In our relentless quest for deeper, truer, more personal meaning, something that often gets in the way is remembering to let go. We look so hard for these elusive feelings and opinions that when we find them, we want to hold them up and say “Aha! I feel something! Isn’t this wonderful!” We want to luxuriate in the feeling, even if it is a “negative” one. Sometimes I call that wallowing in the feeling (wallowing is what a pig does in mud). We like to roll around in it and get all dirty.

But holding on to any particular emotion can cause a pressure which isn’t the most helpful in following the true moment. By holding on, we stop really responding to what is going on around us. We say: “No, no. I don’t want that to happen now. I’m still working on this!” Unfortunately for us, this is the new moment, not that. It is analogous to what happens when a student goes for a particular result (“I want to make my partner jealous” or “I want to help my partner not be so upset” or “I want to make my partner to like me”). We turn off to the rest of the subtle behavioral clues and only focus on those that support our goal. And sometimes, we “see” behavior in our partner that isn’t there simply to give credence to  the interaction we wanted to have.

When emotions are high, letting go is extremely important. The pressure of maintaining and holding onto an emotion gets in the way of whatever’s coming next and makes us less flexible and less responsive. We need to trust in ourselves that if we let go of whatever emotion or meaning is happening now, that something else will come along to take its place.

The behavior resulting from an actor who is letting go of emotion instead of holding onto it (and remember, I don’t mean expressing and not expressing. In both cases, the emotion is expressed!) is light and nimble. It feels like it can go in any direction at any time. The behavior resulting from an actor who is holding onto emotion is heavy and consistant. No matter what the partner does, the response is going to be in a similar direction to what the previous moment was. The heaviness and sameness of the interaction can be a sure sign that someone is holding on to something.

The solution, of course, is to focus outside of ourselves. Whatever the partner is doing is going to be more interesting than whatever we are feeling at any given moment. The willingness to throw away what we are feeling in deference to the partner’s behavior (and their behavior NOW in this moment) creates the letting go. The two simply can’t exist together: Either you are focused on your partner or you are focused on yourself. And for our purposes, letting go — of yourself — is going to lead to much more interesting places than not!

Last night there was an exercise in class that had a good lesson on trust. It is another example of how important it is to strive for truth, even when the truth is not “acceptable”. Two students were working and they were having difficulty expressing their real opinion about the other, mostly because that opinion was negative and they didn’t want to have a negative opinion about their partner. After all, we’re all acting students. We should get along, right?

This suppressing of expression built up and built up and then exploded out in a burst of negative emotion. It was traumatic and unsettling for everyone in class. But once it came out, the air started to clear.

So what’s this about “trust” then? Many times, to really express how we’re feeling, we feel like we’re in a safe environment. We need to trust that the other person isn’t out to get us. Part of what made the exercise difficult for the students was that one of the students was saying the “right” or “correct” thing (something like “I’m sorry that you’re upset”) but that didn’t match his behavior at all. When there is a disconnect between what the other person says and the behavior, we inherently don’t trust that person. The more intense the situation, the more personal the behavior is, the more important it is to be as upfront as possible about how you feel about it.

This holds true even when how you feel is the opposite of political correctness. If you find you are prejudiced (I think everyone is, but that’s the subject of another post!) or racist or sexist or anything else that is “unacceptable” in society, it does no good for you or your partner to keep that in. When we interact with people in a normal everyday setting we are politically correct because we don’t have to stay in that interaction. But acting is much more like being locked in a cabin with someone. If you’re really doing it well, you don’t pull away from them. And that means that the sooner you get everything out in the open, the sooner you can move on to something else.

In my experience, it is so important and humanizing to share a moment of intense, politically incorrect opinion and then see what lies beyond it: what is the human reaction to that weakness or bigotry? If both actors are working from the agreement that they are not out to hurt the other, then from that moment will spring a very deep connection and understanding in both of them.

And the alternative to not getting your opinion out is…? Hold it in? Wish it weren’t there? Try to change it? All of that just brings your attention back to yourself as you try to manage this inappropriate opinion. No good. Get it out there, get the monkey off your back and move on. Focus on what it does to your partner. That will allow you to move to the next moment.

And if what you say and matches up to your true opinions, then your partner will trust you, even if he hates you (in that moment!)

One of the key things to remember with this concept is that this specifically in regards to acting. We have very good reasons for being polite in our normal everyday world. Politeness serves a social function. If it didn’t, we wouldn’t use it. It greases the wheels of social interaction and allows us to move forward without getting too involved in non-essential interactions.

So why is it such a bad thing for our acting? It is precisely for why it’s a “good” thing in civilized society! In acting, we don’t want to sidestep potentially negative (or intensely positive, for that matter) interactions with others! Those are exactly the kind of interactions we are seeking out! By holding onto the idea of being polite, considerate and even kind (when consideration and kindness come out of a sense of social obligation), we stop ourselves from really feeling deeply about the other person.

Politeness by definition gets in the way of us expressing how we truly feel. It takes us out of the moment, because every impulse, every response must be checked for the impact it might have on the other person. That takes a lot of attention away from what’s happening around us and puts it back on us. In acting, at the foundation, we want a free expression of how we feel. And that freedom comes from the complete lack of self-censorship.

