Penny Noble Counselling & Psychotherapy

**Character-Centred Counselling(CCC)**

UNDERSTAND YOU, UNDERSTAND YOUR CHARACTER

Having trouble in relationship with your character?

Are you feeling out of character or overwhelmed/underwhelmed by them? Or do you feel lost in them?

CCC training or therapy for actors is designed to help you reap the rewards of engaging and moving audiences and to support you in the courageous process of exposing yourself emotionally deeply and authentically.

I can offer support in developing a character and history, working through plays and concerns related to performance, such as stage-fright, self-esteem and confidence.
We can work together on dealing with rejection and celebrate your successes as well as finding strategies to cope with some of the difficulties that may come along with success and fame.

CCC also enables a connection and grounding back to yourself and your own life following a performance/s.

As a screenwriter and playwright for stage and radio I find my characters emerge onto the page most effectively and authentically when I feel I have truly managed to inhabit each of them as I write. I feel it is the same for an actor conveying his/her character on stage - they need to live them.

A very important part of CCC is to work through an actor’s own life experiences to discover what of you and your experiences you could give to your characters. In order to make this a safe process we would work together through those experiences to enable you to feel healed enough and comfortable with lending the feelings they raise to your characters. In counselling terms you will have come to an acceptance of those things such that borrowing from them would not feel toxic or draining. In cases where this was not a finished process CCC would offer continual support.

I have found counselling to be a journey to the truth of myself. As Constantin Stanislavski noted an actor has to find his real life in his own life and so on stage for it to become his living art. The true you is born in your personal process through therapeutic work and leads to a birth of your new being on stage or screen.

CCC aims to facilitate an actor in:

**Accessing and expressing subtle and natural emotion with ease**
**Depth and range of expression giving beautifully connected emotional experiences for his/her audience**
**Highly convincing portrayals and readability of facial expressions**
**Engrossing, fresh, powerful performances**
**Taking risks beyond his/her comfort zone**

Character-Centred Counselling © by Penny Noble 2009


For further information on CCC and free information sheets please email me with your specific questions and requests. Currently available: The Development of Character-Centred Counselling, Boundaries, Character Channeling, Couples, Performance Support and Debrief, Private Audience, Role Play, Self-Esteem, Self-Protection, SubRoles, Stage Fright, Typecasting and for those interested in counselling theory and how that relates to Stanislavski Method: The Process.


Though CCC was originally conceived as a therapy for actors I have since developed the principles in work with other performers and writers, who have also found it highly effective.


In addition to writing for film, television, stage and radio, I have some experience in acting for the stage and have attended various acting as well as dramatherapy and psychodrama workshops. I have also worked with the physically and learning disabled in drama workshops, both as participant and co-facilitator.


I am a practitioner for The British Association for Performing Arts Medicine.


NB: Photographs used on this page are not of actual clients. Client confidentiality and identity are always protected. Photographs used with kind permission of performer.


Articles

Scenes of The Method-ological Nature: ACT 1: article on Method Acting and Psychological Issues.
Scenes of The Method-ological Nature: ACT 2: article on Method Acting and Psychological Issues.


Quotes

"Acting is a NOBLE profession that serves the SPIRIT." - Barbara S. Ball

"I am a private person in my private life. In my working life I expect to grant my audience complete and total access, everyone’s got a backstage pass. You have to be willing to live in front of people; let them see the good, the bad, the ugly, the weak, the strong, the conflicted, the terrible… One of the things about acting that gives me the greatest satisfaction is the opportunity for that emotional exercise, that investment to the point where it produces true emotion. It’s not about you again, it’s about the continuity between you and the rest of your race, it’s about being human and it’s about sharing that humanity, and knowing that humanity. It’s among one of the most important moments of my life, being able to do that. And the question about willingness to do that… it’s the true ambition is to give yourself to that moment." - Harrison Ford

"The films keep me as part of my past; it takes me through that thin borderline between reality and fiction.” - Bashir Al Majid on his cathartic acting experiences.

An actor can "inhabit every extremity of the human condition." - Tom Hiddleston

"Styles change but the truth does not." - Louise Brookes

"Deeper... Richer... Fuller -> Better" - Tyne Daly's Mother on bringing out the best in an acting process, and I would say also as a human being.

Acting - like a 'veil' - 'conceals and reveals' the 'real person' - paraphrasing of Derek Jacobi from 'As Luck Would Have It'.