We recently connected with Daniel Ching and have shared our conversation below.
Daniel, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Can you take us back in time to the first dollar you earned as a creative – how did it happen? What’s the story?
I earned my first check as a creative, as a guest dance teacher. I was a dancer before I became an actor, and I quickly learned as a dancer that guest teaching was a great way to help support myself, as well as a great way to pass the knowledge I’d learned on to others. My days as a guest dance teacher taught me that you really do learn just as much as a teacher as you do as a student. Having taught has helped me all these years later as an actor, because the teacher/actor relationship and director/actor relationship can sometimes feel like that stereotypical, hierarchal teacher-student dynamic where the teacher/director has all the power and you as the student have none. But having taught myself, I’ve learned that the teacher doesn’t have all the answers, and oftentimes the job of the teacher is to simply spark questions within the student and ignite his or her curiosity. I credit my first job as a creative, teaching dance, for opening my eyes to the collaborative possibilities that are available between teacher and actor, or director and actor, if your’e open to them.
Daniel, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
I started getting interested in acting while in college studying to be a dancer. When my dance career got cut short from injury, I thought it was the right time to fully switch gears to acting. I am most proud of some of the callbacks to auditions I’ve gotten over the pandemic. They were great lessons of letting go of the outcome, not taking rejection personally, and enjoying the process and opportunity to get to act and be creative with the auditions I receive. I’m looking forward to getting to audition again, once auditions come back. This work pause has helped me refuel my passion for acting, so I’m excited to get back to it! A major milestone for me was booking a small recurring co-star last year which allowed me to act with a series regular actor and see the level of acting that’s required to be at that series regular level. What I love most about acting is the process of bringing a character’s life experience from off the written page and into real life.
What’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative in your experience?
The most rewarding aspect of being an artist is the opportunity I get with almost every audition and project, to collaborate with my scene partner. Most scenes involve two or more people, unless you’re doing a monologue to the audience or camera or are alone in the scene for some reason, so the opportunity to work off another person is something I find really invaluable. It feels scary to really listen and pay attention to my scene partner, because that means having to let go of concentrating on how I’m consciously going to do my performance, but it ends up making the scene so much more alive.
We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?
I had to unlearn the lesson that you have to be motivated to be successful. This might be true in a lot of aspects of life, but in art I have found that it sometimes doesn’t work that way. I’m learning now that I have to first and foremost stay curious, not motivated, to be successful, and fostering curiosity oftentimes means taking away the motivation “to do, to achieve, to be productive, etc.” When I’m not motivated to “be successful” in a scene, unexpected things that I could never have planned start to happen in the scene, that make the scene more interesting than if I had worked from a motivated place to do something interesting.
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Image Credits
Photographers: Alycia Kravitz, David Noles