by Bel | Nov 3, 2015 | acting classes, acting classes london, audition classes, audition doctor, auditions, classes for acting, tilly blackwood
Geoffrey Colman, head of acting at Central, wrote an article on the danger of aspiring actors disregarding the merits of professional training. “The cult of the untrained reigns supreme. Why wait three years, or even one – why make the effort to be trained at all?”
Many young actors, who routinely see the untrained catapulted into the spotlight, understandably feel that training is not a prerequisite to forging a career. However, the longevity of such a career is usually short. Colman encourages vocational training as a way of committing yourself to “a craft that has bestowed such meaning and continuity” and raging against the prevailing view that “all is instant, all is now.”
“…the cultivation of knowledge is worth the risk; worth pursuing for nothing more than its own sake. The vocation of knowledge and the vocation of training are old terms that identify a set of standards and assumptions not immediately associated with the click-and-download generation of today – and therefore are terms and ideals that we must fight for and protect.”
Colman also talks about the idea of surrendering and this is what Audition Doctor sessions encourage students to do. The act of surrendering is linked to a willingness to be open and vulnerable. Those that attend Audition Doctor sessions quickly begin to realise that their progress is dependent on how much of themselves they are willing to proffer.
This can feel exposing and requires a kind of bravery. However, the reason why Audition Doctor continues to be in such popular demand is because the sessions never make you feel unsafe. Any vulnerability is channeled into the role and it is this courage, which is cultivated in the sessions, that breeds work.
In a recent Guardian article, Alex Jennings stated: “I love to keep working,” he says, “but you have to wait and you have to be brave.”
This is the reason professional actors come to Audition Doctor between jobs. Many of them see waiting not as a static state, but as a time to push their craft further and to prepare them for roles which require more of themselves than they have previously ever given.
An Audition Doctor session is also the place to experiment and see the kind of roles that, as an actor, you would like to aim for. Ralph Fiennes recently commented on these roles, comparing them to “the gift of a garment”. “You go: ‘That’s perfect, I love that. That feels like that’s me.”
Those that come to Audition Doctor are serious about their careers and are focused solely on the betterment of their craft. Colman wrote of the subjectivity of what great acting is, however, he said that the one “common unifying quality, the greatness I hope to encounter with each new intake of students, is actually very simple – honest, full commitment to a craft that lies beyond the scope of apparent ambition or easy-won fame. In my long experience of training actors, I think that it is this single quality that distinguishes the real acting elite.”
The act of coming to Audition Doctor is an honest and full commitment to acting and a step to inching closer to the greatness that every actor hopes to reach.
by Bel | Oct 27, 2015 | acting classes, acting classes london, audition classes, audition doctor, auditions, classes for acting, tilly blackwood
Vulnerability is a quality highly prized by actors. Playing a role truthfully requires the ability to empathise and a willingness to unselfconsciously open yourself up, which inevitably exposes you to judgement. This can be daunting, especially for those who are applying to drama school and have had little experience of doing so.
In The Stage, Mark Rylance said: “In my experience, in rehearsal rooms and looking at plays, this is the point of the mask of theatre, as Joan Littlewood once said. It enables you to share something really vulnerable. If you’re not using the mask of pretending to be someone else to share something vulnerable, what’s the point of the mask? This is where we can look at things that might really overwhelm us in life.”
Audition Doctor sessions are in demand because students are encouraged to be vulnerable and it’s rare to find an environment where you feel at ease enough to overstep your own limits.
Rylance spoke about his tenure at the Globe and about why some shows worked some nights and others not: “I realised it was something to do with being honest. You’ve got to delve for something honest and real that at least seems spontaneous, and hopefully is spontaneous, to capture them.”
Students who come to Audition Doctor sessions can attest that honesty and spontaneity are the two qualities – alongside vulnerability – that are fostered.
Aside from drama school students, professional actors make up a substantial proportion of Audition Doctor’s students. Of these, many are actors who have done a lot of film and TV work and who want to re-engage with theatre.
Rylance said: “[In film], the actor is not the storyteller; you just need to be as real and there as the chairs, and they’ll edit it. I’m going to be doing a lot of fronting for the Spielberg film soon – hours and hours of selling it, and I can talk about the process of enjoying playing it, but I’ve not even seen it yet. And when I do see it, it is no more mine than [it is] the camera operators or the grips.” In the theatre, by contrast, it is up to the actor to claim ownership.”
