Acting Without the Drama

And then…?

October 27, 2008. So, the Greek tragedy of the past month or so seems to have wound down. There have been no further catastrophes. No betrayals. No “oh my gosh, you’ve gotta be kidding me” moments.

Just life.

Just the stuff that I think neither my business parnter nor I really have wanted to face. We kept trying to get other people to do it for us. You know, the whole business aspect of everything. Marketing. Promotions. Door knocking.

This is pretty much where most creatives lose it. I’m not sure if it’s that we feel it’s somehow “beneath” us, or if we’re just terrified of it. Maybe both. Probably both.

Nevertheless, it’s where most artistic people with promise have the biggest problems. How do we move from the training and development stages, or even the beginning working stages, to the point where our artistic careers are self-sustaining?

I think sometimes that the reason that our company has had some of the problems that it has is due to the fact that we didn’t really want to have to face…this. The difficulties have served as a very wonderful series of distractions. How could we possibly do marketing when so many things were unresolved?

Well, they’re mostly resolved now. And the things that aren’t tied up neatly in a bow don’t seem like they’re that big a deal, really. Actually, looking back, none of the unresolved issues were truly insurmountable. They definitely weren’t enough for us to halt our forward progress.

Lessons learned. Hopefully.

Part of the business of acting is the business part. It’s the elephant in the room that no one wants to address. Some acting programs make a stab at teaching about the “industry”, and yet, rarely does a student come out of their training and really feel like they know what to do first.

I suppose that a good portion of the trouble is trying to look at the industry as some sort of homogenized entity. It’s not. There really are very few (if any) hard-and-fast rules about the way the entertainment industry operates. Ask five successful actors how they “made” it; you’ll get five different answers.

I think there is one thing that stays relatively constant. Persistence. That whole idea of just showing up that I’ve talked about before. We keep going. We just keep moving forward as best as we can. Sometimes it’s tough. Sometimes it’s discouraging. Sometimes we feel small.

But then sometimes, on occasion, we don’t. We have small victories. Little truimphs that can lead to other slightly larger triumphs. Usually they don’t even seem related. Someone calls you months after you made initial contact. A colleague mentions your name to an interested third party and they file it away for future reference. And eventually, once in a while, that future reference becomes present need.

And that can’t happen if we’ve bailed.

Keep showing up. That’s the advice for the day. I know I’ve said it before. I will likely say it again.

But at least I’m taking my own advice.