I was touched to receive some messages of reassurance as "comments" after my blog about insomnia. It made me wonder whether being truthful about the feelings of doubt and vulnerability involved in any act of creation, usually hidden -- of necessity, if you are leading a large group of people -- behind a facade of directorial togetherness, is what allows people to connect with the process.
Honesty is a complicated word. Feelings are not necessarily a guide to the objective reality of how something is going. I have learned over the years to recognize signs of apparent "breakdown" in performers (i.e. tears, frustration etc) as the necessary consequence of shedding the habits and defence mechanisms which lead to certain predictable rigidities or clichéd ways of being and moving in performance. Just as an individual who habitually holds their shoulders up, when gently released from this defensive muscular pattern, may well suddenly be flooded with feelings that the tension originally blocked, a performer -- when coaxed out of familiar habits that have helped them survive the stress and exposure of a life on stage or in front of the camera -- will suddenly feel naked, alone, confused, and as if they are "not doing anything". I welcome these moments, which are often accompanied by tears. This has happened several times during the last week and the work that follows often has a beautiful clarity to it.
I too have these moments. In the last week I had shed many tears in private as my own ways of doing and being have been repeatedly challenged. It is not that I have been criticised by others: on the contrary, most of the people around me have been delightfully appreciative. But I am aiming high and deep, and am a ruthlessly stern critic of my own work. The harsh words I whisper in my own ear late at night are words I try to welcome, as a Zen student learns to welcome the blows of his master. This kind of pain is a form of awakening in which it becomes possible to locate the truth.
Comments
....Where the wall is vulnerable hides potential place to carve a window, even a doorway...as your words here, uncanny in their relevance to an inner process I'm fumbling through right now, point toward an awakening.
this is SO SO lovely to read your words on the actor/performer's process... witnessing the release that happens emotionally when the body shifts and lets go of old patterns... AND the observation of your own inner voice that whispers to you in the night... the voice of challenging growth, if one can bear it... your words here impact me SO greatly, as i am just now in the process of teaching a physical acting training based on grotowski's work, and they are these very things we play with... a major part of the training is exactly this... letting the body lead the emotion, allowing the body to lead the heart into circumstance/emotionality... and observing, actually training the inner observer to even be able to notice when these openings occur... when the body releases an old habit, how the emotion in turn can release... or how the body can physically move beyond a prior "limit" to carry the heart along for that journey beyond what we thought of as "limit... and how all of this takes place in a kind of dance between the being that experiences and the being that observes and internally marks the "happening"... AND, how inside that keen observation, the play of the inner critic is a constant teacher... i'll stop now, for my own inner critic/judge tells me, "i'm rambling, and entirely aware of my lack of prowess in articlating via words a thing that is in fact an occurance of "being"... i simply SO love to read and recognize a process echoing across the ocean... (i'm the new yorker from your october master class in london last year)...
In film you create all of these characters and set them out into the world in various locations to solve their problems with the world as their stage and in various timeframes, and in theatre you must confine your characters and their various conflicts within four walls where they are stuck until they must come to a resolution before your eyes in real time. I am wondering if the experience of creating in theater is also more confined, intense? Just a different kind of crucible.
This reminds me of a beautiful poem that I found, about Carmen. It's by Lucinda Roy, the professor of creative writing at Virginia Tech who has been working to heal the community after the shootings. She begins her poem-sequence Women in Form with a meditation on Carmen, which opens with the line:
"When Carmen sings, the world takes off its clothes"
Entwined with the clear reference to Carmen's sexuality, it seems to me that there's a suggestion that Carmen - because she is determined to choose her own path and tell hard truths - strips the world bare, to a form of painful clarity.
Listening high and deep to Carmen: you are finding a powerful truth.