Mel Churcher & The Simple Things
I was recently looking through my Twitter stream (@actingcoachmark for those of you that aren’t following me ) and I found a really helpful tweet by Mel Churcher (@MelChurcher – go on you know you want to…) I’ve read Mel’s books and was really excited to see that she was on Twitter. She’s worked with some amazing people as an acting coach, but is also a writer and director in her own right. In today’s blog, I want to share the contents of Mel’s tweet that got me so excited and go on to explain and explore more on the topic. I should pre-warn, I don’t necessarily agree with Mel on everything, but that’s what makes things interesting I believe, and reading her more recent book A Screen Acting Workshopwe do actually agree on an awful lot.
This is the text of the original tweet: “How hard just walking/standing on stage/screen can be. Because it’s become the primary activity & in life it’s secondary. What do you want?”
Of course, with much of this, I couldn’t agree more. Even back to Stanislavski in his fictional student’s studies in An Actor Prepares, he speaks about the difficulty in just walking across the stage. It’s like whenever we’re asked to do something incredibly simple, the simplicity of it trips us up and Mel is spot on by saying that is because in life, those simple ‘activities’ as I call them, are never the primary action. We walk down the corridor to confront our lover over a rumour of their infidelity. It is the forcing of the confession, the getting to the truth thatcauses the walk down the corridor and we don’t need to think about how we walk because our mind conveniently partitions itself and we focus solely on confession of guilt, the legs seem to power themselves and our focus of attention is on the forcing of that confession and not the walking. Like Mel says, it becomes secondary. It’s a matter of perception.
Then what happens is that the director asks you walk down the corridor and you have to do it over and over again. You’ve already shot the scene that happens after this walk, so it’s not like you’re working yourself up to something. So you walk and walk, but you always look self-conscious, uncomfortable and tense.
Now this is where I will take a diversion from Mel and say work out what the character wants in this scene. In this scene we’ve created above, what does the character want the other character to do? Well, there is only that character in the scene, so that is the character from whom something is required/desired. And so what does your character want from themselves? To get to the bottom of this rumour? To get their lover to confirm what they’ve heard? That’s great, now I would ask you to transform that into something simple that you can do that doesn’t require you to pretend that you’ve got a lover that’s potentially cheated on you. Instead, focus on the action, the task that you can do without joining pretend-land. What will this look like? Something like ‘to get what I deserve’,(Please note, it’s not: ‘to get a guilty person to confess’, OR to ‘get someone to tell me the truth’. Because we haven’t actually reached that scene yet and we’re anticipating ) Then ask yourself what doing that task is like to you. Find something that can connect you to the doing of the task, not the feelings or the emotions, the doing. Once you’ve found a powerful connection, use that to tell you what tactics you would use on yourself. This helps you to avoid having to pretend to want something that you don’t, and pretend to respond to that want.
Those simple things like walking are a nightmare if you can’t adjust your focus. You need something concrete to occupy you and those simple things become easy because they’ve become unconscious again. If you let them become conscious (ever thought about how to climb stairs while climbing stairs? Your feet and legs stop working properly and you seriously risk tripping!) you will literally walk into trouble. But let’s not disconnect this from the complexity of acting itself. It’s exactly the same, to make all things appear ease-y (not easy but – with ease) your focus must be taken up with something achievable, concrete, do-able but something that will challenge and absorb you.