“You’re throwing a rock.”

You’re auditioning for drama school.

“You’re throwing a rock down a river.”

You’re auditioning for a very prestigious drama school... Ya, that one.

“You’re throwing a rock down a river and watching it skip.”

These instructions are given during a group warm up exercise before said audition.

“After the rock skips out of view - you bend down, pick up another rock and throw it down the river.. watching it skip again.”

This exercise makes you want to chuck yourself down a river until you yourself skip out of view.

“Now relax and breathe. Good work, everybody.”

If only...

Although I didn’t get into that prestigious drama school *cue tiny violin*

I still ended up attending a college acting program with similar group exercises that gave me the same paralyzing feeling of sinking down like a rock to the bottom of a river (I’m looking at you, _________ University). At first, I justified attending college as a possible place that had the solution for this sinking feeling or, at the very least, had better exercises besides endlessly throwing imaginary rocks ...if only... As soon as classes began, there were similar group exercises drilled monotonously (vocal warm ups like “zoo, woah, sha!”, text charts like Shakespeare drop ins! back massages from your fellow classmates!); there were revered techniques glazed over haphazardly (Meisner! Stanislavski! The Method! Oh my!) and there were more and more instances where I felt more and more isolated, confused and lost. I really didn’t want to attend college - I thought it was a waste of time and that I didn’t need it (I definitely did need college and it certainly was a waste of time). But all the confidence and intuition was not enough to make it as an actor in the professional world. I needed technique. How to achieve this “technique” mystified me as each tool or lesson introduced in these college courses was said to only be a starting point and that we had to decipher which tool(s)/lesson(s) would work best for our individual selves. In fairness, exposing young minds to a variety of disciplines and letting the individual decide their own recipe is beneficial when creating any sort of craft so the university faculty/staff were not wrong in their overall attempt at what they thought was “cutting edge” curriculum. But in their execution, each professor had their own idea of what makes a “good” performance and students ended up trying to play towards individual tastes to achieve a passing grade rather than gauge if a lesson was helpful or useful for them as a performer. By the end of freshman year, I felt that a lot of the exercises introduced and drilled in class were not working for me and to suck it up and dance just to graduate was not my style. I needed to create my recipe. Quick.

What I’ve learned along the way thus far has taken a bit longer than four years time so here are a few thoughts I've been cooking with - three lessons I’ve learned after college in opposition to the lessons/techniques I experienced during college.

LESSON ONE

A tried and true trick from most teachers/bosses/superiors/parents/authority figures/the man.. is to pretend you’re doing or giving out a lot of work when you’re really doing the bare minimum. I hold a high regard for actual leaders and have had the pleasure to know a few in my life so when I see someone neglecting their duties in a position of leadership, it stands out to me pretty quickly. Most of my college professors stood out quickly and felt like imposters. They assigned small portions of text to work on and made a mountain out of every mole hill, kinda like what I’m doing with this piece- oh shit, am I just perpetuating what the teachers did but in essay form? Am I also an imposter?...ahem... For most assignments, they’d give one monologue/scene/project to work on for at least a month at a time. Just one scene from a Neil Simon play. One classic Shakespeare monologue. Dissected, roasted, oven baked and burnt to a crisp. For a month. Maybe two months. And maybe the whole class does the exact same monologue for those two months. Sound familiar? I was not sure what I wanted my training regiment to look like but I knew I was tired of this similar assignment being given out with middling results. I didn’t realize or treat acting like it was a workout for a “muscle” until after graduating when I moved to NYC and started auditioning frequently at Equity open calls and self-submissions. The more open calls/appointments I attended, whether I got cast or a callback or just a quick “Thank you!” the more it dawned on me - I should’ve been auditioning everyday. Why was the assignment just one piece of text for four weeks? Why didn’t we do a mock audition where we prepared a new monologue/scene for the “casting director” (the professor), discuss afterwards what we did that worked and what could have been better and then do something new all over again next week? Instead of obsessing over one piece of text to the point of over saturation, why not frequently tackle as many pieces of text as you can, raise more questions than answers along the way, and then leave it alone until you want or need to revisit it? There were auditions where I felt I knocked it out of the park and days where I thought I bombed like an idiot but it was a relief once I realized it was just one day. It’s a few minutes in a room with (at first) strangers. There’s plenty of time to dissect and rework a piece for four weeks ... once you actually book the role. But the famous phrase I learned early on in the city is that you have to “book the room” before you book the role and that starts by treating the audition as just that - it’s just a room. With who? Strangers. For how long? A few minutes. When? Today. And guess what? You have tomorrow to try something else out. And if you don’t have an actual audition, assign something on your own and hold yourself accountable. And do it again the next day after that. And the next day. And the next day. Until it starts to become a muscle you don’t even think about. Until it starts to become a reflex as opposed to a conscious effort and the once a month assignment becomes once a week or even, once a day.

