Artistic Director of Theatre, Music and Film, Andy Toth, brings a wealth of experience to his role at Arts Umbrella, from 25 years of directing, coaching, teaching and performing in Vancouver and beyond. Here, Andy explores the concept of confidence and craft in acting, and how this can inspire young people in all aspects of their lives, from his own personal journey.

I remember walking out of the subway at 44th and 7th Ave.  It was summer.  Hot.  New York City had that September smell, where the damp wind of the subway pushes up and out of the ground, nudging me out into the bluster of a warm Times Square.  I was 19 years old and floating high above the world. I had just done something incredible.

In reality, I had done something that nobody in the world had cared about. On my Voice and Speech final, in my first semester at theatre school, I got an A.  You have to understand, I didn’t get A’s in anything. This was long before I understood what education was, or what it wasn’t. This was before I had even heard of ADHD, let alone recognized my own experience of it.

And the class wasn’t particularly “hard”. To be honest, this was that class – the one that every other person shuffled to bottom of their to-do list and would sleep in to miss if any of us were, say, being extra social the night before.

Nobody else cared, why, now, does it still matter to me?  How is it I can I still feel the humidity of the city 30 years later? Why do I remember the faint smell of grinding metal, urine, diesel, and hot dog carts that was Times Square on that day?

We are drifting into our second month of classes here at Arts Umbrella. This is where things start to feel familiar as we dive into the patterns we accept for the darker months ahead. One of the most frequent questions we ask our year-long students is “Why?” Why are you here? Why are you studying acting with us? The most common answer we hear is that young people want to build self-confidence. Yeah.  Get in line, my friend.

We spend a lot of time searching for validation in our immediate context. We look to family, friends, peers, employers, and teachers to shore up our sense of self and purpose. We look for internal validation too. We look to our thoughts and feelings for reasoning to establish our own mental models of self.  We build stories and narratives in an effort to bring these thoughts and feelings to life. This is the problem, though.  When we spend so much time seeking self-confidence, we miss its very nature and occlude the pathway to finding it.

It is my goal with Theatre, Music, & Film programs at Arts Umbrella to see students drift away from the self-referential, self-centering worlds they can inhabit, entrenched by social media and the use of new technology to “simplify” people’s lives. Instead, our goal is to encourage them to lean into the practical tools that create empathy, relationships, care, and most importantly, self-efficacy.

Albert Bandura, a psychologist and professor at Stanford University, outlines the difference between self- confidence and self-efficacy, defining each term by their breadth of success.  For Bandura, self-confident people feel as though they can succeed at what they are doing everywhere. By contrast, those with self-efficacy understand they have the ability to succeed in particular situations. I look at this framework for supporting young actors because it breaks down the craft into more practical chunks. We teach tools and strategies that students can easily use, creating clear end-goals for exploring  the craft of acting. They start to understand “If I repeat this over and over, that will happen”.  The “if this, then that” formula is real for people. Over time, this pathway can lead to mastery.

Mastery is not something reserved for wizards or sages.  It is about demonstrating skill and competence in one particular area. Acting is about developing skill and competency in a myriad of ways, all related to the art of being and becoming a generous, vulnerable, and truthful human.  By teaching the craft of acting, we spend our time fostering constellations of self-efficacy.  We teach young people the tools of intention, storytelling, and inspiration through using our voices, bodies, and actions. Perhaps most importantly, we teach them that our relationships are the medium we use to connect all of ourselves to the people we are with – actors, directors, and audiences.  These young artists, these constellations in perpetual motion through their universe, share their completeness as a human being with these structures and tools for being human.

In the fall, New York City often gets a kick of warm summer weather. It was right at this time when I pocketed the feedback from my instructor and headed for the heart of Broadway to find the context that matched my newfound sense of self-efficacy. I stood amidst the tallest buildings I had ever known, beaming down on them from far above while my feet never left the pavement. I don’t remember feeling this, but I am absolutely certain I looked confident. I was beginning a life long road of collecting fragments of self-efficacy. I was gathering proof for my analytical brain that I was good at a thing. Maybe even more than one thing.

My hope for students at Arts Umbrella is that at some point in a not too far future, somebody hits them up on socials with a “Hey – you’re like so confident!” and they, in all truthfulness can reply “huh? oh thanks :)”. Maybe adding a simple but honest full heart emoji before they gently press send.

To find out more about the Theatre, Music and Film Programs on offer at Arts Umbrella, click here