A Matthew Har­ri­son Essay

Get ready. Here comes an inflam­ma­tory state­ment. A con­tro­ver­sial idea that may make you upset and arouse some anger in you. Here it is…

Act­ing is NOT an art form.

What?! What am I talk­ing about?! Have I gone mad?! No. I haven’t gone mad…and I’ll say it again. Act­ing isn’t art.

Act­ing is craft. Act­ing is tech­nique. Acting…is brick­lay­ing. The archi­tect is the artist. The brick­layer is the one who builds the house.

The writer and direc­tor are the artists who cre­ate the story and fash­ion it. Actors are the instru­ment through which the story is told.

We don’t cre­ate story. We don’t write char­ac­ter. We do char­ac­ter. We mas­ter our craft and under­stand­ing of story struc­ture and scene analy­sis and we mas­ter our tech­nique of focus and being present in the moment and we mas­ter our abil­ity to affect change in another through actions.

This is crafts­man­ship. Not artistry.
To use another anal­ogy: Mozart com­poses. He’s the artist. The music is played on a vio­lin. The vio­lin is the instru­ment. So, in this way, an actor…is a vio­lin.
But wait…
This is only true from action to cut, or places to curtain.

Out­side of our actual job of act­ing, away from stage and set, away from class and audi­tion, out there in our lives, want do we do as actors…?

That’s right. We build our instrument.

We absorb life, study the world, inves­ti­gate feel­ings, unearth the psy­chol­ogy of those around us, ana­lyze moments, read behav­ior, define rela­tion­ships, and plunge into other people’s char­ac­ters, the choices they make, what defines them, and what makes them tick. We study life.

We also dig into our­selves and our own psy­chol­ogy, our expe­ri­ences and our imag­i­na­tions, and we strug­gle to uncover our own trig­gers – the hooks that open up the world of emo­tions within us.

And, we smash at our own inner walls, the con­trol mech­a­nisms and blocks that have capped our emo­tional land­scapes, and we learn to have the courage to release the inner mate­r­ial from the safe boxes we’ve locked them up in, and to air out our emo­tional scars and wounds and learn how to take advan­tage of them, trans­lat­ing them into the fuel for acting.

In this way we are instru­ment builders.

In this way, each actor is like Anto­nio Stradivari…creating the per­fect instrument…a Stradi­var­ius. An instru­ment that res­onates with purity. An instru­ment with many, many notes.
Anto­nio Stradi­vari was an artist. So in this way, each actor is, in fact, an artist…but an artist when NOT acting.

That’s the para­dox. Learn to love it.

Actu­ally, it should give you great relief. On set, on stage, in class, in read­ings, or in audi­tions, you as the actor can stop mak­ing the act­ing of greater impor­tance than it need be. Show up. Do the job. That’s all. “Build the house.” “Make the cab­i­net.” Say the lines. Tell the story. The art has been done for you. Simple.

And it should give you great relief in the “down­time” between gigs and audi­tions and class THAT there is in fact no such thing as “downtime” – because that is the time when you should be keep­ing your­self the busiest…building your per­fect instrument.

When I was a teen grow­ing up in Mon­tréal, I was a promis­ing young clas­si­cal pianist work­ing towards a career in per­for­mance. One day at piano les­son, when I was done cathar­ti­cally smash­ing away at some Rach­mani­noff which I embell­ished by adding notes and chang­ing tem­pos, my teacher, Ross Caw­field, sat in silence. After a few moments, he qui­etly dead­panned: “That’s not what Rach­mani­noff wrote.” He told me that if I wanted to be a com­poser, I should go off and com­pose. But that if I wanted to be a pianist, I bet­ter learn to play the way Rach­mani­noff had writ­ten it. I was furi­ous. I thought that he was curb­ing my artistry. But…I did what he asked.

After a weeks rehearsal, I played the piece for Ross again…this time the way Rach­mani­noff wrote it…but I felt con­strained and bored by it. And Ross agreed. I was bor­ing. And that’s not what Rach­mani­noff meant either, Ross told me.

Con­fused and frus­trated, I threw my hands in the air and gave up. Then Ross jabbed a fin­ger towards my heart: “Sure! You know the notes…but now you need to learn how to live life.” And then, instead of con­tin­u­ing our les­son at the piano, he brought me to the museum of art.
We stared at Rem­brandts. We stud­ied stat­ues of the Madonna and Child. We looked at the shad­ings of light in Vermeer’s paint­ings. Then we sat in the museum café gar­den and watched peo­ple. And talked of peo­ple from his past We talked about psy­chol­ogy. About his­tory. About life.

Then we went back to the piano room at McGill University…and he played the Rach­mani­noff piece…just like it was writ­ten. Note for note. Phrase for phrase.

And though he per­formed it exactly as it was writ­ten, the way Rach­mani­noff meant it to be performed…the life, the full­ness of the joy and sad­ness from within this man and all we had seen at the museum poured through from his soul into the music…

That was art. And that was craft. Together. And that’s what act­ing should be like.

Matthew Har­ri­son