Vulnerability and Penetration

I’m sitting out in the bush, a place called Tomerong, near Jervis Bay in New South Wales, talking to a friend Lee Trew, a guy from the first ever acting class that I ever taught. He lives out here with his wife and daughter, in 8-acres, on the edge of two national parks running a bushcraft and nature connection school, helping people take off the shackles of domesticity and grow comfortable in the wild.

Through our conversations out here in this beautiful landscape, we realised that what we taught had an awful lot in common. We were both trying to help people connect with something in themselves that has been removed by socialisation. We agreed that when these social ties are removed, a more successful individual emerges.

Actors must make themselves vulnerable. They must receive as much as they emit. But they are often unable to throw off their social armour, they protect themselves as a default with walls and barriers, obstacles do that nothing affects them.

But the actor must be vulnerable, they must let those walls be penetrated. And once they have been penetrated, they must let others make an impression on them. Like a material that allows an impression to be left in it, they must be clay and not stone.

But it’s harder than it looks. I tend to teach this penetrability through improvisation, it’s a vital part of the training in my studio and our students will do much more of it in the future.

I think the actors I train, the people that I work with, get very good at taking truthful action, but I also worry that sometimes they do not have a reaction that is equal in sincerity.

It worries me that many acting approaches encourage the genuine response to take place through some kind of filter called ‘character’, and that is actually just another wall, another barrier between you and the other actors, another obstacle between you and your inner self, and the ability to let all that good stuff out in reaction to what is done to you. This perhaps also creates another filter that damages what you communicate to the audience.

We’re not talking about anything weird, or new age, or bullshit. Just an openness to things, to others particularly.

But I do think it needs to be relearned.