Where To Start? At The Beginning! - The Young Performer

Robin Williams once said 'You are only given a little spark of madness, you mustn't lose it' and I think this is interesting in a discussion of acting and performing. How do we hold onto that spark of madness?

Finding a sense of ease is something that Michael Chekhov so often referred to. As a child, one often looks back and remembers a feeling of ease - a distinct lack of fear, not worry about how others perceive you or their judgements about you. It is a quality that we slowly lose as we grow older and it would seem it is something that we have to gradually learn how to achieve again through warm-ups, concentration exercises and general performance preparation - actor training.

With this in mind, it is easy to see how children are more often than not able to cope with the task of performance, there are of course other factors which will be considered later but it is a lack a inhibitions that we will focus on now.

Right from when we start school we are arguably taught not to be creative, we forget how to improvise creatively - we must paint inside the lines, we must write a story with a beginning, middle and end and so on.

Intuition is slowly lost at school and mechanical machines are created with 'rules' inhibiting action, and while of course these are necessary, they later form 'obstacles' for creativity.

I believe this is why the young performer can appear so talented with very little experience on stage. They are the children who who paint 1 green when it should be blue, they are unafraid to try new things, they are not in fear of 'getting it wrong' or doing the right thing, their lives are still about discovery and exploration.

It is always an interesting experience directing a cast of young people. I find myself learning from them. It is fascinating the way that they approach characterisation - that is not to say that they are always appropriate and often characters manifest themselves as larger than life characatures, but there is a sense of freedom as they create - millions of possibilities and none too ridiculous or absurd; there is a beauty to that as it seems to be lost as we get older. My point here is that the young performer has the ability to produce a raw kind of creativity and as we fall into habit and lose child-like playfulness, the raw creativity is much harder to find later on.

Aside from fear of judgement, one can also get caught up in academia and so called "thought processes", allowing too much academic thought to pervade in the rehearsal room can cripple artistic exploration, it stifles instinct.

If we become to fixated upon justifying every action that we perform on stage then more and more obstacles are created for the actor. The conscious intention should be converted into subconscious action, but a constant inner monologue of justification is inhibiting.