Dream Big

Last night's online chat to a friend in Los Angeles:

Me: So…I’ll probably NEVER put this in my blog…but I totally ROCKED my scene this past week in class.  It was the first scene (out of 9) that the teacher not only didn’t tear apart…but he really seemed to enjoy.  Score one for the older chick.

D:  Right on.

You SHOULD put that on your blog….

Me:  if I do…I know I’ll only hint at it.

That I had some reassurance.

But it is too public a forum (where my classmates and teacher could read it) to want to be too vocal about…..

Hmmm….I wonder what I don’t want people to know?

That I had a great day?  That I got recognition?  That I have an ego?

I think it is probably the fact that I don’t want to tempt the fates into slamming me back down.

That if I take credit for the ‘genius’ moments…then I have to personally claim all the failures too.  And it is more that this work is just passing through me.

I am neither the alpha nor the omega of the creative energy – just a willing vessel.

It was a great scene...it was well received.  And I found myself reticent to share it with you.  Talking it aloud with a classmate, I almost convinced myself that the reason was because I have been working on the idea of 'the work' being separate from me.  That the work is "it" and it is "out there".  That sometimes it is good and sometimes it is crap, and that doesn't mean I am good and it doesn't mean I am crap.  Getting a sense of distance from the creative work you produce gives you the ultimate freedom to try really bold choices.  When your sense of self-worth is wrapped up in the work, it makes it much harder to throw out a choice that is wild or unexpected (because it has the possibility - maybe even the likelihood - to fail that much more spectacularly).  And in the same breath that I was giving this excuse, I realized that I have no problem revealing my shortcomings, my disappointments and my failures and how they have affected me in this most public forum.

So, why do I have such a wariness about sharing the successes?

Well, that's a damn good question.

It made me think of a visualization exercise we did in one class.   It was meant to be a dream of the best possible sort.  We were asked to close our eyes and picture ourselves coming out for a curtain call at the National Theatre after a fantastic performance.  We see the audience leap to their feet in applause.  We take our bows and then head back to the dressing room.  Fans come backstage.  What do they say?  What words do they use?  The reviews come out.  What have the critics said?  We were asked to picture ourselves at an award show - which one? The Oscars? The Tonys?  BAFTA?  Drama Desk?  What is the introduction of the work we win for?  What is our acceptance speech?  

It was a question of what each artist wants - in the perfect world?  Do you crave to hear the word "genius" from a specific critic?  Do you want a little old lady to put her arm on you and quietly whisper, "You made me feel something.  Over ten years now...and I thought I'd never feel again.  But you made me feel alive"?  What is the core of your art?  

I knew specifically what each of the strangers, friends and critics said about my performance...the words I wanted to hear...but when it came to the awards show, I found myself at the event (and in a gorgeous dress) but not getting called to accept an award.  It wasn't sad or disappointing.  It was just as happy and positive-minded as the rest of my visualization.  It was just a very clear picture of what I actually prioritize in my career.  

There is a great naiveté that we as artists must stay in touch with:  "I have the RIGHT to be amazing, to be astonishing - because, actually, that is my job."

Her point in all of this was to get the warm-up to be not just a 'health-and-safety' stretch, but to transform ourselves (physically, mentally and emotionally) into the being capable of an earth-shattering performance.  The job of the actor is to be connected...so we should avoid any warm-up that allows disconnection.  For me, this was useful - in that I had always approached warm-up as a way to get from 'Caroline' to 'zero'.  To strip away all the extraneous physical gestures, vocal limitations, emotional trolls that would stand in my way in a role.  This change of thinking said that instead of bringing myself to zero, I should rev myself up to 100%.  Instead of the limited choices I may have walked into the room with....bring all the choices that I could possibly dream of...ALL of me.

Now, that lesson was important...but the bigger lesson for me was the idea of dreaming BIG.  Every time I step on stage, I should be aiming for a performance worthy of those words I heard in my imagination...the connections I made with my audience in my fantasy.  

"I want it all, George.  And there's not a chance in hell we're gonna get it all anyway...but if you don't WANT it, we've got even less chance than that." - Chapter 2, Neil Simon.  

What's Lost and Gained

I had my handbag stolen.  It was 2 feet away from me under my coat at the club.

Bank card. Drivers License. Phone. Camera. iPod. Journal.

gone.

All of it I really loved.  I had a white Blackberry Curve that matched my white ceramic Chanel watch (super chic).  I had an iPod touch had a red case with white racing stripes (given as a going away present from a dear friend back home)...and newly downloaded Angry Birds game to keep me entertained on the train.  My camera was less than a year old...and had been grabbing both keepsake travel photos as well as quick snapshots of new friends.

