Actor Growth

I was talking to another actor recently who apparently traveled to New York before to learn about acting.  When it came to getting training, he mentioned how there were so many different types of quality workshops you could take for as little as $17 for a 5 hour session with recognized coaches.  It was a group session of course.  When you compare it to the average price tag of say $250 here, he just felt that it was a scam.

While I personally never been elsewhere for acting training other than Vancouver, in many ways I do agree that the prices seem pretty high here.  Although, for myself a lot of my training came from public schools and so price wise I think it was pretty reasonable as it was inline with anything else you would want to study in.

Honestly though, I think like most things the best type of training is practical experience.  Even for myself I can say most of my real growth in terms of becoming a better actor came from high school as the instructor kept pushing me and gave me so many opportunities to be involved in plays.

As I grew up and went to a different school as well as learning from some working professionals, I felt that you were learning more about theory and technical applications.  I didn’t exactly get as much opportunity to get practical experiences in those situations and not surprisingly I don’t think the training had that big of an impact in me growing as a professional actor from a performance point of view.  It definitely helped me from the business aspect though.

I personally feel that actors overall are the worst when it comes to being very susceptible to every offer that they see which they think will be the answer to catapult their career.  Like anything else, you should really sit down and compare the value to what you are paying for.  Otherwise it is no real different than people who go to every get rich quick seminar and purchase every material that guarantees success.