This is from one of my current students.
Recently in class I started making some significant progress. David asked me to explain what I was suddenly connecting with that I wasn’t before. Here’s what I came up with, maybe it will strike a cord someone else as well.
Before I arrived at David’s acting classes in Los Angeles I believed acting was an accumulation of skill sets; character analysis, beat-by-beat
breakdowns, objectives, historical context, the moment before, etc David showed me, on the contrary, those are great concepts to vault from when I was first dipping my toes in the creative pool, but they can only lead to finite, text driven performances (i.e. line readings). If I wanted to break-through and begin taking my acting to the next level, however, then those intellectual concepts were training wheels that I needed to rid myself of. David convinced me it isn’t about the story, he’s even gone as far to say, “There is no story.” My scene partner and I will tell our own story by being emotionally connected to one another and the words will their impact all on their own. The skill set I have been holding onto so tightly is limiting and could only take me so far. It didn’t teach me to swim in my own creativity, it only gave me a life-preserver so I didn’t drown.
The big “Aha!“ for me was this shift in perspective. It isn’t about
accumulating skills that build upon one another that make a
performance rich and complex, but rather emptying out the
emotional/intellectual junk that stands in my way. Oddly enough, this process is much like coming of age was described in one of my favorite books:
‘Milestones passed.’…It was funny, but the more things I did…the
emptier I felt. Like you started out full and kept throwing things
overboard instead of the other way around. It wasn’t how I thought it would work. (Pete Fromm, As Cool As I Am, p125)
Since I began leashing my intellectual understanding and started
achieving some emotional clarity, I’ve been asking myself, what do I do now? Exactly that: do! With the aid of the cold reading exercise, David helped me see my need to be comfortable with the story before I would commit emotionally, was like standing on the edge of the pool and taking a temperature instead of jumping in and finding out. I need to quit worrying about the result and commit to ‘doing’ from the get-go regardless of whether my instincts make sense. I have to stop
trying to be good and start being instinctual. For me, this has been the scariest step, probably why I haven‘t gone there until recently. If I risk following my instincts irreverent of the result, I may fail; I may reveal something humiliating; or worse, I may belie my emotional security. But as we all know from watching our tapes, even failure and humiliation are more alive than line readings. So I’ve stopped waiting, stopped guessing, stopped worrying. Hey, sometimes the water is freezing and painful, but it is certainly more fun to just leap.
The final realization I attribute to my recent progress that I wish to share, is that I am seeing how much my need for validation, my need to be please, and my drive to be good, has blocked my development as an actor. The drive cultured by my need for validation is a great way to stay disciplined, but it has served as a major stumbling block throughout my development, because it brings in the third-eye: critical self-awareness, worry and self-doubt. To combat these desires (admittedly, I will probably never rid myself of them), I’ve quit crafting performances to save face. Furthermore, I can’t be hard on myself for making mistakes. After all, I can’t know what acting is until I know what it isn’t. It is just part of the process and I can’t beat myself up for progress exploring different avenues. Now I try to just sit down, breath deep, and trust that if I listen the other person my own authentic creative forces will come to my aid. And every time I do that, whether in class, sports or life, I feel myself grow.
Ben Maixner
Copyright 2007 David Kagen All rights reserved