What do we, as teachers, mean when we say we are looking for ‘authenticity’ from a student actor? What is the impact of this word on students?
Recently I’ve been wrestling with this word in actor training spaces. A number of students have come to me with confusion and frustration when a teacher is asking for ‘more authenticity’ or naming that their work did not feel ‘authentic.’
Teachers and students generally share the same goal, right? Students want to learn how to embody compelling performances, teachers want to help them get there. But the language we use to support our students can become a barrier to their growth if there’s not a clear, shared understanding about what we mean.
So today I want to do three things.
- I want to illustrate two ways I’ve witnessed this miscommunication impact students.
- I want to share what I believe the result of this miscommunication can lead to in an actor training classroom.
- And finally, I want to clarify what the teacher’s intention might be behind using a word like ‘authenticity’ (even if their intention does not always match the impact), and share some ideas about how we might engender clearer and more mindful communication between teachers and students.
NOTE: To honor and protect the anonymity of the students and teachers experiences, I have coalesced multiple experiences into a faux student and teacher for the purposes of this article.
THE IMPACT OF ‘AUTHENTICITY’
Let’s say a teacher has asked a student to find more ‘authenticity’ in their work, without necessarily defining what they mean by that. Working with a rough definition of authenticity to mean ‘real / believable / true,’ students might understand their teacher to mean that there’s something that’s ringing false about their work – perhaps about their emotional resonance, or the tension in their body, or their intent? Or maybe it’s the connection with the scene partner that’s off? Or their level of responsiveness in the scene? Could it be that they aren’t listening, or maybe that their imagination work isn’t reading?
So here’s the first problem: what do we actually mean by authenticity? In the absence of a clear answer, students are left to guess and try things until they hit on something that seems like it works. Even then, this can create confusion.
A student I was coaching shared with me how they didn’t understand what their teacher was asking for when asking them to be more ‘authentic.’ From the students’ perspective, they were making clear emotional choices rooted in the given circumstances, listening to their scene partner, and committing to the stakes of the scene – wasn’t that authenticity? Clearly not, so they kept experimenting until they hit on something that seemed to work for their teacher. They delivered their lines as flat and simply as possible. The teacher was thrilled, and asked them how it had felt. The student said it felt like nothing – it felt like they weren’t doing anything. This left the student feeling confused and frustrated. This was authenticity? This flat, dull, emotionless performance? This didn’t feel like acting at all.
LOST IN TRANSLATION
This is a perfect example of when the words we use to support actors get lost in translation. Part of the miscommunication happening in the story above was two different understandings of what acting is. On the one hand, we have a student whose previous experience was mostly commedia and musical theatre, so they were well-versed in an acting aesthetic which was larger-than-life and required a particular kind of effort to express. On the other hand, we have a teacher who was looking for a more naturalistic aesthetic and wanted the student to learn how to approach roles with more simplicity and ease.
For the student, the new experience of simplifying the effort they were accustomed to putting into their performances felt wrong – and of course it did! Shifting from a larger-than-life aesthetic to something more intimate surely would feel like they were doing nothing, compared to the effort they were used to expending before. Moreover, both commedia and naturalistically-styled acting are legitimate approaches to performance, but they have very different definitions of ‘authenticity,’ potentially adding to the student’s confusion around this word.
THE BODY I LIVE IN IS THE BODY I WORK IN
‘Authenticity’ becomes problematic in another way in an acting classroom. Without a clear sense of how ‘authenticity’ is pointing at something specific in the students’ work, it’s natural for the student to assume that the teacher is actually critiquing something about them. Acting as an art form has no canvas to create clear separation between artist and work – the body I live in is also the body I work in – and so the risk of ‘taking it personally,’ so to speak, is much higher in our craft. I have had students wonder if they are ‘too much’ in response to a note about authenticity – meaning, their personality, not their work. When this student experimented with flattening their emotional choices in a scene, and this was praised by the teacher as moving toward ‘authenticity,’ the student was left confused and hurt. This seemed to confirm that their instincts were wrong, and that in order to be a good actor they had to reduce themselves to become more ‘authentic’ in their scenes.
REINFORCING POWER IMBALANCE
These examples of how ‘authenticity,’ undefined, can impact students in the classroom, serves as a broader example of how when we are unclear with the language we use as teachers, we reinforce and amplify the power imbalance in the room. When a teacher asks for authenticity without a clear definition, they establish themselves as the arbiter of what is authentic, and what is not. It reinforces the hierarchical imbalance of power in the room between teacher and student. Now, the student is developing their craft in response to a specific teacher’s aesthetic. What happens when the student takes their work to another teacher or director, and ‘authentic’ appears to be a different, moving target? What emerges from this process is an actor highly skilled at people-pleasing and shape-shifting for various authority figures, but less skilled at forming their own opinions and crafting a creative process that lets them become independent, opinionated artists.
The result of this imbalance of power can become frustrating for both teachers and students. Teachers may become frustrated when after weeks and weeks of work, students are shying away from bold, innovative, creatively risky choices. But why would students risk a choice that could be deemed ‘inauthentic’, a term that may resonate not only as a commentary on their work, but as a personal commentary as well? In nervous system terms, the students’ nervous system has identified that making bold choices in this classroom could constitute a ‘threat’ to their personal wellbeing. Fight / flight / freeze is activated in the student, which may make it physically impossible for the student to embody important acting skills, such as active listening, ease, and responsiveness. The student wants to deliver the performance the teacher is asking for, but may find themselves physically unable to relax enough in order to do so.
INTENTION VS IMPACT
Ok, but what are we as teachers trying to do, when we use this word ‘authenticity’? In the context I’ve created above, authenticity is speaking to a specific, naturalistic aesthetic. I think it’s also speaking to what Michael Chekov would call ‘ease’ – a state of being which is relaxed and ready, spending energy and effort judiciously in order to create responsive and sustainable performances. And lastly I think authenticity is speaking to specific techniques in which students learn to create ‘tethers’ between themselves and their given circumstances. When done mindfully, this allows a student to bring some aspect of themselves into the role, perhaps lending it a sense of ‘authenticity.’
Also – I feel it’s important to remember as teachers that authenticity is cultural. What feels ‘authentic’ to us and our particular positionality, will inevitably feel different for a student from a different positionality. We need to be mindful that in our efforts to move students toward ease, simplicity, responsiveness, or whatever else ‘authenticity’ may be aiming at, that we are not asking them to supplant their embodied cultural authenticity with dominant-culture aesthetics. For more on this, I recommend Stages of Reckoning: Antiracist and Decolonial Actor Training, and in particular, the essay within titled “Representation matters: The why and how of decolonizing Stanislavski actor training” by Alison Nicole Vasquez.
In the process of trying to sort out what our intention with this word might be, despite its impact, I hope I’ve uncovered a host of other useful vocabulary which might speak more specifically to what you see happening with your particular student. What is the skill you are trying to move your student toward, that may be wedged in this word ‘authenticity’? Or perhaps authenticity is what you mean, and is the right word for your circumstances – in which case, perhaps check to make sure that both you and the student are on the same page about what is meant when you use that word.
When all’s said and done, we want our students to thrive. We want our students to learn how to access ease, to take creative risks, to grow. When we establish a shared vocabulary for doing so, we empower students to take ownership over their own learning journey into the artists they want to become.