I take for granted the theatre I've seen, the nature of the theatre I love, the compliments I receive on how different and innovative our stuff is because it’s just where I live. It’s when I step out of it, travel abroad, that my own life is put into clearer view and see what everyone else is doing. It’s when I do Stanislavski and I break down to no applause that I’m reminded of who I am because I have ventured so far away from it.
Let me explain.
I'm currently enrolled in a semester long program here in Philadelphia, Headlong Performance Institute, that deals with devising work, dynamic forms of movement onstage, and healthy and productive collaboration. I'm happily out of school (although apparently not so happy that I wouldn't subject myself to it again) but felt like this would be a unique and important opportunity I should take advantage of while I live here.
I've been having many existential issues with the program in general, largely because I'm comparing it to the semester I spent in Italy where we studied similar things- commedia dell'arte, clown, responsive movement- but with much more intensity. The biggest comparison I can't seem to shake is that when I was in Italy it felt right. I knew that's where I was supposed to be at that moment pushing myself to those ridiculous lengths. Here and now, I am decidedly less sure.
Then, I was 19. I'd had a rough semester at school before leaving, I was angry at my school and my situation and was just ready for something new and exhilerating. I didn't know what I wanted to do as an artist becuase I was all future and potential and I didn't need answers. Now, I'm 23. I've been out of school for a year and working as an actor, learning about the business, teaching and directing at a summer camp that embraced me for what I was and generally trying to figure out what I want to do with myself as an artist. By no means do I pretend to have everything figured out, but I do know what questions I want to ask.
This is a little roundabout but I'm getting to the point, promise.
I've written before about artistic honesty and finding authenticity as a performer and how it seems that everyone's looking at the 'can you express raw emotion onstage' test to see if you're a "good" and "authentic" actor and how I find this to be crap.
Well.
Today in class we did some Stanislavsky. Tactics, specifically. I've read about the stuff but never done it first hand. So because of all my doubts about this program and feeling disengaged so often I've been really trying to pour myself into the work giving it every opportunity to teach me things and convince me that I'm doing the right thing. So I'm up in front of the group doing an open scene with a partner where one of us wants something and can only say things like "Help me" and the other one refuses to give them what they want and says "I can't help you" and the one has to use different tactics in order for the other person to say yes, they can help you. My phrase was "I'm moving to Spain" and my partner's was "I want to go with you" but the subtext of what I was saying was "release me" so I was the one pleading and he was the one denying me so I had to use different tactics.
Ducklings, I don't know what happened, but I lost it. I couldn't change tactics even though I thought I was and I was yelling and screaming and losing my mind. The teacher stayed on me about my impulses to move away from my partner and avoid the issue and I gave it my all to stay in it. But man, I wanted to quit.
When I sat down and they moved on to the next pair I felt horrible. I couldn't tell if those feelings were coming from the exercise having tapped into something (I had to admit that I was out of the habit of asking permission so maybe asking to be released was not something I could connect with anymore) or from feeling like I'd thrown myself into something that just felt really wrong, like putting on someone else's skin.
I had to make peace with the fact that yes, it's important to pinpoint your habits and shake them off so that if you're using the same tactics all the time you should....not. And yes, it's important to be able to access raw emotions when the time is right....but being able to do those things do not mean you are being authentic. More specifically it does not mean that I am being authentic.
Our current commedia teacher (which is a whole seperate issue I'm having with this program. the class, not the teacher) talks about how the moves he does look great on him because they suit his body but wouldn't necessarily suit us because we have different bodies. Any way you slice it, Stanislavsky does not suit my body. This is not some major obstacle I have to overcome or I will never achieve success because that is not the kind of performance I care about or that i was built to do. I remember the feeling I got in college when I found out I could study comedy and physicality as a whole thing. My world opened up. Not so with the Stan man.
I have to remember to have faith in what I do, in who I am. I've worked really hard to identify where I find joy and I will not have those places taken from me just for trying on something new. These probably seem like rudimentary lessons and anyone I'd run out and share them with would probably just nod and say yup like they'd figured it out long ago. But I think it's never a bad thing to have your reality called into question once in a while and rediscover some old truths about yourself to see if they're still in fact true.
Anyway that's where we are. Learning one's own beauty is a treacherous thing; being able to see things for what they are without patting onself on the back for what we'd like to believe they are.
And for your troubles, here's a little bit of adorable.
