Six Months in Lala Land … A post by our student Deniz Akdeniz in Los Angeles

‘It’s not you, it’s your brain’

Doing a ‘Showreel’ course should have some specifically desired outcomes for the actor, who will be committing both time and not insubstantial amounts of money towards this end.

There is no doubt that for many performers, auditions can be a stressful experience, eliciting emotional responses that can traverse from sublime joy to raw terror.

Anxiety about one’s true abilities is a recurring theme with actors all over the world. A fear of not being ‘good enough’, or needing to justify what it is that makes one a ‘real’ or ‘acceptable’ actor is a dilemma that punctuates the careers and fortunes of many. Why does this happen? Why do we feel it so acutely?

Recently one of my students indicated to me that in numbers of their previous classes and courses they had felt the pressure within themselves of trying to live up to the expectation of either the tutor,  the course, or both;  and that they had felt themselves – or had been made to feel – that the expections and theories of those courses were ultimately beyond their capabilities. The student felt that they had become lost in the labyrinth of ideas, disciplines and theories of what might or might not constitute a good performance, or an admirable actor, and so was left to conclude at the end of a course that they had little or no talent, and ultimately felt bruised by the experience.