Corporate Training... With Actors?

​Have you ever considered what an actor has to offer the corporate world?

An actor’s craft involves body, voice, mind and emotions. It involves creating characters. It involves taking command of a stage or feeling confident in front of a camera. It involves creative thinking and ideas generation, team (or as actors call it, ensemble) skills, and imagination, not to mention storytelling and the communication of ideas through the spoken word and physical expression.

There is a long history of theatre that stretches way back to ancient times, and a history of film over the past couple of centuries. Within that history are a tremendous range of practitioners, innovators and theorists who developed the craft of acting, and theatre and film as art forms. Many of their ideas have application not only to acting but also to daily life and the world of work.

At Perform Australia, our corporate training draws on acting technique and its traditions to:

• Enhance personal presence and presentation skills
• Develop public speaking and communication skills
• Participate in a range of creative thinking techniques
• Analyse and improve leadership skills
• Develop more confidence during media engagement
• Build teams, togetherness and trust
• Inspire innovative thinking
• Manage anxiety and workplace stresses
• Develop empathy and advocacy skills.

This may seem a diverse collection of outcomes, and usually the question is, “How is this achieved?”

While many come to our corporate training never having set foot on a stage, or participated in a drama program, fears are soon allayed through a group agreement as to how we will proceed.

After that, we use a range of drama games and activities, along with theory and discussion, to lead participants through a journey of gentle self-discovery. Believe it or not, a big part of what we do is play. The playwright George Bernard Shaw reputedly said, “We don’t stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing.” Often participants in our workshops find themselves playful again, after a very long hiatus!

Sometimes we use scripts, as actors do, and sometimes we use improvisation (spontaneous performance) or role play. Sometimes we select a handful of acting techniques and invite participants to apply them to particular circumstances or workplace issues.  

There is usually fun, laughter and learning as people step outside their usual context of cubicles and boardrooms and find themselves permitted to explore ideas through the performing arts. Participants wear casual clothing to allow them free movement, and come prepared to try new things, in what is a safe and socially interactive learning environment.

Perform Australia’s corporate training programs have been commissioned by government departments, non-profit organisations, companies and educational institutions alike to upskill their workers.

Some of our programs run for just a couple of hours, while others can be full-day programs. We have some classic corporate training programs that are tried and true, which can be selected from our website, or we can work with you to identify a problem you need to solve in your team, and then create a bespoke program to address it.

We can also call on our bank of professional singers, dancers, writers, producers and directors to bring their expertise to bear in a training program, where voice, movement, music, and literature can assist with learning.  We can send our trainers to your site anywhere in Australia or Asia-Pacific, or your participants can come to us at our headquarters in Canberra.