Acting Skills for a Better Life

Acting skills will enrich your life in many ways, from making you more poised and effective in social and work situations, to helping you be more mentally flexible and adaptable to the changing environment around you. Plus, it is just plain fun. Join me, Robert David Duncan, as I share with you the many lessons I have learned on my own journey to becoming an actor in mid-life.

You don't have to be outgoing, loud, attention-seeking or any of the other common perceptions people may have about performers. The best actors are often quiet, thoughtful and in many cases quite reserved when they are not performing. The main thing is that you be yourself, have an openness to try new things and be willing to work steadily at building your acting tools.

I start from a belief that all actors should have a baseline set of skills, including learning how to work with text, voice and physicality, as well as more intermediate skills like listening, reacting and improvising. As we move further along, we learn about more advanced tools such as imagination, emotions and empathy. As our skills build, we then consider what it is like to inhabit a character and how to make that character come alive in scenes in the company of other actors.

Finally, we look at what it means to be the kind of actor everybody wants to work with, and how we can keep growing both as actors and people. This is definitely not a course in becoming famous, or a set of shortcuts that get around the hard work of becoming a capable actor. Rather, it is all about that hard, unseen work that all good actors have had to put into learning their craft.