Whether it was hesitating to get started, or their need to rehearse every single moment, I could tell something was going on with the acting students. So, one day I gave them a prompt they could answer privately on a note card:
The most common response among Acting 1 students was the word “judgment”. Some qualified their answers with things like forgetting their lines or just generally that they didn’t want to be laughed at. It was important for me to see that s a reminder that there can never be enough group-building work in a class like this. A large majority of these students are not, nor ever will be, “theatre kids”. It is also good reason to remind students of the importance of using the time given in class to rehearse.
Speaking of “theatre kids”, the Honors Acting class was given the same question. The word “judgement” was definitely used but more so as a substitute for “failure”. This led to a discussion about bigger things, the most surprising of which was a fear that their performance wouldn’t meet expectations, or that they wouldn’t be able to improve with each performance.
This was similar to a conversation I had with a few of the actors during rehearsals for the winter musical, The Addams Family. A couple of actors expressed concern that their performances wouldn’t meet the audience’s expectations of the character. Maybe this was because of the success of Wednesday on Netflix. I don’t really know. Worrying about audience expectation wasn’t something I thought about before - at least not from the perspective of a young actor. Whatever was driving this concern popped up every so often as we continued through tech week. They seemed to be in their heads too much.
I understand where they were coming from. Putting yourself out in front of an audience means you are going to be judged… especially in high school. That vulnerability is scary and I can understand how a sense of perfection, or even procrastination, can grow from that moment. I’d say that both of those crop up fairly equally in young actors. In the most uncertain moments of rehearsal, I preached consistency as a solution, and encouraged them to think more about how they perceived the character and to keep that in mind all the way to the end.
The day after our conversation about fear, I encouraged the Honors Acting students to stop rehearsing and to not worry about memorization. They were encouraged to come into class with what they had prepared to that point. This took pressure off and encouraged them to take that leap. The results were powerful and I am eager to find a way forward with that lesson in mind.