Feeling
Oh, we're getting into dangerous territory now.
One of the earliest and more difficult realizations that I came to in the semester was that much of what we're learning isn't up for deliberation. As someone who has always prided himself on being fastidiously deliberate, that was a tough pill to swallow to say the least. I'm tempted to use the phrase 'to take on faith' but that carries with it a nexus of associations that don't quite fit the bill. It's not that I'm blindly following my professors and their lessons towards some unknown destination that they tell me is 'being an actor.' It's more that what they're trying to help me see is that the mind and the body more often than not inherently know what action to take and that stopping to think, to weigh A vs. B vs. C and so forth, often mutes the immediacy of the knowledge I already have within me - the feeling becomes less potent and consequently less interesting to an audience.
A strong qualification here - I'm talking about acting, not day-to-day life. Natsuko has a story about an actress she was coaching who after a while became convinced that her husband needed to come in and be coached himself to improve his life. When she told Natsuko that her husband was a surgeon the response was an emphatic "Absolutely not." Do you want a surgeon to not be deliberate in his or her actions? As I've said before, being an actor isn't a normal thing and, as counter-intuitive as it may sound, day-to-day life and replicating day-to-day life take very different sets of skills.
At the same time, this isn't to say that thinking and deliberation are not vital in acting, they absolutely are. This is what textwork is all about. It goes back to the Paradox of Freedom - to do the work of knowing the text, weighing the actions of all the characters with respect to the others, using my mind and my logic to see the flow of the plot, imprinting all this work on my mind and body, and then throwing it away. All that work will still be there if I've been disciplined enough to absorb it but when I'm there, in the moment, I can't be anywhere else but feeling what I am then and there. But that's the question, isn't it? What is feeling (for an actor, at least)? Well, as it's something that nobody can really discuss except in relation to themselves, I guess that's a place to start.
I started my first relationship in August of 2008. A late bloomer, obviously. I entered into it understandably excited, eager, and not just a little bit desperate. Twenty-four years of delay, in some ways this was more an act of deliverance than a relationship. Obviously I had no way of knowing what I was getting myself into. Yes, I had fantasized, I had created jumbled amalgamations of relationships I had been witness to both real and fictional and I'm sure a part of me thought that, while this was going to be something new and thrilling, that there would be no reason it couldn't be handled the way I felt I handled most things in my life - with thoughtfulness and deliberation. Those more experienced readers out there can now take a moment to smile and shake their heads or just laugh outright.
Almost immediately that part of me that thought that I could handle this with any kind of logic went straight out the window. I was blindsided to find myself in a situation where feeling - irrational, illogical, often stupid - was the singular factor in everything I did with respect to this girl. It's hard to describe just how disturbing this was to me. Here's the point though: thinking over it now I see that rarely over the course of this relationship was I ever not squarely in the present with my feelings regarding the situation. Plans were made and the past was talked about, sure, but everything was in service of trying to maintain the immediate feelings that accompanied being in a relationship. And when it ended (messily)? It was the other side of the same coin. Every thought was still rooted in the now only the thoughts of affection were replaced with those of betrayal.
So what am I getting at here? It's ultimately the idea of engagement, I think. When all I'm concerned about is how I'm feeling right now and if I let that dictate my actions and my responses then I will be engaged in the dialogue. If in that moment I'm thinking ahead or thinking about what has already been said then I will necessarily not be engaged in what is going on in the present. Of course I must be aware of what has been said/done and of what will be said/done but that awareness will be in service of my intentions in the present.
Oftentimes we're told that acting is a strange thing partly because what's essentially being done is normal interaction, only backwards. In reality we enter a dialogue knowing what has happened and the text is created from that knowledge. In acting, traditionally speaking we're given the text and we know how it's going to end and we must construct the history of that dialogue ourselves. The challenge is to do this, to have this knowledge, and to not let it in any way mute the true feelings that would be generated by the interaction in normal life. It's where imagination and experience are really the only tools at our disposal.
My experience of my relationship, of all the factors that went into its formation and the pain that resulted from its end, these are things that won't soon be lost on me and will serve as touchstones for my acting. I think many, myself included at times, scoff when people say that being an actor requires courage but here's an instance where that idea comes to bear. If I'm truly committed to acting, to the act of providing an image of reality, then in this one way I can't leave anything in the past, it's too useful, and I must be prepared to revisit those past feelings both joyful and traumatic, over and over and over again. The skilled ones can deftly separate this clinging to the past in their work from their everyday lives. For those of us still in training all I can say is that it's a constant struggle. That's the way it feels anyway.
