Why I Became a Coach for Actors 

I’ve become a “Coach for Actors” in addition to being a Gestalt Therapist. Why did I do this? Well, it all started in September ’22 after a failed round of IVF in Athens and a relationship break-up. 

I  was back in London sat at my work desk looking at the familiar church spire in the distance, the grey pigeons on grey tiled rooftops and the busy main road below. The sky was charcoal. It was getting colder and autumn had set in. 

Looking ahead to the winter, I felt grief as well as glum dread. With the exciting project of a second child potentially over, I pictured myself doing the same work for another 20 years until I retired and my heart sank. 

I knew I had to change something but what? What were my passions, what could I add to my life or do  that would inspire and energise me?  As I sat brooding I asked myself what I’d do if I was a millionaire and money wasn’t an issue. 

I thought I’d spend my time ‘playing’ . When I reflected on what play looked like I thought of acting. I’d done a foundation course in acting at Mountview theatre school in my early 20s. 

I associated it with fun and playfulness and being in “flow” . With my therapist hat on I pondered on how I could introduce more play into my life? I googled a few different acting courses I could try out and signed up for a taster in Method acting. I also paid for a package of trapeze classes at a local circus school down the road.

My first acting class

I felt nervous as I arrived at my first acting class. My 2 1/2 year old son was being looked after for the day by a childminder. It was the first time I’d been away from him for anything other than work. 

I also  felt excited and thrilled to be at the class and to be treated as an ‘actress’. I loved Method training. It totally resonated with me and my way of thinking about life which in turn was influenced by Gestalt Therapy theory. The aim was to be as ‘real’ as possible and to take full responsibility for oneself in the acting process and in one’s life process.

I gravitated towards the Method exercises as they were about connecting with the body and getting out of the head. Being very ‘in’ my head, I knew that getting more connected to my body was what I needed to do and that would connect me with my feelings and instincts which are essential to act truthfully. 

I did the exercises dutifully. I relished all aspects of the training from the movement classes to the scene study, from the improv classes to the text analysis classes. I came away feeling energised and uplifted by the whole process and wanted to continue.

At the same I didn’t feel that I was particularly ‘good’ at acting. I was in my head a lot rather than connected to my feelings and my body. I aspired to be fully in the moment with my scene partner but knew I often wasn’t. I wanted to be able to ‘let go’  but couldn’t. 

I chose to think of acting as a process (and a self-development tool) that I could get better at over time and that regardless of how bad I was, it didn’t matter as it was bringing me joy.

Moving to online acting training

After the 3-month experience with Method in-person I moved to an online training. Due to being a solo-mother of a young child it was a lot more practical and convenient to attend online classes. They were twice a week for 6 hours in total. I revelled in the experience. 

Every module felt new and exciting and enjoyable. In most classes I experienced a state of flow, with no attention to time. I have taken classes on “Introduction to Text”, “Shakespeare”, “Voice”, “Movement”, “Animal Studies”, and a  module on the black playwright Roy Williams. We also do annual “showcases”. 

From each teacher I got helpful feedback. For example: to be bolder; to be more in the moment with my partner; to allow myself to be impacted by my partner and not ‘snooze’ until I say my next line;  to be more embodied; to try less hard; to not telegraph what I do; to raise the stakes; to trust my instincts; to follow the thought through to the end of the line, amongst other feedback. I observed my peers and what they did that I found inspiring and powerful. I also noted the feedback they got from the tutors.

As time went on I gained a greater sense of when I witnessed or experienced myself doing ‘good’ acting and when I didn’t and what it was that the person or myself was doing that meant their acting impacted me. Just as with the Method experience, what I learned in the online classes  resonated with my Gestalt Therapy training. 

How Gestalt therapy interfaces with acting

Fritz Perls who was the founder of  Gestalt Therapy back in 1949 started out as an actor. As did Laura Perls, his co-founder and wife. Perls took acting techniques and integrated them into Gestalt Therapy.

