Robert Bell

My first acting teacher, Robert Bell, has impacted my drive to become a professional actress. I took his class during my last semester before graduating with my Associate of Arts degree as a make or break class. Acting would either become a hated profession and finally forgotten about. Or I would realize how much I still love being on stage and would finally stop being this embarrassing desire that I’ve kept in a box in the back of my head since I was thirteen. On the first day of class we all introduced ourselves and only one or two of my classmates where already involved in professional acting of some sort. Most were taking the class just to earn an “easy A” and I was the only one who was using this class as a “should I or shouldn’t I” for career exploring. I was a total …show more content…
What gave me more confidence in my own talent was that Mr. Bell would make sure that we as a group would critique each other using a method that involved praising what we admired in our classmate’s work, questions from our classmate about their own work, and then suggestions from the audience to our classmate if they were okay with hearing it. By using this was of critiquing I got to hear what I did well on as opposed to just negative comments. We also kept an acting journal throughout the semester where I was able to do a lot of introspection about what emotionally affects me among other topics. Mr. Bell was so impressed with me at the end of the semester that he told me to look up a certain professor in the theater department at my transfer school, Rollins College, and to make sure to work with him. He even told me that if I ever needed a letter of recommendation for anything to let him know. Taking his class gave me the confidence that I needed to pursue acting with the knowledge that there’s someone in the professional field who believes that I can do well at