One of the earliest and more difficult realizations that I came to in the semester was that much of what we're learning isn't up for deliberation. As someone who has always prided himself on being fastidiously deliberate, that was a tough pill to swallow to say the least. I'm tempted to use the phrase 'to take on faith' but that carries with it a nexus of associations that don't quite fit the bill. It's not that I'm blindly following my professors and their lessons towards some unknown destination that they tell me is 'being an actor.' It's more that what they're trying to help me see is that the mind and the body more often than not inherently know what action to take and that stopping to think, to weigh A vs. B vs. C and so forth, often mutes the immediacy of the knowledge I already have within me - the feeling becomes less potent and consequently less interesting to an audience.
A strong qualification here - I'm talking about acting, not day-to-day life. Natsuko has a story about an actress she was coaching who after a while became convinced that her husband needed to come in and be coached himself to improve his life. When she told Natsuko that her husband was a surgeon the response was an emphatic "Absolutely not." Do you want a surgeon to not be deliberate in his or her actions? As I've said before, being an actor isn't a normal thing and, as counter-intuitive as it may sound, day-to-day life and replicating day-to-day life take very different sets of skills.
At the same time, this isn't to say that thinking and deliberation are not vital in acting, they absolutely are. This is what textwork is all about. It goes back to the Paradox of Freedom - to do the work of knowing the text, weighing the actions of all the characters with respect to the others, using my mind and my logic to see the flow of the plot, imprinting all this work on my mind and body, and then throwing it away. All that work will still be there if I've been disciplined enough to absorb it but when I'm there, in the moment, I can't be anywhere else but feeling what I am then and there. But that's the question, isn't it? What is feeling (for an actor, at least)? Well, as it's something that nobody can really discuss except in relation to themselves, I guess that's a place to start.
I started my first relationship in August of 2008. A late bloomer, obviously. I entered into it understandably excited, eager, and not just a little bit desperate. Twenty-four years of delay, in some ways this was more an act of deliverance than a relationship. Obviously I had no way of knowing what I was getting myself into. Yes, I had fantasized, I had created jumbled amalgamations of relationships I had been witness to both real and fictional and I'm sure a part of me thought that, while this was going to be something new and thrilling, that there would be no reason it couldn't be handled the way I felt I handled most things in my life - with thoughtfulness and deliberation. Those more experienced readers out there can now take a moment to smile and shake their heads or just laugh outright.
Almost immediately that part of me that thought that I could handle this with any kind of logic went straight out the window. I was blindsided to find myself in a situation where feeling - irrational, illogical, often stupid - was the singular factor in everything I did with respect to this girl. It's hard to describe just how disturbing this was to me. Here's the point though: thinking over it now I see that rarely over the course of this relationship was I ever not squarely in the present with my feelings regarding the situation. Plans were made and the past was talked about, sure, but everything was in service of trying to maintain the immediate feelings that accompanied being in a relationship. And when it ended (messily)? It was the other side of the same coin. Every thought was still rooted in the now only the thoughts of affection were replaced with those of betrayal.
So what am I getting at here? It's ultimately the idea of engagement, I think. When all I'm concerned about is how I'm feeling right now and if I let that dictate my actions and my responses then I will be engaged in the dialogue. If in that moment I'm thinking ahead or thinking about what has already been said then I will necessarily not be engaged in what is going on in the present. Of course I must be aware of what has been said/done and of what will be said/done but that awareness will be in service of my intentions in the present.
Oftentimes we're told that acting is a strange thing partly because what's essentially being done is normal interaction, only backwards. In reality we enter a dialogue knowing what has happened and the text is created from that knowledge. In acting, traditionally speaking we're given the text and we know how it's going to end and we must construct the history of that dialogue ourselves. The challenge is to do this, to have this knowledge, and to not let it in any way mute the true feelings that would be generated by the interaction in normal life. It's where imagination and experience are really the only tools at our disposal.
My experience of my relationship, of all the factors that went into its formation and the pain that resulted from its end, these are things that won't soon be lost on me and will serve as touchstones for my acting. I think many, myself included at times, scoff when people say that being an actor requires courage but here's an instance where that idea comes to bear. If I'm truly committed to acting, to the act of providing an image of reality, then in this one way I can't leave anything in the past, it's too useful, and I must be prepared to revisit those past feelings both joyful and traumatic, over and over and over again. The skilled ones can deftly separate this clinging to the past in their work from their everyday lives. For those of us still in training all I can say is that it's a constant struggle. That's the way it feels anyway.
