At the start of the new semester (classes started last week!), we have been focusing a lot on how the first phase of repetition work has so much to do with loving your partner. This is, of course, mostly a platonic love: a love for them one human being to another rather than a romantic love, though sometimes romantic love or attraction comes up through the exercise.
Why should this be a focal point of our work now? Is it enough to simply put your attention on the other person and repeat what they say and take them personally?
What we are going for here is a deep way of taking in what the other person is doing and the love or friendship aspect allows us to take our partner much more personally than if the partner was simply a colleague or classmate. When we love each other, we allow ourselves to be vulnerable to the other person, to give up complete control to the other person. We must do this if we are to be fully free in the moment. The love allows us to take personally even the most simple and seemingly innocuous behavior in the other person: the way they look at you or away from you; the way they stand; whether they move towards or away from you. Without the love, we can allow ourselves to be indifferent about these things. And being indifferent is a really uninteresting place to be for an actor!
Now, does this mean that we will only have love fests in our exercises? No. There will be differences of opinion and we will get hurt and angry with each other. We will feel rejected and betrayed and those feelings will lead to conflict. But if we start from a place of wanting to move towards each other, wanting to love each other, wanting to build a bridge to each other. The conflict becomes simply an obstacle - something to work through to get to the other side of and reach some sort of understanding rather than the point of the exercise. In the early stages there might be a difference of opinion that leads to conflict, but we are building a foundation so that in the later stages we can use our imagination to dirty the relationship and ensure that there is an obstacle or some kind of conflict in the exercise.
With a foundation of love and a dirty relationship (ie, someone did something to hurt the other person), then we can allow ourselves to go to the furthest edges of our emotion and trust that we will not lose ourselves. It allows us to feel and open ourselves in a deep way. The “love foundation” increases the faith that we have in ourselves and our ability to really be affected by the other.
So, at these early stages don’t shrink from loving your partner. Keep in your mind that you always want to be interested in the other, always want to move toward them and you will be in a great place to put the starting blocks further and further away. You will not only be able to see something human in them, you will make yourself vulnerable to them.