All the World's a Stage*, Including Your Classroom

Tips borrowed from the acting profession can help us perfect our training techniques. The acting profession's theatrical techniques assist instructors by teaching us to make full use of our body, voice, and environment. Theatrical techniques help to increase our energy, our confidence, and our spontaneity.

One useful acting tip involves controlling our internal stage mother, the destructive critical voice inside our heads. Actors control their internal stage mother through split-focus concentration -- like learning to rub your stomach and pat your head at the same time.

We can learn to stretch our power of concentration through the simultaneous performance of a verbal activity and a physical one. For example, try practicing your verbal presentation while cleaning out a closet or washing a car.

The split-focus concentration activity helps us to integrate right brain and left brain functions. An actor uses the left brain to organize the speech aspect of the performance and the right brain to integrate physical movement. When we master doing two activities at once, there is little concentration left over for self doubt or stage mother advice.

As trainers, we know we can help our students to retain more if the information we convey is emotionally charged. An acting technique to develop a more highly charged speaking style is to practice speaking in an exaggerated manner. Practice your presentation as you ham it up in various ways. How would you present if you were a prizefighter, a bored bureaucrat, or inebriated?

To feel confident we must experience ourselves differently. Using acting techniques helps us to experience what it is like to try on new behaviors and to act in an unaccustomed manner. We can learn from actors how to tune into the energy of a group -- how to feel it, step into it, and be one with it. Acting techniques help us to shed limitations and develop our best public self.

Sources:

• Teaching As Performance, American Library Association Conference, July 2000,Monika Antonelli, Joe Dempsey.

• Power Talk: How To Use Theater Techniques To Win YourAudience, Niki Flacks, Robert W. Rasberry, 1982. (available from your local public library through InterLibrary Loan)

Do you use or know of other resources for actors? Please send your recommended list to Annie Norman.

* Shakespeare, As You Like It