WHAT IS ACTING?

What is Acting?? 

   For years people have been asking me What is Acting?? My customary answer is the same one the headmaster at the London Academy of Music & Dramatic Art told me over thirty years ago as I was a student who had worked professionally as an actor in New York for ten years and had studied with several well-known actors, Uta Hagen, Mira Rostova, and Bobby Lewis which had confused me and didn’t get right down to the core of the matter. So my answer is: It is knowing what your character’s attention on moment to moment, knowing what s/he is communicating, to whom and having a point to say, something of significance, something relevant and pertinent to the scene or song you are delivering. 
  That is what acting is.
  So the problem is: How does one do that?
  When I opened the Los Angeles Academy of Dramatic Art, I had to figure out a technique, something an actor or singer could do that followed a pattern, and guided the person through the treacherous process of interpretation, which itself is laden with traps, but that’s another article called the 4 A’s Worksheet. There is another article you might consult, Six Things Every Voice Student Should Do When Performing, but for now, I’ll sum up the technique I developed and have used as a performer over and over again. It’s called SRS,
   See Relate Signify, the three steps to assuming a viewpoint of a character.
   For that there is the SRS Worksheet, which you can ask for to help you discover the treasures that await you. Acting is mostly mental with some emotional and physical work attached, but the most important thing is to align your thoughts with the character’s thoughts so you can assume his/her viewpoint readily and sometimes not easily… The only way I know it to experience doing it, and the number of times you do that, the better it is.
   Have fun and above all Enjoy your work!!