So it is lost. It's just stuff after all.  I keep hearing the line from Harold and Maude:


 "Well if some people get upset because they feel they have a hold on somethings. I'm just acting as a gentle reminder, here today, gone tomorrow so don't get attached to things. Now with that in mind I don't mind collecting things. I've collected quite a lot of stuff in my time. Yeah, this is all memorabilia — but it’s incidental, not integral, if you know what I mean."


The only thing I really minded losing was my journal.  I keep notes daily about classwork and discoveries both for personal reference and as a resource for the final part of my dissertation.  This was a new journal, only three weeks old.  But it still is irreplaceable.  Or is it?  I talked to a classmate today about the possibility of re-writing and seeing what had really absorbed over the past three weeks.  It might not be as detailed in description, but it might be more poignant in depth...in that it would not be the things that I simply wrote down, but that have made their way into my true understanding.


Did I lose faith in London?  Nah.  Have had things stolen in every city.  


Did I lose my experiences? My friends?  My sense of safety?  Nope.


Did I lose the fun that was to be had for the rest of the night?  No!!


What did I gain?  I gained a real life understanding of how happiness is not contingent on life going just as you planned it.  I gained a true sense of the community that does love me and reached out to help me: from the friend I had just met that night that called my bank from his phone at 3 am so that I could cancel my card, to the classmate that bought me a rose on the street corner to cheer me up, to the high school friend of my brother's that offered to wire me cash if I needed it.  I was amazed by the support and love that poured out to boost me.


So, today when I was coming home from class, gripped in a massive wave of insecurity...I started thinking about this sense of loss and gains.  I started trying to unpick what had thrown me on this sudden 'LOSS' side of thinking.


I feel like I've been working with a pretty unbound flow recently - enjoying the work - reveling in the play. I've been continuing to find new avenues for strength and exploration in my voice and movement work.  I've had my first round of clowning.  As frightened as I have been from the first week of class, when our teacher gave us the outline of the course, I knew that after neutral mask, after half mask and after commedia...I would have to face down clowning.  eep.  Give me lines.  Give me actions.  Give me a character.  But please don't put me on stage - with no guards or defenses - and ask me to be funny as Caroline!  (This clowning is based in more Lecoq style training rather than what you might think of with circus clowns.)  It is basically about tapping into what is most vulnerable and unattractive about you - personally - and showcasing it for the entertainment of others.  Sound scary?  Yeah, did to me, too.  But I found a great pleasure and challenge in the work.  Because I have worked for many years in comedy, I definitely found a comfort with the entertaining part - but that was more about my desire to work the audience than allowing them behind the mask, as it were.  As I explored, I started to edge into the realm of the 'sad clown', a vulnerable and deeply open self... and will continue to delve into it.  


Today I played a tea bag.


That's right.  A tea bag.


We were assigned to carefully study and portray an inanimate object - and portray its story: beginning, middle and end.  I know, I know...I had the same reaction at first.  I'm paying HOW MUCH MONEY to pretend to be a tea bag?  But this really wasn't one of those "be a tree...feel the wind" acting exercises.  First, it requires keen observation.  Each time I poured hot water into my cup, I found new things to try. Oh! There is an air bubble trapped inside it that keeps it moving up against the top of the cup!  Oh! When you dunk it in and out of the water, the top part exposed to the air is actually heavier than the part still in the water! The more specifics I observe in life, the more I can bring into my performance. This is true of every thing that I observe...people, ideas, objects. Secondly, it challenged the imagination.  Instead of creating an exact replica of the inanimate object, we were to embody the texture, the weight, the tempo - and allow our imagination to fill in the gaps, and to inform an interpretation when our bodies were unable to match the required action. (How do you float to the top of a cup?  How do you dangle, dripping, above the cup?)  Because my process is usually so incredibly linear: text, actions, obstacles, given circumstances etc....I have been happily exploring the non-linear, the creatively circumspect, and the imaginative inroads.  It has been part of my work over the last few weeks that has been most rewarding - and hardest to define.  


So, if the work has been good....full of exploration and creative flow...if I'm working from a sense of general gain....why do I suddenly feel at a loss?


I looked more specifically at what was underneath my insecurity, and found that it had much to do with worrying where I fit with my classmates.  I worry that even though I have felt an expansion in my approach, that it may not be received well.  I don't trust my new pathway - and if I am honest about it, it is probably because it doesn't feel earned.  I place so much value on what I've EARNED in life.  Hard work = something to be proud of.  If I'm working less directly, if I'm exploring more creatively, it is hard to feel that I have accomplished something.  It feels - what? too easy maybe?  The other part of this has to do with how work is received by an audience.  (Also known as: "Do they like me?")  I can feel that my work is going well, that I am learning and growing, that I continue to have solid work ethic and am dependable as a friend and a scene partner - but that does not mean that someone else is going to look at my finished product and like it.