In a profession which is famed for its instability, attending sessions such as Audition Doctor is also an act of taking control of your career.
Rylance went onto talk about the difficulties of keeping lines you’ve said countless times before as original and fresh as the first time you spoke them: “Repetition is a big problem in the theatre – in my time, there was no training for it, and it is hard to give you the experience of doing more than five shows in a row at drama school. But there are things you can do to keep refreshing yourself, just simple things like coming out of your head and into your senses. If you’re onstage and stuck, come out of your mind that is causing you difficulties and think about what it smells like, looks like and sounds like, and get into the present moment.”
Getting out of your head is what Audition Doctor excels at and with playwrights such as Shakespeare, it’s easy to get caught up on the difficulties of the language rather than playing the emotion that the language is seeking to convey. Audition Doctor refreshes how you approach a text and liberates you from any obstacles that are preventing you from being vulnerable and genuine in your performance.
by Bel | Oct 14, 2015 | acting classes, acting classes london, audition classes, audition doctor, auditions, classes for acting, tilly blackwood
Anthony Head was interviewed in The Stage this week and commented on how actors, particularly British actors, are the only artists who cease to develop their discipline after drama school.
We’re the only artists who don’t practise regularly,” he explains, “and if you can’t throw crap at the wall in a safe environment, you can’t really do it when you’re working. You can in theatre to a certain extent, but in the confines of a role. The thing about acting class is that you can do anything.”
Head has credited the acting lessons he took in America during the filming of Buffy the Vampire Slayer as integral to the success of his career. While acting lessons have been ingrained into the culture of the American acting industry, the same cannot be said in Britain. However, things are changing. The rise of Audition Doctor’s popularity particularly with professional actors has risen dramatically. The undeniable fact is to get better, one must relentlessly practice. Head credits his wife with pushing him to attend the lessons, saying to him: “Listen, you need to do something well, instead of doing…things half-arsed’.”
Head went onto comment: “It’s great to put yourself in those positions, to flex those muscles and find out what works and what doesn’t work. Because that’s what acting’s about – getting to do things in your life that, hopefully, we don’t have to do. And when it’s a rollercoaster ride, it’s exciting. We go through a gamut of emotions in [a] play.”
Audition Doctor sessions are all about strengthening the muscles that the actor feels the role needs. The specificity of the sessions for each student reflects the detail of the work undertaken.
Christopher Waltz was interviewed by Xan Brooks in the Guardian: “Carl Jung once claimed that if you collected a sample of 1,000 pebbles, you could calculate the average weight of a pebble on the beach. And yet the chances of finding a single pebble that matches that weight is about a million to one: it basically can’t be done.”
Waltz stressed that the analogy was appropriate when approaching the creation of a character:
You cannot reach a generality and you cannot reach an individual through generalities.”
Students who come to Audition Doctor have the luxury of gradually building up the psyche and inner landscape of a believable human being. The depth of research and experimentation that they commit to in the sessions is so comprehensive that they generally surpass the other candidates for the job in terms of knowledge of the character and the play itself.
Anthony Head advised young actors when auditioning to “Make a choice and stick with it. And don’t be scared of making a choice because if you don’t get it, you don’t get it. But if you do get it, you’ll get it.”
Audition Doctor is all about taking risks and making fearless artistic choices. The character that actors form in the sessions are always marked out by audition panels as being totally original. This is why students often land the jobs they audition for.
by Bel | Oct 7, 2015 | acting classes london, audition classes, audition doctor, auditions, classes for acting, tilly blackwood
The pianist, Sara Solovich, wrote in the Guardian about her journey overcoming stage fright and explored the nature of fear that lies in most performers. While a certain amount of fear is healthy, many students come to Audition Doctor to control the nerves that sometimes sabotage an otherwise excellent performance.
Solovich documented a Harvard Business School study, which “found that people who view their anxiety as excitement actually perform better on all kinds of tasks, from public speaking to karaoke singing.”
While Audition Doctor sessions focus on character development and hitting an emotional honesty that rings true to an audience, it is through this rigorous preparation that students have found that their perception of fear changes. They become emboldened to make more experimental choices when rehearsing and become less worried about getting things “right”. Similarly to what Solovich writes, sessions are “about rebranding your fear”.