But then you’re asking me to be rude! you might think. No. Being rude, in this context is not the opposite of being polite. Rudeness implies that you’re trying to have an effect on the other person: you’re trying to move them in some way. But in this exercise, we are neither trying to “help” the other person by keeping the truth from them, nor hurt them by attacking them or being mean to them. Our goal is simply to tell them the truth as we see it. Simply express to them how we feel about them, to let out our reactions to their behavior as fully as possible. It’s cliche, but we strive to do it the way a 2 year old would on the playground. Not out to get someone or try to make it easier on them. Just simply tell them the truth.

Yesterday in class we talked about something that happens “normal” repetition exercise when partners look intensely at each other.  The habit, which is not at all a requirement of the exercise, becomes overwhelming to the point when we are not able to take in something about our partner if we don’t see it with our eyes.

To get the point of how rich and interesting behavior that isn’t visual can be, we had students do a repetition exercise through a closed door: each on one side of the door. All of a sudden, they were listening to small changes in intonation and word choice. Pauses took on special significance. The extra concentration the students had to put into listening made them loose their own inner monitor and allowed them to freely express themselves in the moment. And the exercise retained a lot of that flexibility and freedom when the pair worked then face to face.

It’s very good to embrace not only the visual but all 5 of the senses. The sense of touch (which I think also includes the sense of distance from someone and the tension that that can bring) is especially strong. Usually in an exercise, we don’t get to use our sense of taste that much, but it could come up and how interesting when it does! Smell is also one that we give short shrift to. And with bad smells, it really challenges our sense of what we can say or what we are allowed to admit about our partner.

Not only is moving beyond the need to stare at our partner a very good thing for the moment to moment work (it allows us to take in so much more information about the partner), it also gets us out of the problem some students face when they then have to work on stage and deal with an audience.

Being aware of the audience and being “open” to the audience (with your face visible to them) is extremely important for a stage actor. Being in visual contact with the audience is often more highly valued than being in visual contact with the other actors. It is not uncommon for actors to be having a conversation but instead of facing each other, they face the audience. In such cases, it is imperative that the actors are still taking in everything about their partner. They just aren’t able to do it with the sense of sight. Train your other senses, too!

As students are working through our scene work (we’re working on “Key Exchange” by Kevin Wade), we are coming up against the inevitable problem of remembering the text while still maintaining contact and connection with your partner. While I wouldn’t go so far as to call the text our “enemy”, it is certainly true that text, even at the best of times, can serve to get in the way of the moment. Even when actors are completely comfortable with the words, simply the knowledge of where the scene is going or what the other person is going to say can be enough of a reason to stop listening to what is happening around you. The scenework we’re doing in class tries to show students how to move the focus from remembering and saying words back and forth to each other towards actually working off of each other the way we would do in a repetition exercise.

To that end, we use repetition exercises when working on scenes. After doing the first reading, students are asked to go off and memorize the scene. There are various ways of doing this, but the best ways are ones that don’t impose any one way of saying the lines (ie, it’s bad if you always emphasize one word in a phrase). How you say the line will come from what your partner is doing in the moment and how that works into the circumstances that you are living out. When the partners come to work again, we can start with something that looks like a first reading, but when one partner says something that the other person doesn’t believe (and that happens when the person who’s speaking is only doing so because that’s what it says to do on the page: “oh, I’m supposed to say this bit of text now, so I’m going to say it” rather than in response to anything their partner is doing), the line or phrase gets repeated back and forth until it touches some true place in the person who’s line it is. Then the partners move on to the next line.

A variation on this would be using a repetition exercise to get into the scene. That is, start with a repetition exercise and forget about the text. When you are connected and working truthfully off of your partner, throw in a line of the text. It can be from anywhere in the text, just something that fits with what is going on in the moment. Repeat that line back and forth or, if it already causes a response in you, say the next line. As soon as one partner has to go up into his head to get the next line or to think of what should happen next or how you messed up, go back to behavior. Behavioral repetition will bring partners together and connect them. Text will tend to put you in your head and move you apart. Only say text, then, when you are connected and go back to behavior when you get disconnected.

This way, you will build up a habit of being connected all the time regardless of how the scene is supposed to go.

As we enter the last two weeks of the Spring Term, we have started working again on text. It is amazing how having the words you need to use with your partner given to you makes actually listening to what they have to say (and really saying what it is you have to say) so difficult.

Again and again, we come back to this: The contact with your partner is the most important thing. It is more important than the lines you have to say. It is more important than any accent or external characterization that you have thought up. It is far more important than how you think the scene “should” go. The contact with your partner, which you get from really putting your attention on him or her, really listening to what they say and how they say it, really picking up on their behavior even at its most subtle, will allow you to take the pressure off of how you’re saying the words.

With a script that is even remotely well written, when actors simply listen to each other and respond instinctively to each other, the scene comes alive. When we let that be at the foundation of the scene, then we always have a core truth to fall back on. Then on top of that core truth we can add all the bells and whistles which move the actors from a simple doing of the script to really performing it.

But without the foundation, the scene feels flat. It feels like work. It misfires and sputters like an engine that’s out of tune. It doesn’t feel like fun, like you’re on a roller coaster. It might even be boring to you to go through it!

So actors, when doing a scene (and there is a large portion of work that is technical and requires your intellect as well as your intuition that happens before you “do” the scene), forget about everything else but listening to your partner. They will give you everything you need!