There are certain things I think about that completely change the way I feel.
In an instant I can feel hopeful, excited or happy.
Or I can feel tense, anxious or even depressed.
Actors literally use this as part of their work; hijacking a natural occurrence in humans.
We might as well picture the things that make us feel happy, motivated and excited right…?!
I remember cracking up laughing looking over my mates shoulder in drama school. It looked like he had made some profound acting discovery and he was furiously underlying it.
I looked over and saw written in big bold letters in his notebook:
ACTING IS WHAT WE DO.
At the time, it cracked me up and I still laugh about it now…
But the thing is, it kind of is amazingly true in a profoundly simple kind of way.
All we do as actors is ‘do’ our actions. We do things in the world in the hope we will get our outcome.
Acting is what we do.
And any time I find myself doing anything other than that, it’s back to basics.
DO something!
You have a script to learn and you have two choices:
Take the 5 minutes now. It’s worth it to let the time compound.
And you might still have the 30 tomorrow as well.
Acting is cool because it’s simultaneously about doing something and about listening.
But it’s a great balancing act.
When it doubt, though, the answer is to listen more.
With most things, really.
I love that acting is synonymous with loving and taking care of your body.
Before rehearsal, it’s important to warm up. Actors warm up their body, they warm up their voice, they warm up their internal, emotional landscape.
To be in a show means to be healthy. To be in a show means to be strong. To be in a show means to listen. To be in a show means to have empathy for others.
Acting is synonymous with peak human health, and peak human consciousness. What a gift.
I remember at drama school, our teacher encouraged us to stop clapping, or wooting, or whooping, when our classmates did amazing work.
He was encouraging us to normalize the outstanding. Because if we’re amazed every time someone does incredible work, that work becomes something out of reach, something separate from us. It’s only when the outstanding becomes normal that we can actually build on it and create something even more extraordinary.
It’s important to celebrate our wins. But we mustn’t colour that celebration with astonishment.
Ever feel like you’re drifting through life?
Here’s one thing I learned that changed everything for me: drifting through life, or drifting through an experience, comes when you don’t actually know what you want.
Have you ever heard someone say you can’t get where you want to go if you don’t know where you want to go? It’s like jumping in the car, opening Google Maps, but never putting in a destination. Just driving, and driving, and then wondering why you’re never getting there.
The thing that really, really helps me is to set an outcome, to set an intention. What that means is simply stating what you want.
If you wake up in the morning and you’re heading to work feeling bored or feeling angry, it’s probably because you’re just at the whim of whatever your day brings. Setting an outcome is being intentional about what you want that day to bring. It’s as simple as: today I want to find out three new facts about my coworker. Or, today I want to find a new way to have fun with my family.
Just simple little objectives you give yourself. And what that means is you’re not just at the whim of the day. You’ve set yourself a destination.
Stop drifting through life. Set an outcome for the day.
Your brain needs time.
Sure, you can put in all the input… but give the brain some time to rendezvous with the heart and invite the soul as well.
When we let the subconscious work away in the background, we emerge again with new resources.
The mind, dreams, emotions, physiology and memory are a mysterious petri dish.
“How do you learn all those lines?”
Actors get asked this all the time- and honestly I don’t know the answer!
But here’s what I’m trying…
I started learning the script from Act 2. Then I worked my way backwards through Act 1.
Why?
Act 1 Scene 1 is too loaded.
Even in the line learning phase, it’s hard not to imagine, dry mouthed, pupetting yourself out onstage for that first moment of the show.
I’d also end up going over that section over and over again if I started there.
So I just mixed it up. Actor’s are time travellers, anyway. We don’t relate to sequence, we relate to emotion; that’s our only timeline.
Is the order you’re doing something in helping or hindering you?
I’m preparing for an upcoming play and part of that process is to examine every line with a fine tooth comb.
In doing this, I realised that so much of my job as an actor is this part: it’s having an intellectual, emotional, visual and three dimensional understanding of the words.
The words infer an entire world of this character. As I work with each one; taste it, see it, try it and live it… I’m building an intricate network of threads that will eventually make up the whole piece.
Acting is this tapestry. It’s not showing up on the day with all your might and pushing a performance out. It’s weaving it and investing time, energy and heart into it in the lead up.
Then when you show up, you merely wear the tapestry you’ve created.
But you can’t wear it elegantly without putting the time in on the front end.
I wonder where else we mistake giving our ‘all’ on the day with simply doing the work before hand and letting the complexity live?
