Yes ?? It ?? Can ?? If you've been playing along from home, you'll know we've been working hard to make our collection of sexy spreadsheets available to the Dojo Black Belt community. This month, please enjoy our UK Acting Agents database. (For those playing along from other parts of the globe, "acting agents" = "talent agents".) Strong recommendation to fellow actor amigos: avoid self-submitting during drama school showcase season. Which, in the United of Kingdoms, is typically February to May. The exception to this rule being, of course, if you're at drama school and this year is ..read more

Did someone say spreadsheet? For those who've been following along, we have another database update ready for your love and attention. This month, it's our AUS Acting Agents database. For those following along from different parts of the world, "acting agents" = "talent agents".  As we like to remind Dojo homies whenever we release an agent database update, your chances of being read and seen drastically increase by self-submitting outside of drama school showcase season. Which in the land Down Under means avoiding outreach from October to December. Unl ..read more

Your Dojo friends are back at it, being all provocative sounding. But not without reason. Never without reason. As some of you may know, we started Grad School in July 2023. After four years of dancing the Dojo dance, we realised that if we really wanted to make peak performance and holistic well-being a reality for us actors, we had to rigorously pressure-test and formalise everything we've been doing, preparing it to scale at large. In the past nine months, we have read more than 100 academic papers, written over 20,000 words toward our thesis, and spent an unknown number of hours conversing ..read more

Long-time friends of the Dojo will know half of our raison d'être is pioneering actor well-being. The kind of holistic well-being championed in other peak performance professions, but, bafflingly, not ours. In 2022, we wrote an article about how influential our inner social circle is on our well-being — specifically, those five to ten people we spend the most time with. While that thinking absolutely still holds, it's actually only one of two pieces of the social/relational puzzle. It isn't just our inner circle that determines our well-being; it's our wider circle too. Ready to level up? Join ..read more

"I think self-awareness is probably the most important thing towards being a champion." ~ Billie Jean King Isn't it kinda wild how we can know everything about the characters we play — their objectives, super-objective, desires, fears, quirks — and so little about ourselves? We can (and do) fill notebooks upon notebooks with profound insights on Lady Macbeth and Blanche DuBois, but if asked to fill a single A4 page with observations on ourselves, we'd be like ?. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, self-awareness is the "Conscious knowledge of one's own character, thoughts, emotion ..read more

Bianca Melchior is a true triple threat.  Before making her musical theatre debut in Toronto's 2019 run of Bend It Like Beckham: The Musical, Bianca cut her teeth as the inaugural Female Best Dancer at The Dance Awards and as a supporting vocalist to Canadian pop star Alessia Cara. A few years later, she was acting in Apple TV+'s Schmigadoon!, starring in and choreographing Delacey's music video for "Too Poor to Live in LA", and soon, she'll be gracing the silver (or green?) screen in the upcoming two-part film adaptation of Wicked.  Here, we speak to Bianca about doin ..read more

"What's this, an excuse to watch more film?" we actors excitedly hope. It may well be. In the world of athletes, especially in the US, film analysis has become standard. This is as true for college gymnasts as it is for NFL teams. The "film room" exploits the fact that more than half of us are visual learners and allows athletes and coaches to analyse, correct, track and compare performance. It has become a vital cog in the training wheel. ?? Continue reading at The Stage Thoughts / feedback / challenges? We'd genuinely love to hear. Need some 1-On-1 attention? Book your coaching session ..read more

As y'all know, we've been kicking around the sport science world for some time now, and if there's one name that brings a smile to everyone's face, it's Peter Clarke's.  Born and raised in Barbados, the avid cricketer moved to Australia by himself at 18, and less than eight years later, secured a coveted spot on the team at Cricket Australia — albeit as a psychologist, not a player. Here, we speak to Peter about identity, the freedom of controlling little, and being a high-vibe human.  ..read more

"We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience." ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin We've been dancing around writing this post for a while, but given we consider spirituality a key component of holistic well-being in our (working) model of actor peak performance, decided it was better to attempt — even if imperfectly — than not at all.  Before we dive in, however, let's clarify what "spirituality" means in Dojo land. Although we recognise it's a word that often comes with unhelpful connotations, it's the most accurate one we've fo ..read more

Here's a reality I never thought would be mine: six of the last 18 months were spent living the digital nomad life — working remotely from my laptop while travelling Asia. And it was easily one of the most game-changing experiences of my life. I don't disclose this to brag. In fact, #realtalk: it took almost two years of intentional life systemisation to get to a place where doing so was possible. But that it was even seen as possible and that we followed through is a conversation worth having. Experiencing the digital nomad life is by no means on everyone's bucket list, but it was on min ..read more