I was watching Joan of Arcadia last night, this is another show I love to watch because the entire cast is so honest and real. And the episode I saw last night (the mock trial episode) was riveting! Both Amber Tamblyn (Joan) and Christopher Marquette (Adam)--Wow! They were both crying, you could see how frantic Adam was over the mistake he'd made, and Joan hurt and betrayed...
I hope I'll be able to learn to give a performance that stunning and honest.
Yesterday, I went back to one of the exercises in the first chapter of "The Actor's Checklist", I decided to do the "Unrelated Activity" exercise (pg 8). All I needed to do was pick a complex activity such as manicuring my nails and recreate that activity precisely. Then pick a monologue unrelated to the activity, identify the main action of it, practice it separately from the activity. Last step: Do the monologue while performing the activity. The purpose is to experience how physical activity empowers the action of the monologue.
So I go looking for a monologue. I don't know if I should use one I've worked on already, or pick a short new one. I'm looking through my monologue books, and I suddenly realize that I'm panicking: My breathing is shallow, my heart is pumping, and the predominant thought going through my head is, "I don't know these women! I don't know how to interpret them! I can't do this!" I feel paralyzed.
And I am stunned by how powerful my fear is. I feel like it's come bursting out of the ground like a wall of thorny roots that slam me to the ground flat on my back. And it hurts. I'm almost in tears. So much for blasting past my fears and skyrocketing.
And I didn't understand where the fear came from. It was just an exercise that no one was ever going to see! Why was I so frightened and panicked? I spent a lot of time writing in my personal journal yesterday, trying to figure out what to do about this fear: Find the root of the fear and get rid of it? Find a way to go around it? How can I go around it when it's so paralyzing?? And where is the thought that "I cannot do this" coming from? In the past, I've been very good at digging into characters and understanding their motivations.
Finally, towards the end of the day, I figured it out: the past characters I've worked on have all been in my comfort zone, meaning they're very much like me, so it wasn't too difficult to understand them. The only exception to this was the last scene I did last semester: Final Placement, a physically abusive and mentally unstable mother, the first role I was attempting that was a huge stretch for me. And I wanted so badly to do so well with that scene, give a riveting performance, but I didn't have the time, mental energy, or courage to put even half as much work into that scene as I felt was necessary to create the performance I wanted to give. I was in anguish over this. And the fact that my scene partner kept cancelling our rehearsals together didn't help anything either. So when my scene partner and I actually performed the scene, I had difficulty with my lines, and the whole thing just felt like an awful performance. I felt like I had failed. I knew the role was a stretch, and I had failed.
And so there's the root to my current fear: Stretching out of my comfort zone is linked to pain and failure. So this time, when I went looking for a monologue outside my comfort zone, panic set in.
Now that I know why the fear exsists helps to tame the fear a lot. I know I currently do not have the skills to stretch too much, but it's something I can learn with time and practice. And it feels like the right thing to do is to get back on the horse, so to speak, and pick a monologue from that scene, Final Placement. It's still a stretch, but because I've already done some of the work for it, it's not entirely unfamiliar territory.
No comments:
Post a Comment