“Anyone can act!”

“Anyone can act.”

I cannot hope to recount how often have I heard this remark during the course of my forty-plus years of strutting and fretting my hour upon the stage.
It is, however, essentially a very true statement… and, by the same token, it must also essentially true that anybody can dance a jig, sing a ditty, draw a picture, tell a tale, or play a tune. These are all activities which we engage in from the moment we are dragged, kicking and screaming into this fine old world, and to assist us in the pursuit of which, we are all gifted with a certain amount of talent.

Yes, anyone can act, and everyone does act, all the time, as an instinctive and fundamental aspect of human behaviour.
Naturally, there will always be individuals who can instinctively perform one or more of these activities better than others, and some who are infinitely better at them than the majority of their contemporaries. On very rare occasions, there appears a particular individual who is the possessor of such prodigious amounts of natural talent that he, or she, surpasses all human expectations, elevating one or more of these activities to altogether new heights of human creativity, skill, and aesthetic appeal, e.g., Mozart, Pavarotti, Eleanor Duze, William Shakespeare, et alii.

But for most of us lesser mortals endowed with but a mere modicum of natural talent, such creative heights as these are beyond us. Aha! Beyond us they may be, but this fact does not prevent a great number of us having the desire to aspire to equal the very best… many of this group actually have the audacity to, presumptuously and unequivocally, believe themselves at the very least on par with this select few.

Such belief is a wonderful thing… though it does not tell me what to do, or how to do it, or even what I do not know, or what I actually need to know, but when it happens it is a wondrous thing. People of uninhibited, free-flowing talent can act. They may not know anything… about what they are doing or why they are doing it, but they can do it.

However, the majority of aspirants of desire but who are blocked need training to liberate and understand their talent. They need training, and training offers them their greatest hope, and like any other arts aspirant, e.g., a musician, a painter, or a writer, it must be understood that it takes years of exercises to achieve excellence.

I like to say that it takes twenty years to make a good actor; and a lifetime to make a great one.

If we sincerely want to excel in a chosen discipline, and if we want it strongly enough, and for the right reasons, then we need to learn… we need to learn HOW to learn, and how to train. To achieve this we need to also understand what talent IS and how it works; how it can be developed and manipulated to aid us in the pursuit of excellence.

Of course, if you have talent and don’t want to consciously understand or train its process, that is your choice.
No one is forced to learn. But the knowledge is there for richer and deeper than you allow.