Solovich states: “Aspiring to perfection in a live performance is a dead end, and stage fright – or stage excitement – is like an untamed horse: we have to try to harness it, let it out, pull it back and let it out again so that we can ride the energy in our performance.”
Professional actors and drama school applicants attend Audition Doctor sessions not because they want to deliver a perfect performance which has associations with rigidity and a lack of imagination, but because they want to be fearless in their playing. It is this unselfconscious trial and error that is the springboard for an original and truthful performance.
Audition Doctor is in continued high demand because actors understand the absolute necessity of preparation. While Katherine Parkinson declared in the Guardian that she thought comedy was so instinctive to an actor that “you don’t have to do any homework”, she did say: “I think with drama everyone has an emotional truth and it’s about accessing it. Some actors can access it more easily but you have to put the work in. You can’t do a play about someone with depression, for example, without thinking that through. It’s not to say comedy is easier – I think the talent is rarer – but I find it easier. For me the most satisfying thing is to do both in the same play or programme, which is frustratingly rare.”
Accessing the emotional truth as well as harnessing nerves to the actor’s advantage is another reason for Audition Doctor’s popularity. Places where this is both available and affordable are few and far between.
When Parkinson was asked who her heroes were, she said: “People like Lesley Sharp, Lesley Manville. Anyone called Lesley. Anna Chancellor and Imelda Staunton obviously. The thing I admire about all those actresses is the way that they do lots of theatre. So to see Helen McCrory in Medea and then on TV in Peaky Blinders and managing the rigorous demands of different media as well as different characters, that’s what excites me.”
Audition Doctor sessions are about exercising practical as well as artistic muscles. This means that students always feel confident and prepared to deliver daring and authentic performances regardless of which medium the part is for.
by Bel | Sep 30, 2015 | acting classes, acting classes london, audition classes, audition doctor, auditions, classes for acting, tilly blackwood
On Monday, Matt Trueman wrote a piece in the Guardian about the importance of companies such as Kneehigh, Complicite, Frantic Assembly and Filter’s approach to Shakespeare. Their refusal to be precious about the language and embracing the playing element of approaching a text, he argued, was equally as important as the more established approach – analysis of the text and a table-read.
Paul Hunter, who directed A Comedy of Errors at the RSC in 2009, said that using improvisational clowning methods ultimately helped the company find its way into the text. Hunter stated: “It’s not that text isn’t important, just that the process allows meaning to emerge organically. With Shakespeare, often I only understand it when I’m up doing it.”
This is why students have found Audition Doctor to be invaluable to them – especially during drama school auditions. Audition Doctor gives each student the opportunity to make Shakespeare totally their own. Unlocking the text and understanding the heart and depth of the play rarely comes from a reading but from the actual playing of it.
As Trueman states: “Obvious though it sounds, that’s because Shakespeare was writing for performance. Simon McBurney, Complicite’s artistic director, stresses that each of the plays is “an embodied text”: its meaning wrapped up in speaking and acting. Equally, he adds, they’re “just extraordinary poems” and their meaning is manifold. “When you start to analyse Shakespeare it simply starts to fall apart. What’s beautiful about a poem, like a piece of music, is that you can’t always say exactly what it means. The moment you try, you realise that it also means exactly the opposite.”
Audition Doctor’s strength is that each approach for every student is different. With Tilly, there is no one set way that she employs to unravel a text. Trueman warned against only following the more traditionalist approach: “If an orthodoxy’s problematic, it’s because it creates the sense that there’s a right way of doing Shakespeare. McDermott believes that creates barriers, like if you don’t understand every word, you’re not allowed to put the plays on. He’s been directing for 30-odd years. “It’s amazing how strong that feeling is that says, ‘You’re not a proper director if you don’t do it this way.’”
Audition Doctor students experience success as a result of regular sessions because they come to combine an absolute understanding of the muscularity of the text and complexity of character with that certain ineffable quality that McBurney speaks of that defines an outstanding performance.
The gift that Audition Doctor affords each of her students is to detach the reverence that inevitably is attached to Shakespeare. Pulling monologues apart and practically trying out different motivations behind each line is what makes your performance unique. Sessions feel liberating because failure is seen as a prerequisite to reaching a truthful interpretation.
