What Alan Rickman & David Bowie Taught Us About Acting.
We lost two greats from the acting and music world last week. Their insights about creativity and how to be a bad-ass will be missed.
David Bowie and Alan Rickman.
I thought it was worth sharing some of their inspiring words to help us have greater creative courage. And their advice is weirdly similar in how to be a great artist of any kind and combat the fear that strikes us as we move forward on our journeys.
Mr. Rickman was asked by a young actor once, “What advice can you give me ”¦ I’m thinking about training, I want to be an actor?” His response? Pure genius.
“I say forget about acting. And I really mean it at that point in time, because whatever you do as an actor is cumulative. So I say go to art galleries, listen to music, know what’s happening on the news, in the world, and form opinions, develop your taste and judgment so that when a quality piece of writing is put in front of you, your imagination which you’ve nurtured has something to bounce off of.”
What he’s conveying is that we have this obsession with acting training thinking it has to do with how well we understand and rehearse and memorize and practice a scene. If we put something up “perfectly” we’re growing as an actor. But without pulling from our own lives and being willing to share that, how can we possibly ever understand a scene or bring it to life? We have nothing to offer. It’s about our own blood and guts and tears and opinions and point of view of things. That comes from living.
Oh”¦ and courage!
Courage in showing who you are. He goes on to say, “And then you have to start learning about courage, I think. Because you have to be courageous with yourself on stage, I think, emotionally. ”¦One thing that actors and dancers, singers, musicians do is to actually use both sides of their brain at the same time, because you have to hand yourself over completely to whatever the emotional demands of the part is”¦ [and] at exactly the same time assessing what’s happening out there, and what’s happening there to the person you’re talking to”¦but at the same time the bit of you that doesn’t know it’s lying, because of course we’re divided from the neck up, it’s just a load of lies, but the rest of you has no idea that it’s lying. So that’s the punishing part of acting, is taking the rest of your body to this strange place that it finds it hard to recover from.”
David Bowie touches on the same things in giving oneself over totally to the moment in creating and that if you are in your head judging and thinking about what you are doing, you’re basically screwed.
“If I’m going to do something that could be provocative or artistically relevant, I have to be prepared to put myself in a place where I feel unsafe, not completely in control. I have no fear of failure whatsoever, because often out of that uncertainty something is salvaged, something that is worthwhile comes about. There is no progress without failure, and each failure is a lesson learned. Unnecessary failures are the ones where an artist tries to second guess an audience’s taste, and little comes out of that situation except a kind of inward humiliation.”
When you go into an audition room, when you’re on set, when you perform or do a take of a scene ”“ do it fully. Go for it and do it the way you want to do it. Don’t question if this is correct or am I doing it right, or is this what they want or is this the way the scene should go? Do it your way. If they want it a different way, they will tell you. But that will come out of you being brave enough to be you and do it the way that only you can. The person watching will see you and what’s unique, beautiful and weird about you. Just like we saw (and loved) in both Rickman and Bowie.
Courage!