Hey hacktors/actors and not-sures,
If you live in LA in particular, you are very familiar with a variety of workshops, mostly put on by casting directors and companies who organize them for CDs. In other countries, they are not as omnipresent and therefore there is sometimes confusion between a similar sounding, yet completely unrelated activity…here’s a post on the subject which should help to clarify the difference.
Hacktor Question:
This might be a stupid question, but I need to have this cleared up.
I’m confused about the word workshop. I’m pretty clear about what a casting director workshop is, because David talks about them all the time.
But here (in the UK) I see ads about workshops that seem to be more similar to an acting class. I still haven’t been to one, but I need to make sure I understand what it is before I go.
I thought that it might be a difference between American/English, so I googled. And there I found that a workshop is the show you put up in a theater production before you put up the real show. Which just made me more confused.
It would be nice to get this sorted out.
Thanks!
Workshops are all the same if they are taught/hosted by anyone other than an acting teacher. If they are taught by a CD, agent, producer, director, these people are just supplementing their income by giving a few rather useless tidbits to actors. They are not real classes except in doing things the way a CD wants them to, or they give you little idiosyncrasies about their own personal preferences which are largely useless. You can avoid all workshops because they just try to corner actors into doing things a certain way. You will never be offered an audition by an LA casting director if you live in London unless you are already famous or look like Quasimodo or something really specific, and even then it’s a long shot.
In the theatre sense, ‘to workshop’ is a verb i.e. workshopping a play to work out the kinks and test audience reactions, etc. You wouldn’t be asked to pay for that and would likely be involved in some kind of theatre or writers group and would be part of the decision making team. Workshopping is very involved, whereas workshops are just a paid thing where actors pay for some advice, most of it benefiting only the host and often hurting the actor because it stimies their thinking into doing only what the CD told them they can/should do.
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