Perls borrowed from the psychiatrist Joseph Moreno who’d started an improvisational theatre company in the 1900s. Moreno adapted role play techniques and improvisation to use in therapy. Fritz Perls came up with the “2-Chair Technique”. 

In this the client talks to a significant other or another part of themself imagining that they are sat opposite them in a chair. The sole aim is to gain more awareness. There is no specific outcome other than this. Whilst there is a lot more to Gestalt Therapy than this, the spirit of experimentation and improv continues. Indeed on a recent training with Stella Resnick, a Gestalt relational and sex therapist, she recommends the improv book from ……..

Gestalt Therapy has its roots in existentialism. One of the tenets of existentialism is that whilst we have no choice over whether we come into the world, we do have a choice about how we show up. We have self-responsibility. We get to choose how we show up and how authentically we live according to  our choices, our values, needs and wants.  

This connects with what Stanislvaky, Strasberg, Meisner and others say is what makes powerful acting. It’s when we stay true to our experience as a human being during the acting process.

Another root of Gestalt Therapy is the father of body psychotherapy, Wilhelm Reich. From him comes the idea that there is holistic mind-body-emotion connection. The Gestalt therapist invites body into the therapy not as a separate part but an integral aspect of the individual’s experience. This way of working can be transferred to  support an actress to connect with their body experience as an integral part of their acting. 

The three basic pillars of Gestalt Therapy are:

• The phenomenological method
• Awareness
• The dialogical method. 

The phenomenological method is about staying with current experience, the ‘here and now’ and using this as a starting point from which to experiment with other ways of doing things. Similarly when as an actor you do improv, you experiment and play starting from your present process. There is no ‘wrong’ way or ‘right’ way. In Gestalt Therapy we experiment in order to gain more understanding or to try a different way of doing things.

In acting there is also no objective ‘right’’ or ‘wrong’ way to act, it’s about staying with our phenomenology, our current experience and Gestalt therapy can help us get more in touch with that. 

In Gestalt the term ‘awareness’ refers to an aliveness to how we express ourselves on a physical, emotional and cognitive level.  If we know this then we know what to change in order to show up differently. As an actor, awareness of your vocal quality or your connection to your body gives you more choice about making a change. I explain more in the examples below.

The dialogical attitude values the interaction between the therapist and the client in therapy room and between any two people. By allowing ourselves to truly open up to someone, when we feel safe, we allow a healing connection. Martin Buber called this the “I-Thou” connection where we can have a sense of being separate from but at the same time connected (different from co-dependent) with others. 

When I see two actors achieve a similar kind of connection, I feel moved and impacted in the same way they are by each other. The dialogical attitude is something we can learn to enhance our acting.

Ways I coach actors and actresses using Gestalt Therapy techniques:

360 Degree Listening

One of the skills that was emphasised by my acting teacher was to practice ‘360 degree’ listening. This means truly listening to my scene partner as if they are saying their lines for the first time. Often,  if I have heard them many times before, I find myself skipping ahead to thinking about the lines I need to say next

In Gestalt Therapy there is an experiment called ‘ I notice, I imagine, I feel’. In this I sit opposite my partner and tell them what I notice as I look at them, as I really take them in. I need to stick to the phenomenological i.e. what I can actually see for example them staring back at me, them tapping their foot. I say ‘I see you tapping your foot’. 

I then go on to say what I imagine. For example, ‘I imagine that you’re feelng nervous or excited or that you are rehearsing what you’re going to say”. I state aloud what I imagine. 

My third sentence starts, ‘I feel…..’ This is where I tell them what I feel towards them as a result of what I see and imagine about them. For example,  “I feel warm towards you,” or,  “I feel blank towards you,” or “I feel nervous”. 

They then go on to say back the same three sentences to me. My experience of doing this and also the experience of my clients is that it really deepens contact. By that I mean it can lead to what Buber calls an “I-thou’ moment when it is as if time slows down and I’m fully present and occupying the same moment as the other. I feel seen and perhaps uncomfortably so. 