As Tim Crouch said: “Shakespeare can take it. He can take kabuki and punk rock, clowning and improv. He will take Kneehigh and he will take Improbable and he will still be going strong long after we’re dead.”
by Bel | Sep 16, 2015 | acting classes, acting classes london, audition classes, audition doctor, auditions, classes for acting
Tom Conti was quoted in the Telegraph worrying over how young actors got started in the industry: “We don’t have rep theatre…That was a phenomenally good start, actors developed stage craft, learnt how your voice worked.
He went onto state: “There’s no training ground at all now. Actors come out of drama school – and I want to say, go and ask for your money back. They have taught you nothing.”
While this is an opinion held by some actors, particularly by those who gained a foothold in the profession through repertory theatre, many actors credit their success to the three years spent at drama school.
Actors such as David Morrissey have been vocal about their support for drama schools, with the latter describing how his training at RADA helped him maintain momentum and longevity in his career.
Morrissey is about to appear in Martin McDonagh’s Hangmen at the Royal Court. When interviewed by the Guardian and asked what is it about McDonagh’s writing that inspires such respect? He replied: “His love of language. You’re reading the script through with other actors and there’s immediately this incredible rhythm, like you’re batting words back and forth. That’s energising in itself, and then you start to pick up on the complexity of the script, all the underlying strands that are threaded through the play in such a subtle, revealing way.”
This idea of understanding the muscularity of the language and the ability to unravel the complexity of the text are what training grounds such as drama schools and Audition Doctor focus on.
At Audition Doctor, the concentrated sessions assure students that they are using the language to communicate character and emotion.
Freddie Fox, due to appear as Romeo in Romeo and Juliet, said: ”I think every actor probably has a little bit of apprehension at the beginning of [their] first Shakespeare. And yet my dad had said to me many times: you will suddenly realise how blessed you are to say those words because Shakespeare makes it very easy for you.”
Audition Doctor’s popularity with professional actors and drama school applicants lies in the way Tilly gives every student the tools with which to overcome obstacles. Although the work undertaken in the sessions is often difficult, the performance itself in front of the audition panel becomes far less daunting and, perhaps unusually for some, enjoyable.
Picking suitable speeches is something that Audition Doctor considers vital for audition success and many come to Audition Doctor for this guidance alone.
Fox recounted his drama school auditions: ”It was awful. I made such a fool of myself! I went into the audition feeling like the Laurence Olivier of the public school system. I did Noel Coward, Bernard Shaw and Oscar Wilde – and they said surely you can do things other than drink tea and speak nicely? So for my second audition I did a piece from [David Mamet play] Glengarry Glen Ross, in my gruffest Pacino voice. Dan looked up at me afterwards and said, ‘That is the most preposterous audition I have ever seen in my life.’”
Thankfully, Audition Doctor students rarely have similar experiences to that because Audition Doctor guides them in choosing speeches and characters that showcase the best of what they can offer.
by Bel | Sep 9, 2015 | acting classes, acting classes london, audition classes, audition doctor, auditions, classes for acting
This week, Brian Cox was quoted as saying “The Benedicts, the Redmaynes are very good. But, I look at a lot of young actors and I don’t think they’re very good. There’s a thing that goes on in acting now where they don’t engage, there’s a blandness about them, they’re homogenised…There’s a lot of people who work in television and film who can’t cut it in theatre, they don’t have theatre chops. And theatre really is, for an actor, an actor’s medium. It’s where you exercise your craft.”
Lyn Gardner wrote a rebuttal in the Guardian defending the variety and entrepreneurial spirit of today’s actors. She argued that the new exigences of the acting industry demanded much more from its members.
“The old ideas of career progression have disappeared in acting as much as they have disappeared in other professions, too. One of the great things about the younger generation is that they are making their own opportunities, writing and directing and devising and not just sitting around waiting for the call from the Royal Shakespeare Company that may never come.”
Professional actors have found Audition Doctor to be a real help in furthering their craft and avoiding precisely the kind of uninteresting acting that Cox refers to. Consequently, Audition Doctor has proved to be a necessary step in terms of career progression for many actors. The recalls and job offers that Audition Doctor students receive are testament to the bold and unusual creativity that the sessions foster.
