Reading Room
Talent Is Common and Workmanship Is Rare.
Jason Bennett on acting, voice, imagination and the demands of performance. Read the essays. Follow an argument. Try the work.
Further Reading | Open the Encyclopedia of Acting
For auditions, begin with Four Vital Points on Auditioning. For preparation, read Scene Study Isn’t Enough. For imagination, enter The Curious Imagination.
Intro to Archetype Work
Explore unfamiliar qualities through body, voice, imagination, and point of view. Archetype Work expands a repertoire of acting tools.
Knowledge You Need for Script Analysis
Your understanding of a script depends on what you bring to it. Study human needs, relationships, social influence, resources, and conflicting values.
Are the Best Actors Dummies?
Intelligence, imagination, and spontaneity can work together. Good training tells you what to do with attention, voice, body, and thought.
Personal Inventory
Ask “How do I feel?” and listen to what changes. Personal Inventory develops attention to your feelings, voice, body, and images before a scene.
Great Actors Access Vulnerability
What is your character protecting? Explore vulnerability, stakes, joy, and the choices that help an actor work with precision and care.
Great Actors Access Archetypes
A character may ask for qualities your everyday persona rarely allows. Explore range and prepare those discoveries in service of the story.
The Curious Imagination
Dreams, daydreams, deliberate invention, and curiosity can supply acting material. Develop vivid possibilities, then test what serves the scene.
Four Vital Points on Auditioning
Develop your artistic agenda, practice the circumstances of auditioning, and make your readiness visible through accurate materials and useful work.
Those Who Know Little About Acting
A performing résumé is not a process. Ask what you actually do when you work, what a class develops, and what you can carry into the next scene.
Talent Is Common and Workmanship Is Rare
Talent gives you a beginning. Workmanship develops the instrument, craft, habits, and preparation that let you offer it consistently.
Scene Study Isn't Enough
Why scene study needs imagination, a responsive instrument, and practical rehearsal tools. Jason Bennett connects preparation with truthful work in the scene.
Using Dreams for Your Acting
Can you create vivid, specific imaginary worlds to live in while you act? Can you create intense experiences for yourself, effortlessly and on cue? Once you learn how, your dreams can help you do these things with astonishing results. Dreams connect you to your unconscious world of hopes, fantasies and fears… your imagination. Dreams literally are your imagination and talent being expressed every night while you sleep.
The Ingredients of Great Acting
What is it that distinguishes the average, employed actor from the truly memorable, astonishing actor? Great acting can seem mysterious. Training gives you tools for cultivating many of its ingredients. If you find one of the rare great acting classes, you can cultivate many of these qualities in yourself with profound results.
How to Make War When You Act
Master actors are experts at creating theatricality. If you want to be a successful actor, you must learn to assemble the specific ingredients of theatricality into a performance. This takes a great deal of training. If you are willing to work hard, you can learn to activate the ingredients of theatricality and distinguish yourself from average aspiring actors.
Great Actors Are Energy Masters
When you speak, does the room lean in or do their eyes drift away? When you enter a scene, does the atmosphere charge with possibility, or does it remain flat?
The Little Bubbles You Don’t Know You Live In
Real life is the best acting class, and it’s free.