I don't know about you, but more than once I've ended up in a discussion about workshops that got so heated I had to remind myself we weren't talking about national politics. People tend to fall into one of two camps; either workshops are an actor's only hope, or a predatory scam. I think - as is the case with most things - the reality is somewhere in the middle, and it's up to us as actors to make sure we're spending our time, money, and energy wisely when it comes to workshops.
As my career coaching clients know, two of the most important things you can do to take control of your acting career are 1) build a Target list, and 2) build a Contact list. A Target list is a list of people in the industry you don't yet know who can help you reach your goals. A Contact list is a list of people in the industry you DO know who can help you reach your goals. Your job is to move people from Targets to Contacts. (Pretty simple, right?) The process of defining goals and creating lists is different for each person (you'll find some helpful ideas in Part 2 of our series on finding representation), but the objective is the same; to narrow the focus of your networking and marketing efforts from the whole industry to a select group of people who can help you get where you want to go.
So what does that have to do with workshops? Most actors who do workshops either set a quantitative goal ("I'm going to do 2 workshops per week") or make it up as they go along, reading the monthly calendar and listening to sales pitches from the workshop company, then signing up for the ones that sound the most impressive or are recommended by a friend. (I just got an email from a workshop that said "Network TV CD Seeking Actors - she needs to find talent immediately for guest and co-star roles!" Sounds exciting - until you remember that's every CD's job every day.) Most actors also measure the effectiveness of workshops by comparing notes on whether or not they got called in after meeting someone in a workshop. It's no surprise that these actors end up frustrated, because they're letting other people dictate their workshop strategy.
A Target list solves that problem. It doesn't matter what anyone else says about a particular workshop guest… The only ones you have to think about are those that feature someone on your Target list. And the objective is simply to meet the person, so you can move them to your Contact list (which means from then on, when you or your reps market or pitch you, it'll be as an actor they know, which sets you apart from 95% of the actors being submitted.) No more getting talked into workshops you later regret. No more feeling like you wasted precious time and money. And no more measuring the value of workshops by whether you get called in.
But wait a second… Isn't getting called in the whole point? Yes and no. Let me put it this way... would you rather:
- get called in once by every person you've met in a workshop, or
- get called in dozens of times by 10% of the people you've met in workshops?
I hope you chose #2, because getting called in to the same offices again and again is what careers are built on. Nine of my best credits came from two casting offices. NINE. It doesn't matter how many casting offices don't call me in, what matters is the handful that call me in like CRAZY. That's what we mean when we talk about relationships, and relationships are the real point of workshops. To make a somewhat hokey analogy, every time you go to a workshop, you're planting a seed. Most of those seeds won't turn into anything, but a handful will take root. If you nurture them with the right amount of attention, they'll grow into relationships, and a few very fruitful relationships make all the other seed-planting worthwhile.