We continue to make the statements, not shying away from the contact. I may feel exposed and self-conscious and vulnerable. These are states that make ‘good’ acting, when the artist really lets us see the real them being impacted by the other.

Movement for Actors

As a movement coach for actors, I use Gestalt  Therapy techniques to suport you to connect more with their body when acting. An experiment you can try is to talk as a part of or all of your body. In my own acting, I’m aware of tensing my face to avoid showing too much. I know I’m not alone with this as I’ve heard trainee actors getting feedback, along with me, of not allowing emotions to surface in their faces. 

I invite you to talk as your face or whichever part of your body you feel disconnected from. Make yourself comfortable lying down or sitting comfortably. You may feel silly but see if you can put that to one side. 

As my face speaking I might say: “I’m Alexandra’s face. I keep myself wooden and stoic. I tense my upper cheeks, my jaws. I keep her tongue shortened and tensed resting behind her bottom front teeth, hovering actually. I ache her jaws which she doesn’t notice until she pays attention. I’ve been like this a long time. I’m like a trusty old guard who has been guarding a house for a very long time. I take myself and my job very seriously…….”. As I speak I start to feel grief and think about how in other ways I don’t feel very supported…….I start to feel compassion for myself.

And so you go on. There is no wrong or right to this experiment. There is no ‘diagnosis’ or ‘specific outcome’. It’s just an awareness exercise to see what comes up. After doing it you can journal about what that was like and what interested you. Is there anything you can take from it or try out in your acting?

I use Gestalt Therapy to support actors and actresses to connect with their emotions more consistently. I’ve had the feedback that in my recent showcase piece I was at times fully in the moment and not ‘in control’ of my emotions. At other times I was in my head. I tried to be consistently not ‘in my head’ but this was the issue, I didn’t have control over when and when I wasn’t.  

A Gestalt way to work with this is to be curious about the part that disconnects me from my emotions. I can invite it to sit in a chair opposite me. I can imagine what it looks like and get really detailed and specific about this. As I do this I imagine it as a grey cloud attached to a pink ribbon. It hovers over the chair and is about 1 metre wide and 75cm in height. I notice what happens in my body as I look at it. 

I speak out my experience for example, “as I look at you I notice my head ache. I notice I feel a bit anxious/panicky in my chest area. I also feel a bit blank and weary because I feel a bit helpless in the face of you……” When I have said everything I want to the part I then switch sides and respond as the  ‘cloud part’. It might say: “ I have power, I get to choose when and how you access your emotions…….’ You continue this dialogue switching back and forth between you and the part as long as there is energy to do so.

Then reflect on the process.

• What was it like?
• What interested you?
• Where was there energy and where was there less energy?
• What did you learn?
• Is there anything you can take from this and try out in your acting work?

Vocal Coaching for Actors

As a vocal coach for actors, I use Gestalt Therapy technique to gain more awareness and choice over vocal quality. As an actress, feedback I’ve been given is that my throat is very tight and that I make my voice small. Obviously this is not ideal for an actor. 

An experiment I might offer is for you to record yourself saying your lines. I then invite you to play back the recording and really listen to your voice. I then ask you to do a free-style exercise of speaking as you voice. For example you may say: ‘I”m Alexandra’s voice. I’m quite constrained and measured. I have a kind, caring quality, I play safe and restrain myslef so that she doesn’t make a fool of herself…….”

Once you’ve done this you can reflect on what it was like to speak as your voice and what you learned. If you have a partner, they can be the listener and also comment on your voice and how it makes them feel. There is no right outcome from doing this or any of the other experiments. It is just a way to get more awareness and according to Gestalt Therapy theory, awareness gives us the possibility to choose to do things differently. Whatever that looks like to you.

So here I’ve shown you some examples of how Gestalt Therapy interventions dovetail perfectly with aspects of the acting process. The fact that I’ve been participating in these techniques as a therapy client in 1-1 and group settings for over 8 years has made me more able to ‘show up’ and risk being more ‘real’ in my own acting journey. I know it can do the same for others and feel excited about how I can support you.