Great Acting: Catching Lightning in a Bottle
Filed Under Articles, The Best of, Preparation, How To, Career | 1 Comment
“Thunder is good, thunder is impressive; but it is lightning that does all the work.”
–Mark Twain
On stage today I suddenly knew just what I had done wrong all of those times before. It suddenly struck me what the difference was between my successful performances and my not so successful performances. Like a bolt from the blue it came into my brain; the difference between good acting and great acting. Suddenly I knew. This time it was right. This time it would work. And the answer was something I already knew, I just hadn’t truly understood.
So what is it? What is this magical secret? It’s what we’ve all always known, but few of us have ever truly understood, and even fewer have ever mastered and replicated. It’s stream of consciousness.
Sandford Meisner
I contemplated that for years; struggling to find the difference between the times of success and the times of mediocrity. Somewhere inside I always knew that the difference was the mythical “being in my head.” Mediocrity came from being in my head and thinking as I acted. Success came from letting go of my consciousness and allowing a higher self to come forward; or being “out of my head.” These, however, are vague answers at best.
What is the difference between being in and out of your head? We know that it feels different, and we know that performances are different, but the question is why is there a difference? What causes the difference? Today it occurred to me that I had known the difference all along, I just never truly understood it.
We’ve heard all our careers that “acting is not acting, it’s reacting,” but that’s crap. I always thought it was true, but it’s not. Not really. It’s too simple. We’ve always heard that the key to reacting was listening but that, too, isn’t right. What it should be is: “acting is not acting, it’s living.” The difference between reacting and living is stream of consciousness.
What occurred to me today is that my character doesn’t know what is about to happen to him, he doesn’t know what’s about to be said to him, he doesn’t even know exactly what he’s going to say next. I’ve heard this before in acting classes, but I guess I just never truly understood what that meant. It was hard to understand because it’s such a mind-boggling concept. To think that you must somehow forget this script that you’ve read twenty times in the last month is insane, yet that’s what has to happen. If on any level you aren’t surprised by what comes next, the performance is lost. I know everything. My character knows nothing. For my performance to be truly great the two must never meet.
I can listen and still know what’s coming. I can react without truly experiencing. I can pretend not to anticipate. I can pretend not know what’s coming next, but pretending is still pretending, I don’t care how good a liar you are. Somehow we must find out how to leave ourselves behind to the point at which we are truly living on stage. In your everyday life you never truly know what’s going to happen next. You never know what anyone is really going to say; even yourself. That is the way your life on stage must be lived: by the seat of your pants.
I do not yet know how to recreate this phenomenon, but I am convinced it is the secret to turning “good” in to “great!” I now understand this idea, but I can’t replicate it . . . yet. I am certain now that it can be replicated. It cannot be condensed into a “method” that will work for everyone, but I’m convinced that we can all develop our own. We can discover a pathway to lead ourselves into the right state of mind to achieve this stream of consciousness. Perhaps it cannot be replicated every time without fail, but perhaps, just perhaps, it can be reproduced a higher percentage of the time.
Maybe I’m crazy, but I think I have cracked the acting code for myself. I’m sure there are many actors reading this who are rolling their eyes and sighing heavily, “Well, duh!” but I think I have made a discovery for myself. I thought perhaps I should write it down here so that maybe others could begin to think about their own pathways. Maybe, just maybe, there are others like me who never truly understood what it meant to “live in the moment.” Maybe there are those like me who never truly grasped the idea of experiencing every second anew. If there are those people, I hope we can go along this journey together. If, however, there are not any of those people and I’m just the last horse to cross the finish line . . . well in that case, disregard the above article.
I’m off to continue cracking this code . . .
When Letting Go Is the Only Way to Live
Filed Under Articles, The Best of, Personal Development, Survival, Career | 3 Comments
”We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned, so as to accept the life that is waiting for us.”
– Joseph Campbell
In any project, performance or journey there is a point at which we must let go. This point isn’t the end of anything, it isn’t the culmination of our responsibilities; it is only the beginning. So often we are afraid to let go of anything. We cling to things tightly in the hopes of finding security. But is there any need for that type of holding on? What can we gain by letting go? What do we lose by hanging on?
To answer these questions, we must first define what we mean when we discuss letting go. Giving up is not letting go. We have to remove that idea from our hearts and minds before we can truly discover the peace that letting go can bring. Letting go of anything doesn’t mean it is the end of your work, or the conclusion of your journey. We talk about letting go in relation to parents and cutting the proverbial apron strings. Some parents have a harder time with this than others and it doesn’t really matter why. What are important are the effects this can have. We know that a child who is coddled for too long can become socially stunted in their growth; the same can be said of any work that isn’t let go when its time comes.
Painters know that there comes a time when a painting is complete and their work must cease. They also know that if they do not stop themselves, they will work on one painting forever. Those who have that difficulty letting go tend to call themselves “Perfectionist.” Don’t be fooled by this title though, they are not after perfection, they are scared.
All of us are perfectionists; we all want to do our best. None of us wants to create a masterpiece that isn’t our best work or isn’t our view of “perfection.” But those who refer to themselves as perfectionist generally aren’t. They are generally people who are looking for security. The actor who constantly changes his performance is not in search of perfection, he is in search of plausible deniability. Final decisions leave room for criticism, but a work in progress is safe. The painter who constantly changes her painting is not a perfectionist. She’s afraid of being wrong, not struggling to be right.
In every project there are two simple stages. These stages have no concrete names or processes; they are simply the most generalized maps we can draw.
Stage One is a planning and learning stage, the stage of ideas. This is when we spend most of our time plotting and brainstorming. It’s when we develop our characters, read our scripts. It’s when we sketch our pictures and mix our colors. This is the stage of learning when we gather the necessary skills. Some we already possess, others we must seek out specifically for our task. It is this first stage where our knowledge, our experience and our imagination all come together. We gather all our resources and get everything moving forcefully in the same direction.
Then comes the second stage where the letting go begins.
Stage Two is the working phase. This is the stage where we begin our endeavors, and ultimately where we will end them. We paint our images, we perform our roles and write our books. But we do not “let go” of our works at the end of this stage, because to work productively we must have already let them go in the beginning.
So often we think that the “letting go” comes after we have completed our tasks, but that is only an illusion. The letting go comes before we have even begun. The perfectionist painter begins with no intentions of ever being truly finished. The perfectionist actor begins with no intentions of ever leaving his script at home. The second stage of our process truly begins only when we have put our faith firmly in our abilities. If we doubt ourselves, our work is not work at all, it’s only so much noise and distraction and business of our bodies.
You see, the truly artistic moment comes through the faith that our preparation is complete. We begin our work by letting go of the idea of perfection and the fear of rejection. We find the courage inside of us that shouts our talent into our own ears. Before we hit the stage we find in our hearts that voice which says we are ready. We are prepared. We have learned what needed to be learned and experienced what needed to be experienced so that we could create the art we see in our minds.
Letting go is the process by which we step out of the way of our better self. We remove the self-doubt that blocks it. Parents leave their fears of the world behind and the doubts they possess about their children. Only then can they truly let go and watch the magic they have created unfold. Because, you see, childhood and adolescence is Stage One. The child soaks up the rules and laws of the world they are in. They learn everything they can so that they may be prepared for Stage Two when they must trust they are ready to join the larger world.
Letting go is not the end that we fear, it is the beginning of the journey we wish to take. When we have let go of our fear and doubt; when we have left behind the idea of perfection; when have come into the knowledge that we are powerful and given up our weakness, then and only then can we create the beauty we see.
You can survive by holding on, but you can only live by Letting Go.
