All in All, You're Just Another Brick in the Wall

I keep getting postcards from the unconscious.

Little clues of what's going on under the surface of my newly ill-fitting daily suit of 'playful spirit'.  I'm not going to lie. They aren't love notes.

The strangest thing is: this is when my natural playful side kicks in (ok, so it is a dark sense of humor) - and gets a real belly laugh at what panic-stricken mindplay can reveal at 4 in the morning.

It starts with a dream, half-remembered.  Which, on waking, reminds me of the quite uncharacteristic temper tantrum I threw in acting class earlier that day.  (We are down to one 4-hour acting class a week, which does put a certain intensity and pressure on making your working time COUNT.)  During an exercise, I threw myself prostrate on the ground and wailed, "I don't UNDERSTAND this exercise."  To which the teacher raised an eyebrow, tilted his head to consider the crazy woman who had appeared, and said, "What exercise?"  I rolled my eyes in response, lay back down on the ground, and continued struggling from that position.

It is 4 AM....perfectly reasonable time to start analyzing why I had a meltdown in acting class.  "I'm sure nothing negative could come of going down this path," she says, fastening her red cape around her shoulders.

Hello, little girl.  What's your rush?  You're missing all the flowers.  The sun won't set for hours.  Take your time....

And so I run with it.  Why did he look at me as if I was crazy?  Well, because although the Meisner exercise was never fully explained, from watching I had picked up enough of the basic rules to be playing it adequately.  And what I meant was not that I didn't understand it...it was that I didn't GET it: that it wasn't clicking for me.  Although I understood the game intellectually, I didn't connect to it.  It didn't feel instinctual or enjoyable - it felt awkward and forced and self-conscious.  Which is, of course, when my worst habits and guards surface.  Which is, of course, when he stops the exercise to point them out.  Which is, of course, a perfect opportunity for more self-consciousness and habits and guards to pop up.  After a few minutes of wee-morning-hours consideration (because this all whirs much more quickly in my head than on paper) - I have spiraled into full-on panic attack.  I start wondering what the hell I'm doing here.  Why I have gone into massive debt and left everything I know and love...and if I might come out of this program a worse actor than when I came in.

This is where I start laughing.  The train to crazy town has now left the station.

It is all part of the process.  I get it.  I talk to some of my classmates about where I am.  Standing with my face bashed up against THE WALL.  Just enough of my party tricks exposed, just enough of my comfort zone broken down, just enough of my guards chipped away to make me feel completely bare.  Not any of the new skills in hand to start building back up yet.  This is the place where learning can begin.  IF (and this is a big 'if') I can keep my emotions out of it.  As soon as I bring in my judgement system - all is lost.  By putting an emotionally-negative, judgmental name on myself and where I am - struggling - I then build that brick wall thicker and higher, virtually ensuring I will never find a way around or over it.  If I can just do the work, every day, do the work...even if I don't feel connected, even if I feel like I've messed it up again....then I will build a new process for myself that comes out of true awareness.  If I wallow in the emotion of seeing all the broken pieces of my former process around the base of THE WALL, knowing that I'm crap, that all I know is crap, and I don't have anything to replace it with that is NOT crap....well...I'll be standing at this wall for a long time.

My goal:  to play.
to be open to explore to trust the inner creativity instead of the work to reignite to enjoy to giggle to be stupid to trust that what is inside of me is enough

What stands in my way:  my desire to be good.
to do it right to be the best to impress to entertain to be accepted to be approved to be liked

I do have one class which is not individual critique on performance (at this point) - and is proving to be the hot springs where I take my sore and aching body and mind to rejuvenate.  For any of my actor friends, I highly recommend you pick up Lorna's book "The Body Speaks" (there's a link to it in an earlier post).  We are working our way through her exercises which are all very clearly outlined in the book.  One of her mantras is "Get your acting DOWN."  The audience knows from social interaction that the face is a mask, an effective mask well practiced in hiding what is beneath the surface.  The body is a much more honest tool for revealing what is happening on the inside.  Much of what we consider 'bad acting' is because what is happening in the face is supported by a dead and lifeless body - which reads as false.  This week we did the starfish exercise.  Thinking of the body as a 5 limbed creature (2 arms, 2 legs, and one limb starting between the shoulders through the top of the head), we explored reacting with ALL limbs to a single stimulus.  If it was a slow stretch, then the stretch started at the center and worked its way through all 5 limbs simultaneously.  If it was a pulse, then we pulsed arms, legs, fingers, toes, neck, face, ears all at the same time.  It is a weird feeling to connect the upper and lower body.  The legs are used to walking somewhere and sitting down.  The head is used to swiveling around and taking in information.  The arms and fingers are more accustomed to the intricate manual work.  Getting them in synch with each other is a new sensation.

Moving from that exercise, we did Actor's Impulse - continuing with working in the entire body - but allowing the impulse to be human (heat, cold, fear, hunger, nervousness, a 5 year old playing with a bug, an old person in love).  We explored with the performative and the revelatory, the big impulses and the small, the fun and the serious, the smart and the silly.  It was amazing when I worked on 'getting my acting down'...working more consciously in the legs, the pelvis, the torso...I didn't worry about my face.  I didn't worry about emoting.  I didn't awkwardly wonder what I should do with my hands.  It was all connected.

It is also such an intellectually stimulating class.  She has her fingertip on the pulse of the neuroscientific community's research and discoveries about the mind/body connection...and is connecting all of the new science to what we do as actors.  But she does it with a child-like excitement and curiosity.  She embraces all of the science, and also dreams how she is going to teach lectures.  She encourages us to get to know ourselves - as we are the only tool for expressing our art.  

As to the other classes, well, I'll just suit up in my playful spirit and see what happens.  If there is one thing that I'm sure of, it is that when neurons fire repeatedly in the same pathway, that pathway gets fused.  I'm working on fusing the playful spirit.  Making it my go-to pathway.