Christopher Lee said: “I think acting is a mixture of instinct, imagination and inventiveness. All you can learn as an actor is basic technique.” Those that come to Audition Doctor are building far more than just technique.
Aside from building an actor’s creative development, Audition Doctor offers practical guidance on speech choices as well as more general career advice that is tailored to each student.
Gillian Anderson advised aspiring actors: “Attempt to get an objective perspective of what it is that you individually bring to the table, and foster those strengths, and embrace those strengths. And work really hard.”
Audition Doctor’s popularity with drama school students lies in guiding students in having a sense of where they would fit in the profession and enhancing their natural talents to ensure originality and ultimately, durability in a notoriously insecure profession.
Anderson also stated knowing why she wasn’t cast for jobs was “just as important to embrace. Not just to help with diminishing disappointment, but it infuses one’s experience with a practical nature, which is important to have, to keep sane.”
Many drama school applicants have come to Audition Doctor towards the end of an unsuccessful bout of auditions. After a change in speeches and a couple of sessions, Audition Doctor often successfully manage to help students gain hard-won places.
Audition Doctor sessions encourage hard work and ensures that students are prepared to give believable performances in every medium. Consequently, they are ready for any kind of job that comes their way.
by Bel | Aug 19, 2015 | acting classes, acting classes london, audition classes, audition doctor, auditions, classes for acting, tilly blackwood
This week, Lyn Gardner wrote of an experience she had at the Forest Fringe: “I had one of those moments in the theatre when it feels as if you have seen something that was made just for you. They don’t happen often, but when they do, it is as if the artist has glimpsed inside your heart and mind, and made a gift just for you. One that you will carry with you…But it isn’t the case that such a performance will speak to other people in the same way it speaks to you…art isn’t fixed, it’s malleable, plastic and shape-shifting.”
The flexibility and spontaneity that theatre offers an actor is also the reason why actors who are preparing for television or film roles come to Audition Doctor. The live response to their work and artistic choices are an important part of the development of their craft.
In an interview about Robin Williams, Ethan Hawke mentioned: “Some actors have a plan: “This is what I’m going to achieve in this scene” and you can usually smell it which means you’re not watching creativity but a kind of re-creativity. Like “I cry on this line” and sometimes it’s quite good. But with Robin, he had no idea what was going to happen….All the best performers I’ve ever worked with create their own vibration of spontaneity.”
However, Hawke was also quick to say that spontaneity only emerged out of a wealth of preparation and attention to detail.
“Peter Weir used to say that the difference between being good and great is like one twist of the screw but it’s the hardest one to do…so much rehearsal, so much thought needs to go into the tiniest gesture that ultimately needs to be spontaneous and can’t even be planned out.”
Audition Doctor offers this level of both research and rehearsal, which consequently often gives rise to the twist in the screw that Weir speaks of. Furthermore, the engagement of heart as well as head that the sessions encourage mean that the character you create is true to the text.
Hawke said in the same interview: [Every kind of art, not just acting] is like a sailboat, Every true moment, every beautiful thing, every honest thought puts wind in the sail. Every fake moment every cheat, every lie is a little tear. If you have a few tears, the ship will still move. But to make The Godfather…there’s got to be no tears. How many can we get rid of? How much truth can we put in the sail? If we can do that we can make something really beautiful.”
Actors come to Audition Doctor because they find that the more sessions they attend, the fewer tears there are in their performance. Getting rid of them takes regular practice and commitment, however, students find that it pays off because they put themselves in the position where they are closer to giving an audience the experience that Gardner speaks of.
by Bel | Aug 12, 2015 | acting classes, acting classes london, audition classes, audition doctor, auditions, classes for acting, tilly blackwood
In an interview for BAFTA, Imelda Staunton spoke of the importance, for her, of being able to fail on the job after drama school. Repertory theatre afforded her the opportunity to continue to mould herself into the kind of actor she wanted to be.
“I remember thinking that I didn’t want to go to the RSC and stand at the back. I wanted to be at the front making a fool of myself. I didn’t care as long as I was doing it. I was given a lot of responsibility when I was very young. I was 20 when I left RADA and I went straight into a leading role. I wasn’t very good at it but I was giving it my best shot and really learning my craft. I certainly didn’t come out fully formed when I left drama school.”
