Build Without Breaking

Today we're launching season one of this performing arts interview series with our first guest Stacia Keogh, an actor, voice actor, speaking coach, and longtime storyteller.

Stacia recounts starting as a dancer, shifting into acting, and building a diverse career through theatre, teaching, voiceover, and her podcast, Finding My Voice.

We discuss topics like destructive, ego-driven teaching methods and the “break you down to build you up” approach, including Stacia’s personal experiences with unsafe, humiliating training under the tutelage of Sanford Meisner himself.

She emphasizes safety, technique as incremental tools, curiosity, play, and inclusion, discuss suspension of disbelief and transformation in storytelling, warn against comparison, and advise reconnecting with small sources of joy.

Follow Stacia:

Website: https://staciakeogh.co.uk/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/anastaciakeogh27/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/staciakeogh/Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/StaciaStoryteller

More Build Without Breaking:

Website: https://www.buildwithoutbreaking.co.uk

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/buildwithoutbreakingpod

Host Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/florencestleger

Build Without Breaking is hosted by Florence St Leger and produced by Canary Studios.

If you’ve trained as an Actor, you’ll probably know the saying “We break you down to build you up again.” That saying has never sat right with me.

Build Without Breaking is a solo-hosted interview podcast about training, mental health, and the harmful things we were told were ‘just a part of the industry’.

Through honest conversations with guests at different stages of their careers, we unpack what it actually felt like to be in training, what followed us into our professional lives, and which practices and sayings we’re now unlearning. Each guest is also asked one core question: if you could go back in time and erase one harmful phrase or practice in the performing arts, what would it be - and what would you replace it with?

It’s about reflection, care, and imagining healthier ways of becoming - for students, graduates, and professionals who want to build without being broken down.

More from us:

• Instagram
• Official website

Build Without Breaking is hosted by Florence St Leger and produced by Canary Studios.