Student Blog: Consuming Art as an Actor

Performers spend hours watching and listening to themselves, whether it’s in the mirror at dance class, reviewing self-tapes, or looking at performance clips. And while this work is important, many actors forget the value of watching other people. While it may go unnoticed, a large part of life as a performer is simply consuming art, whether that’s for their own joy, or to better their craft.

Watching musicals, movies, television, and listening to music benefits actors for many reasons. Whether you realize it or not, you mirror those that you admire. When you watch or listen to a performance that speaks to you, it can be an incredibly moving experience, and seeing what worked for other performers is helpful in understanding what may work for you. Because at the end of the day, the work of a performer is to affect an audience. Being a part of the audience when you’re an actor allows you to experience how incredible art is. It fuels your creativity and allows you to do the same when you’re on stage.

Not only this but consuming art helps you gather material for your own use. As an actor, you constantly need to be looking for new songs for your book, and the first step to finding the right song is listening to a lot of music. When I’m looking for a good Sondheim song to learn, for instance, the first thing I do is go to Spotify and listen to curated Sondheim playlists. This is not only helpful to learn new material, but it also helps you gain a love and appreciation for the history of music throughout the different eras. The entertainment industry is vastly different than it was even thirty years ago, and understanding how it has evolved will help you learn how to perform anything. Because of this, when you listen to music, I encourage you to listen to various genres and eras, ranging from writers like Lerner and Loewe, Irving Berlin, and Rodgers and Hammerstein, to contemporary musical theatre, country, folk, and pop rock.

For the same reason, watching plays, movies, and TV shows is equally helpful in finding new scenes and monologues. It’s harder to find scenes and monologues just because of the amount of time it takes. If you do find yourself in the position where you need a monologue and you don’t have time to watch a ton of film, or you can’t get access to live theatre, reading plays is incredibly helpful. In New York City, a great place to look for these materials is the Drama Book Store, a store that specializes in theatrical works. They have an incredible collection of plays to look at, ranging from Shakespeare to modern new works. But if you aren’t local to NYC, many plays are available to read online, and you can always go to your local library or bookstore to look in their theatre section. But I promise, it is so much easier in the long run to make a note of an incredible scene from a play that you really connected with rather than last-minute googling ‘best female monologues for young actors’ when you need one for an audition. Gathering material that excites you will only help you in the long run, and it’ll make performing so much more joyful.

Above all, consuming art as an actor is inspirational. Professional actors tend to go into this industry due to a deep love of the art form of performance, and nurturing this love by seeking out new music, films, musicals, and plays will only make you a more passionate actor. So if you are a performer, I implore you to make playlists of songs you want to learn, listen to new composers, lyricists, and soundtracks of musicals, watch film and television, see live theatre if you have the means, and read anything you can get your hands on. It helps you better your craft and it will help you live in the joy of what you do by experiencing it from the outside.