And this is where I MUST let go.  I cannot control the reaction or the taste of anyone - classmates, faculty, the general paying public.  I can only do what I can to bring life onto the stage.  Specific, creative, delicious, unpredictable life.  The rest is out of my hands.

I bear a charmed life.

I performed at Shakespeare's Globe!

(Ok, ok....so I wasn't on the mainstage treading the hallowed boards.  And I wasn't speaking classical text.  As a matter of fact, I wasn't speaking at all.  But it was thrilling nonetheless.)

I participated as a member of my MA Acting class in an interactive symposium on Gesture - doing an experiment with two of my teachers on Bulwer's Gestures.  The three day symposium was a chance for scholars and practitioners to come together and explore the use of gesture in theory and performance.  Our performance was based on early modern gestural manuals and the information they provide about early gestural practice.  It is also being considered as part of future actor training in our school - as a way to wake up gestural life (responding to the actor's most common question: 'What do I do with my hands?').  We worked as a group exploring the meanings of each of the common and rhetorical gestures that accompanied certain thoughts or ideas as noted by Bulwer in his manual.  Each gesture had a Latin word or phrase that accompanied it - things like "to show irony" "to betray impatience" or "to explode".  As we discovered, the right hand was almost exclusively used in early modern gesture - the left hand being so deeply recognized as evil at the time.  Things like "to steal" would be gestured with the left hand.  With a basic understanding of how to bring the gestures off of the page, we then were led in three groups by three separate actors (from last year's MA course: one actor was working from a rhetorical Shakespearean text, two were working on a scene from Hamlet.  Each of these actors looked at their texts individually, and chose from a list of the translated Latin verbs actions to accompany both their actions and reactions (without seeing what the gesture associated with that word was).  They then taught us the series of gestures - in pure form - that they would be exploring in the scene (which we did not watch them rehearse and incorporate).  This pure series of gestures is what we brought to perform for (and to teach to) the audience.  The audience then watched the scenes performed by the actors using each of the gestures within the scene as a way to connect to and physically express the thoughts.

It was an extremely well received presentation.  The audience was abuzz with questions - and even more fascinatingly, even with their small tutorial - their hands were actively engaged in asking these questions.

All this keeps circling back to what I keep chewing on from my movement class: what the actor's body DOES, the audience FEELS.  Our understanding is so much more about reading people's bodies than hearing their words.  I don't think that was the case in Shakespeare's day - as the society had a much more tuned ear.  Television has 'viewers' - which has informed how we WATCH performances.  Even though a theatrical audience implies 'audio'...we see much more than we hear these days.  Our understanding happens on a very base level through the visual.

Movement class seems to be where I feel like I'm doing my best exploration and growth right now.  Of course, having a teacher who plants ideas like "Your very small preconception of yourself is inaccurate.  The idea of yourself is minutely small compared the all of who you actually are."  Think of a small box called the Polite Self (who you are on the train, to the cashier, with the dry cleaner).  The box around that is your Social Self (the you that your acquaintances and colleagues know - the one that functions best within the world).  The box around that is your Intimate Self (the you your closest friends, family members or lover knows).  Around that is your Private Self (contains all of you that your conscious mind knows about).  Around that is your Unfamiliar Self (a total of the conscious and subconscious self - the self you get glimpses of in dreams).  Most of us consider "who we are" to be the Social Self...the self we present to most of the world all of the time.  Even if we acknowledge the Intimate, and maybe even the Private....we still define ourselves as (and as actors - generally bring to the work table) - the Social Self we are most comfortable in presenting.

Just starting to chew on this idea of bringing the much larger vision of myself into the work opens up all sorts of possibilities for exploration, discovery and play.  

Which is very exciting.

This is why I came to school.  To get excited about the work.  To rediscover the play.  To bring unusual and interesting choices to my acting.  I am the first to admit that my desire to 'get it right' combined with my extremely analytical literary analysis usually create an understanding of text that is very clear ... but also very predictable.  The performers that we enjoy watching (and as I'm discovering...the performances I enjoy giving) are ones where the choices work in surprising and unexpected ways.  This involves a certain amount of risk - risk of failure (those choices that make the performer and the audience go 'blechk!' and spit it back out like a child with their first bite of spinach).  But what we are missioned to do is to bring LIFE to the stage.  "Life" implies failure.  We don't live and learn anything in life without it.  And what is scary is not actually the failure, but embarrassment.  

Who cares about embarrassment?!

Up next?  My first scene for class (Twelfth Night - Maria/Sir Toby Belch) and clowning (getting on stage without line or script or character - just bringing the true Caroline - and making an audience laugh.)

Bring it on.