Master of Arts Practice at CSU

After spending time over the past seven years teaching myself how to translate +30 years of experience into something that is possible to communicate to students wanting to take the performance path, I want to take it further.

Deconstructing my own process has been fascinating. I hear the voices of my own teachers, and the actors and directors I have worked with, in my head all the time.

This is what I have discovered so far-

1. I believe you cannot teach a person how to act.
2. You can teach  techniques to use when instinct fails.
3. You can teach how to be a better communicator.
4. The indefinable joy in performance is inextricably linked to the success of that performance.
5. If you want to work and it is not flowing freely to you, create a project.

The idea of further study comes from the fifth element in that list. And I  began thinking about making a documentary around teaching screen acting. I have access to many experienced people -actors, directors, casting directors, crew members- and have begun to get them to agree to being interviewed about their take on screen acting.

Kim Hardwick, who is a lecturer at CSU currently, directed me in "Love Song" by John Kolvenbach at the Darlinghurst theatre in 2009. It was her suggestion to look at this course with a definite intention to make myself more employable as a teacher of screen skills.

To be perfectly honest, the role of teacher is not one that has ever sat particularly easily with me. I have had a long career as a performer and have found the rigors of teaching a room full of students of varying degrees of intelligence and talent exhausting and frustrating at times. And boring. I was so used to the exhilaration of performance being it's immediate reward that enjoyment in teaching seemed a rare thing.

It was Denise Roberts , who runs Screenwise (a screen acting school in Sydney), who first asked me to put together a course around presenting for TV. Then asked me to take screen acting classes at short notice . When I asked what I should teach , the reply was  as loose as 'Oh, take them through some scripts and get them to hit marks and stuff'.

 What actually happened in the room was a revelation. The students concept of what acting on camera requires varied so much it took a lot of  time to work out what they understood.

Where to start?

I asked other teachers at that school. And those I knew of at other schools- the Actor's Centre , ACTT, NIDA. 

Most seemed to work at several schools, like me, on a casual basis.The most common answer was " You just get them to do scripts and you'll know what to do."  Or "Tell them  'That's okay but I don't believe you. Do it again'" The latter is actually useful. The former less so. 

The biggest problem for me initially was trying to give the non talented students something to go away with that they could use in life. It was painfully clear that they would not be employed as actors. It was not in my employer's interest for me to be blunt. These days I raise the bar - I set excersises which expose the students on camera. They can  clearly see that they fail. There is no need to tell them so, I can compliment whatever  is watchable and leave the rest for them to acknowledge themselves. Again, probably not good for business but I could go home feeling that I has not misled my students.

The value of using actors still involved in the industry as tutors is obvious but the lack of teacher training in my case was a problem for me. Accustomed to performing I would wear myself out after a three hour class .

To make matters worse , I took some casual work at The Ann Macdonald High School for the Performing Arts. Year 5 and 6 and 7, 8and 9, for Voice and Improvisation , Screen and Repertoire.

Two hours a, a bare room and fifteen adolescents. They ate me for lunch.

So , here I am, still teaching and learning , embarking on an organised way of discovering more about how to pass on what I know. Is that what teaching is?