Patternicity and the Actor
Our minds are predisposed towards seeing and making patterns in the world around us. Some people call it PATTERNICITY. When our brains engage in patternicity, we see faces in the clouds, conspiracy theories, futures in the tea leaves. When this part of the brain goes wrong, we start seeing messages everywhere around us, like John Nash in A Beautiful Mind.
Patternicity is necessary for evolutionary survival, there’s very low cost to us when our brain mistakes the wind in the tall grass for a sabertooth tiger stalking us. But if we don’t engage in patternicity, then the risk to us is great, and the cost our lives. So there is REAL benefits to accepting our brain’s tendency towards patternicity.
Living in a busy city can be equally dangerous, so patternicity is fairly useful still. But modern life has considerably less dangers and so our pattern sensitive brain continues to seek out patternicity wherever it can. The brain often struggles to differentiate between patterns which require action and patterns that require no action, so it lumps them all together as essential, or we might say as meaningful.
What the hell does this have to do with acting Coach? - Well, okay, thanks for your patience, I’m getting to it…
Stanislavski believed that the writer didn’t provide all the actor needed to live the role. So, the actor’s job was to fill in the rest, to fully create a three-dimensional character. For this to happen, the actor needed to be able to draw together the strands of stimulus they found in the script.
In this process, patternicity has been encouraged in actors for over a hundred years. Actors have been encouraged to see meaningful connections in places where there are none. They look into the script and begin interpreting the signs and signals as specific things, but since they have been encourage to ‘fill in’ the details not provided by the writer, they end up ‘making shit up’.
The ability to create a synthesis from two ideas is vital. But the ability to read patterns where there are none is actually of little value to you as an actor. Your job is not to fill in anything. If it isn’t in the script, the author didn’t consider it important. You do not need to fill anything in, you are already more than filled in enough as a person, you plus script, plus audience’s imagination equals character.
You + Your Interpretation + Script + Audience’s Imagination = Inflected Performance
But our innate patternicity seeks patterns and connections and it seeks to fill in the blanks somehow, so our imagination makes the leaps and defends our perspective by making any evidence available fit the answer, no matter how round peg in square hole. This is just the same as conspiracy theorists bending the evidence to fit their particulary theory. It also can create the same slightly irrational, very defensive stance on certain decisions because we see the pattern as meaningful.
Run away from the tiger, stop reading more into the script than is written there. The longer you leave off on your interpretation, the more can occur in the moment.
-COACH-