An Act of Bravery

To be an actor is brave, a life of little security and a lot of uncertainty. It takes courage to dedicate your life to it, and even if you never make the heights of Hollywood or Broadway, there’s no shame in living your life for acting, contributing positively to the world. 

But I want to talk about a different kind of bravery. 

I want to talk about the kind of bravery that makes a performance live.

The trouble with rehearsal is that it tends to kill the performance. It doesn’t bring something to life, instead it teaches the actor to try to reanimate in performance what died in rehearsal.  The more you do something, the more you find a way to set it in stone.  And as it calcifies, it mortifies. It dies.

But we need security and as we move towards the opening night, we want more and more security. So lines get fixed into line readings, not because we are bad actors, but because we don’t want to fuck it all up, we stopped paying attention to the others, and we delivery the best version of what we’ve practised. And it is dead. It is not truthful. It is empty, and we know it. And as the audience tell us well done, we know inside we didn’t live on stage, we just reanimated a corpse.

To live truthfully from moment to moment takes bravery. A bravery that doesn’t know what is going to happen next. To do this, we must

1) Understand the psychological action of the character and use it as our mindset.

2) Know our lines well enough without intonation that nothing can throw us

3) That second one is really tough, so we need to understand the size of that endeavour.

4) Be able to identify moment to moment changes in our scene partners’ psychological behaviour.

5) Allow the line to come out as a response to that and not in the way we’ve learned to say it as a prescribed verbal response to another prescribed verbal response.

It’s tough, but it’s possible. But it requires bravery. Anything that is done in response to something else that is done on stage will seem appropriate to the audience. If you scoff at the other actor’s anger, and they then see that scoff and adapt to it, THEN we are really bringing a performance to life in a moment to moment way.

Let your response to what they are doing (channelled through the mindset) be the way you say the lines. That’s real moment to moment work.

But it’s scary as hell, because there’s no safety net. But there is, there IS! The lines, the blocking, your mindsets, and all the times you’ve practised the scene.

Be brave my friends, and live on stage, live in the moment, live before the camera.