Even with all this muscle flexing, I was not immune to the all-powerful nervous system. I’m never one to shy away from nerves or think it’s a bad thing, but I thought if I were auditioning everyday I would stop being quite so nervous during the process because sometimes those nerves would cost me. Until I discovered the second lesson to add as part of my “technique” –

LESSON TWO

Four years living in the city working as an actor, I found myself sitting outside an audition room trying to (once again) calm myself down. I was nervous because it was a good role for my career and a great room to be seen in and it was a second callback so the stakes felt even higher than before and I was kinda broke at the time so I could use the money and I just really wanted it really bad and ... I’m sure you’ve heard all that bulls**t before. Me too. And I was sick of hearing that voice in my head reel through all of that nonsense and then also try to tell myself at the same time, “It’s all good, you’re cool, you got this, don’t be nervous.” These dueling views were in no way helpful for the actual audition scene and these differing moods swirling back and forth in my brain reminded me of a very annoying question one of my college professors loved to drill home right before someone’s scene would start - “Are you in your head?” In what could be the pinnacle of oxymoronic questions, this particular phrase was asked relentlessly all four years to my fellow classmates and myself by someone who no doubt suffered from hearing this question in their own head. To answer bluntly - of course you’re in your head. You’re always in your head. If you weren’t, you’d be dead. Allegedly, the teacher’s purpose for asking this is to remind people to get “out of their head” and into the scene, to be reactive instead of cerebral. In theory, the impulse is noble. In reality, you are always somewhat in your head whether you like it or not...cuz, ya know, you have to have a functioning brain to, ya know, function. Most, if not all of the time, when a person enters any room (whether it’s an audition, a class, a date, returning home from work, a grocery store visit, a zoom meeting, a conference, the list goes on) they are thinking about and dealing with multiple topics at the same time and they are usually nervous about one or more of those topics. Sitting outside the audition room, I realized I was nervously overworking my brain when I could use those nervous thoughts to my advantage. Why am I trying so hard to not be nervous? Why am I trying to hide myself from the room? Nine times out of ten, the character I’m playing is just as nervous as I am. The character is usually nervous about something unrelated to my personal nerves but the overall feeling the character has I probably share more than I know - when someone wants to be heard or understood, we may get nervous in the process of communicating those thoughts to others. Why not just combine my nervous feelings with the character’s? It’s okay that these two thoughts start out in different worlds - staying focused on the scene/task at hand, the brain starts to blend the nervous feeling as one. So what if the thought, “Am I in my head?” pops up while in the scene? Why can’t the character also think that question in the moment? Maybe you are in your head for a second. Let the thought be a thought like you would in real life and refocus yourself back to the scene/task at hand. Let the nerves guide you. This becomes especially helpful if, for instance, you forget or mix up lines during a scene. Instead of dropping out and apologizing, why not just take a breath like you would in real life and really think about what you were saying before speaking again. If you berate yourself for forgetting the line or start to tense up for a second, that’s fine too - the character might be mad they slipped up and have the same reaction of tensing up because they lost track. Again, breathe and refocus your attention back to the scene and your partner. We all flub our words and hiccup through sentences. As long as we stay committed to the thought, we will get out what we intended to say...or not. “It’s all good. You’re cool. You got this.” Even if it’s not, even if you’re not, even if you don’t - that’s okay too. Be nervous and keep it moving.

LESSON THREE

Not long after I stopped not being nervous, I was in a production of a play where I discovered a book called “The Rebel” by Albert Camus. This philosophical theory travels through history’s civilizations up to the present day and asserts that all systems that were or are currently in power exist because there are two groups that forever fuel these systems in every society - the victim and the executioner - and that people fluctuate back and forth between playing those two roles. A repeating scene that every so often feels new. This assertion challenged something I have heard throughout my life both in college and professionally where a teacher/director says to a cast right before a performance, “Remember, this play is happening for the first time.” Like the, “Are you in your head?” question, I’m with this sentiment in theory but ultimately agree with Camus in reality. Ideally, you want the audience to feel like the story is fresh and happening in the present moment but realistically, most of the scenes that occur during a story are scenes that have happened before (a repeating scene). However, the reason the writer has chosen to put said scene into this particular story is because any and every repeating scene contains certain moments or elements within it, which have never happened before or have not happened in a very long time (the every so often feeling of something new). Recognizing the specific overall elements that make up the repeating scene (a date, an interview, a proposal, an argument) and the specific changes and shifts that happen during the scene (kiss or handshake, hired or fired, yes or no, wrong or right) helps illuminate clues and hopefully, clarifies the scene. Forget trying to forget that the scenes ever happened before and, instead, remember how much you remember whenever these scenes have happened before. What are all of the moments that the character has already experienced or heard or said in the past? What are the words, phrases, and other stimuli that are familiar? Whether the character is conscious or not of every “new” moment that occurs, the performer recognizes those shifts internally and watches the scene play out how most people live out their days - it's a lot of the same conversations and transactions that take place...until something new happens. It’s like placing detonation mines or breadcrumbs to trigger the character’s ear. For the audience, the performance should feel like it’s happening for the very first time. For the performer, it’s okay to admit that you know every line by heart. Blend those differing worlds together as life is both rehearsed and spontaneous, nerves and confidence, victim and executioner. The happy and sad face masks dueling to be expressed. The outcome of the duel will differ but the duel will repeat.

That’s it for now. No wrap up. No “The End.” There are more lessons to write about and much more to be discovered and discarded and questioned and reaffirmed down the line...for another time. Be well and do it well.

‘Till next we meet.

Jordan Bellow is an actor originally hailing from Southern California. He has performed in New York at Theatre for a New Audience, 59E59, New Ohio, The Playwrights Realm, SPACE on Ryder Farm, The Connelly and Columbia Stages among others. Regionally, he has appeared at Westport Country Playhouse, Denver Center, Syracuse Stage, Indiana Repertory Theatre, Florida Studio Theatre and South Coast Repertory. Film/TV includes "Dickinson"; "Gotham" and "Orange Is The New Black". www.jordanbellow.com

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