really playing moments? Are they clear in their intention? How would a better actor (like you!) play the scene?
Basically, the suggestion here is that you should be the hero of your own life; and “a hero is someone who does the next necessary thing.”
D.W. Brown
