On Performing and Not Performing

Just a short one today: A few days ago, I tweeted that ‘In my house, performing is a dirty word’. As he should as a good friend, Paul Wilson brought me up on this while we were having lunch a few days ago. He felt that I was being a bit unfair to ‘performance’ with this comment, and to some extent, he’s right. I was however concerned that people ‘put on an act’ when they are ‘performing’, so I was attempting to discourage that behaviour.

Paul said to me “Performance is the result and not the objective”. Here in Paul’s wisdom is the solution to the problem that so many actors face. The trouble is (and the reason that performing is a dirty word for me and performance isn’t) that so many actors think of acting as performing. Of course, it’s a performance, but as Paul said, that’s the end result, that’s what the audience watch. However, when an actor ‘puts on a performance’ it is always false, fake, inauthentic.

But many actors mistake ‘putting on a performance’ with performance as their objective, as if it were they who had to ‘put something on’ and just as Paul wisely summarised, the problem is that actors think that is the goal. This simple error is at the heart of an awful lot of problems for actors. And it afflicts everyone from the kid in the school play right through to professional actors.

Because of this, I often try to avoid saying ‘perform’ or ‘performance’ and sometimes, am concerned about saying ‘act’. I used to say that the actor had to ‘perform a task’, but of course – that’s exactly NOT what I wanted. I don’t want you to perform anything, anything at all, the only performance is the one that you create as a result of bring your most authentic self into an interactive engagement (thank you Paul) with your scene partner(s), the script and the reception of an audience.

The moment that you start to perform as an act of will, you lose your authenticity and dilute the power of the interactive engagement with the others around you.