CONNECTION

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People want to watch other people. But more importantly, people want to watch other people connecting — in love, rage, attraction, repulsion, sorrow, friendship, curiosity and a myriad of other states.

Between us is a space we need to cross. We use simple greetings to do this every day. Sometimes we use touch like a high-five or a hug. In the post-Covid world, the customary Western handshake is being replaced by a fist or elbow-bump. Increasingly now we use greetings without touch, like a wave, a nod or the salutation namaste. In Nepal, people used to greet each other by sticking out their tongues.

Actors cross this space with thoughts, words, feelings and gestures.

It’s the space between. The between-ness. Not empty space, not space that separates but space that connects.

That is how novelist Albert Wendt describes the Samoan cultural concept Le Va. In Samoan culture (Fa’a Samoa) Le Va is all of space and all of time. It is the space between Saturn and Jupiter. It is the space between me and my father who died in 1995 yet is still with me. It is the space between you and the person sitting right next to you. It describes the space the camera can see, created by the actors’ relationships with each other.

You can change your relationship with the other actor just by thinking about Le Va, the space between. As Hamlet says, sometimes just “thinking makes it so”.

UNSELFCONSCIOUSNESS

The very act of observing will alter the phenomenon being observed.

This is how quantum physicists describe The Observation Effect. The experiment takes place at a miniscule level. In it, electrons actually change their behaviour depending on whether or not they are being watched… just like people do.

I was part of the creative team that made the 10-part prime time documentary series TOUGH ACT (2005) which follows 20 actors through the emotional and practical challenges of their first year of training at Toi Whakaari: New Zealand Drama School. To begin with, the young actors were very alert to the camera. They slightly altered their behaviour when they knew they were being watched. But after many hours of being filmed, they lost their self-consciousness and forgot the camera was there. This was when their behaviour was at its most watchable and authentic.

You can see all 10 episodes of TOUGH ACT on my youtube channel here.

Watching documentaries and news-stories allows you to see people at their most unvarnished and real. It’s the quality some film-makers aim to capture in their work. Watch the films of Debra Granik, Kelly Reichardt, Andrea Arnold and Chloe Zhao to see great examples.

EXERCISE: SELF-TAPE

You can practice becoming unselfconscious. Try putting your cellphone on the kitchen bench. Film yourself doing something that takes enough focus to make you forget you are being watched by the camera. Cooking dinner or wrapping a gift are good examples. These tasks are easy to do, but sufficiently tricky to capture your full attention. Leave the camera running for long enough to forget you are being filmed.

You might watch the video back … or maybe you might just delete it. You are in charge; you don’t need to be afraid of being judged. If you do watch it back, you will see that your activity is distracting you from noticing that you are being observed. How does it feel?

Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls this state FLOW

… a state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter

Based on the work of the founding father of naturalism, Konstantin Stanislavsky, Stella Adler developed the exercise Public Solitude, aiming for this same outcome.

If you are truly unselfconscious the camera can read the tiny fluctuations of thoughts and feelings clearly as they flicker unmediated across your expressions. These are the micro-expressions documented by psychologist Paul Ekman. They are tiny, uncontrollable shifts and changes in your eyes and in the 44 muscles of your face, created by your thoughts and memories.

But right now, let’s return to the impulse to reach across Le Va.

GAMES

Schoolyard clapping games are my favourite tool to cross the space between humans, whether it is creating a connection between brothers Saroo and Guddu when I was the acting coach on the film LION (2016) or between lovers Mary and Ned in THE TRUE HISTORY OF THE KELLY GANG (2019).

Hand and clapping games originated in the playground where pre-teen kids seek ways to connect with other kids around them. I have collected clapping games in playgrounds from Rarotonga to New York. Once kids grow a little older, they start to cross that space-between with ideas and conversation, but in preparation they use the rhythms and tricky challenges of games (or body-texts) to reach out and make a visceral connection with one another. That’s why these games are so useful for actors. All you need to play a game is willingness to learn and a sense of curiosity about what the other person is thinking and feeling. Playing games creates an invisible bridge.

Entangled particles remain connected so that actions performed on one affect the other, even when separated by great distances.

This is how physicist Ernst Schrodinger described quantum entanglement, which Einstein later called Spooky Action at a Distance.

Many times, I have helped a director create a sense of entanglement by linking-up a bunch of strangers to become an on-screen family quickly or connecting a group of teens to forge a gang of old buddies. As a kick-off, it is a winning formula to ask the actors to teach each other a clapping game.

CHALLENGE

You can find a few on the Quick Tips and Games tab on my website.

You are aiming to know the game not just in your mind but deep in your body so that in the playing of the game you can focus not on remembering the structure but on creating your relationship with the other person.

This kind of remembering is called noetic knowledge, when it is just part of you, and you do not have to think about it. It is worth pointing out that this is how deeply actors need to know their text.

Teach the game to someone else — your acting partner, someone in your family — and see how richly you occupy the space-between, both while you are learning together and once you have mastered the game. Now you are on the way to being in the flow.

Thanks for reading! You can read more deeply on this topic and many others if you subscribe to my archive of Substack articles at this link.

But of course, you are welcome to keep checking in on these briefer free articles too!

xx Miranda

Check out my Substack articles about acting: mirandaharcourt.substack.com

Check out my website: mirandaharcourt.com

Check out my Youtube vids: www.youtube.com/c/MirandaHarcourtActingCoach