Audition Doctor gives actors the similar chance to advance their technique and artistry albeit in a less public setting.
Sarah Frankcom, who has directed Maxine Peake in Hamlet, spoke of the need for actors today to manage their own careers: “[Peake] is part of a generation who are having to shape their work and opportunities in a different way, and that is about taking control rather than serving an industry.”
With the demise of repertory, actors today are increasingly looking towards spaces such as Audition Doctor to avoid stagnation between jobs and to forge ahead with their professional development.
Actors value Audition Doctor sessions because they endow them with the ability to tell a story which, at its most basic definition, is an actor’s job. Tilly’s students are often successful in auditions for simply being true to the part and not embellishing it with any falsity or “acting”.
As Staunton said: “You’re privileged enough to dive into someone else’s life and tell their story. That is your only responsibility; not to make it bigger than it is or more extraordinary than what it is, it’s just what it is…Doing it in the moment is the most important thing.”
Staunton also went onto mention: “ [When rehearsing] Entertaining Mr Sloane the language is difficult and technically it’s quite difficult. I thought [my character] had terrible problems and she needs delving into in my head. That was for me to do work on in my own time. not discussing in rehearsal “Oh what do you think she’s feeling?” That’s my job. I do that privately.”
Audition Doctor has proved indispensable for those applying to drama school who understandably need guidance with mastering difficult texts and also the private work that Staunton speaks of. Audition Doctor’s students have proved that they are remembered in the right way by audition panels – for serving the role authentically and not for any artistic choices that might be perceived as attention-seeking.
Sarah Frankcom said of Maxine Peake: “Her great gift is that she makes you feel like she is going through something. She helps an audience makes sense of what is happening between people.”
This is what Audition Doctor helps all her students achieve and pushes them closer to following Peake’s own mantra about acting: “Just be honest, be interesting, be alive.”
by Bel | Jul 29, 2015 | acting classes, acting classes london, audition classes, audition doctor, auditions, classes for acting, tilly blackwood
In the Guardian, actors Rory Kinnear and Anthony Sher discussed their different approaches to playing Iago.
Kinnear commented: “Nick Hytner’s first instinct was always to steer away from racism and examine that jealousy” while Sher decided from the outset: “We definitely wanted him to be racist.”
What is immediately apparent is that the depth of research and rehearsal that each actor undertook led to nuanced and rich performances that differed hugely.
Kinnear said: “With a lot of Shakespeare’s characters, something seismic has happened to them just before we meet them. Hamlet has lost his father. Angelo jilts Mariana in Measure for Measure. Iago suspects that Othello has slept with his wife. As an actor, you have to know who that character was beforehand in order to understand how they’ve changed.”
From both actors’ accounts, the analysis and quarrying of the play to understand Iago’s mental make-up appears to be extensive; there is a constant questioning and determination to drill deep into the character’s psyche.
Sher said: “Words such as “evil” and “villain”, they don’t mean much to me as an actor. They seem to hark back to a time when we knew nothing about psychology, and I’m far more interested in thinking about those people as damaged in some way that leads to their actions.”
Professional actors and drama school candidates attend Audition Doctor sessions because the environment that Tilly provides allows for a forensic exploration of character. It’s a rare situation where you are not spoon fed any “answer”, but are encouraged to organically find your own way into the character.
Lupita Nyong’o once said of her experience of working on 12 Years A Slave: “Every single role brings with it an ignorance and an insecurity, and so you have to approach it with the same curiosity and humility. I’m always nervous. Doesn’t matter how many times I do this. But I remind myself it’s because I care. Steve [McQueen] would say, ‘Fail and then fail better!’ And that environment was so liberating. It’s not about getting it right. It’s about getting it truthful.”
This is the similar ethos employed at Audition Doctor. Students who come to Tilly’s sessions often land jobs or places at drama schools not because their performances in front of audition panels are so polished and “finished”, but because there is always an honesty, rawness and daring in their acting that is unavoidably watchable.
Kinnear said: “You have to implicate the audience. They’ve got to squirm, not just over what happens [in Othello], but because they did nothing about it. They had all the knowledge – this guy was not to be trusted – and they just sat there.”
Students who have trained at Audition Doctor understand this. Sessions push them to reach these stakes and bring a grit and fearlessness to their work.
