are acting lessons a good idea for me?

March 8, 2009 7:19 AM

are acting lessons a good idea for me?

I must have held a million presentations in the last twelve months and I noticed how much my delivery has changed. I find it much easier to read people now - when to move on to the next page, when to elaborate, when they 'get it,' those sorts of things. I have fallen into a pattern - how to start, how to explain a piece of work I am presenting, how I make people understand it. I used to think I was pretty good at presenting my work before and only now that I've practiced this relentlessly out there I realize how mistaken I was. I was the quintessential nerdy designer, stumbling and mumbling from page to page.

I wonder how to keep improving my presentations - I wonder if there are speaking tactics that would help me especially when I'm presenting work to people I don't know yet, if there are ways to win over my audience that I am not aware of. you can't work on issues you are not aware of yourself.

so that's where acting classes come in. I wonder if they'd be useful for me of if there is something entirely different I should be considering to work on my presentation and people skills. making strangers like you doesn't come natural to germans.

to those who have taken acting classes: what were your experiences? what would you recommend I look out for?

posted by krautland to writing & language (9 comments total)

I've taken acting lessons, been in a few plays and am currently taking improv classes. I'd recommend all of them. The improv classes are especially good for what you are looking for: the "yes and" concept of improv is an ah-ha moment.

See comedy sportz training, for example. Try out for some local community plays, they often have parts for people with no experience.
posted by forrestal at 7:37 AM on March 8

How about Toastmasters? This is exactly what the organization is meant for. Hopefully they have a branch near you.
posted by lizbunny at 7:44 AM on March 8

Seconding Toastmasters. I started with them years ago and still go to keep myself from getting rusty. I was an uber-nerd, now I'm a grandstanding uber-nerd :-)

The good thing about Toastmasters is that it is specifically about becoming a better presenter. You can check out a few different clubs in your area before joining. Each Club has a different mix of experience and atmosphere... As well if you attend the conferences you will get to hear top-notch professional-quality presentations. (plus it is cheap, <>
One great thing about ToastM is the weekly "Table Topics" sessions. These are a ton of fun once you get used to them. You are handed a short question or topic with little or no preparation. You get up and speak for a minute or two on the subject. With practice you rapidly build up confidence and eventually get to a point where you're conversing with an audience rather than speaking "at" them.

Having said that, acting lessons are helpful too. I've done improv. It is a blast. It helps you get comfortable physically and draws upon your creativity.

It's all a continuum. Public speaking is performance is theatre.
posted by storybored at 8:03 AM on March 8

It's all a continuum. Public speaking is performance is theatre.

I agree, with a caveat- a performance (in the theatrical vein) is much more one-way. You are telling the story as it was written and interpreted by the director/writer/performers, but also *in character*. Audiences easily forgive certain pretenses when someone is supposed to be in character, in fact, that's part of the beauty of it.

Public speaking on the other had, especially in the information sharing arena, needs to be a bit more interactive and much more "real". If you shift into playing a character, you can lose the audience. They will either get lost in the theatrics, or lose interest in you because it won't seem natural. And you can get lost in the character, to the detriment of the goal of sharing information.

So yeah, use acting classes to help build comfort and toastmasters to help with "working a room". But it kinda sounds like you are getting a hold of that. I'd suggest working just as hard at improving the content of the presentations, sifting the chaff and getting better at organizing the material and presenting it in a way that will be memorable to the audience.
posted by gjc at 8:43 AM on March 8

toastmasters and improv classes sound way interesting to me. should have mentioned I'm in hamburg at the moment. damn.
posted by krautland at 8:57 AM on March 8

Toastmasters is an international organization. Two locations in Hamburg.
posted by cmgonzalez at 9:42 AM on March 8

Improv or Clown lessons would be great for improving public speaking skills.
And watching TED Talks is like a free education in how to be an engaging public speaker.

Finally, if you can wrangle yourself a position in which you have to give the same spiel several times in one day, your public-speaking learning curve will climb steeply. I used to be a horrendous public speaker, until I got a job doing crowd-wrangling at a busy week-long event. I had to give the same boring speech (Here's where the washrooms are! If you're standing in this line you should be holding tickets for this presentation! It will be an hour long! Please fill out an evaluation form afterwards! There will be a raffle after the event!)-- ten times a day.

The content of my "talk" was so pedestrian that it didn't really matter if I was interesting or not, but each time, I would watch the crowd's level of engagement with me, and notice when I was being boring. Having to do the exact same speech ten times a day then gave me a chance to try a different tactic a mere hour later. I worked on my eye contact, pace, humour, style, posture, etc, and by the end of the week, my speech was really funny and the audience would shut up and listen to my every word with a big smile on its collective face. I basically evolved rather good public-speaking skills over the course of 70 meaningless little boring speeches in a single week.

If I'd done those 70 speeches over the course of 2 years, there's no way I'd have learned as much- there was something about trying again RIGHT AWAY that helped me learn very quickly. I guess it was kinda like the ten-thousand-hours theory. So while a weekly speech in a Toastmaster's class is great, it's even better if you can get yourself a short-term position where you do repetitive short speeches. Maybe leading small tours of your workplace during an open house, volunteering at a soup kitchen and helping wrangle the crowd, working at a youth group, wandering around a corporate event and selling raffle tickets to small clusters of people, whatever. I guarantee you'll learn tons. Good luck!
posted by pseudostrabismus at 12:32 PM on March 8

Ah, and the trick of "making strangers like you" is what would, in theatre, be called jeu or complicité. I'm kind of obsessed with it and have described it on askmefi a bunch, so I won't do that again here. But if you wanna read a little more, you could check out this askmefi answer, this askmefi answer, or this article about master clown teacher Philippe Gaulier. Gaulier, who teaches all over the world and is not at all hesitant to make generalizations, would agree with you that it's harder for Germans to be engaging clowns, as German culture doesn't generally reward silliness. He thinks Spaniards make the best clowns.... so maybe Spain for your next gataway? And keep an eye out for Gaulier in Hamburg, he frequently travels to teach, and his classes are absolument fantastique.
posted by pseudostrabismus at 12:45 PM on March 8

So while a weekly speech in a Toastmaster's class is great, it's even better if you can get yourself a short-term position where you do repetitive short speeches...

You can also join more than one Toastmasters Club. One of the top speakers locally joined several clubs when he got started. He made ten speeches a month, if i remember right. So I definitely agree, the more often you practice, the higher and tighter the trajectory.

One other suggestion (some TM clubs do this already) - videotape your speeches. Nothing like seeing how other people see you!
posted by storybored at 7:06 PM on March 8