Hey there, dear Substack subscribers
Check out my new Zoom Masterclass series beginning June 04! It's 5 x 4-hour weekly on-line classes and actors are loving it. Here's the link, hope to see you there as a performer or an auditor. Here's what one actor had to say about it:
She is a magical game-changer
— Alex Tarrant (Lord of the Rings, NCIS Hawai'i)
And remember, over on my paid-subscription site these articles continue with more detail and behind-the-scenes material — and an archive to access. Check it out!
REVERSE THE FLOW.
Make it about the other person, not about yourself. Reach beyond yourself to connect with the people around you. That is what the camera loves to see and that is what today’s article is about.
HIDE SELF VIEW
Imagine you are holding your phone. You want to take a photo of your favourite person. But you find that selfie-mode is activated. All you can see is your own face! Argh! You have to press the icon to flip the focus off your own face to the other person.
This is the process of reverse the flow. Learn to make that flip in your mind. As we say on Zoom, “Hide self-view”.
In my article WHITE SPACE, I wrote about how actors and directors need to value the white space on the page, the thoughts, just as much as we value the black marks on the page, the words.
The poet Keats called this negative capability. The Japanese call it Ma and the people of Samoa call it Le Va. Samoan novelist, Albert Wendt says:
Va is the space between, the betweenness, not empty space, not space that separates but space that relates, that holds separate entities and things together in the Unity-that-is-All, the space that is context, giving meaning to things.
Here are two visual illusions that open up for you the experience of flipping your awareness from word to thought... from black to white... from text to space. They are called Kanizsa’s Triangle and Rubin’s Vase. Let your gaze flick from seeing the black text on the page to acknowledging the white spaces on the page. In the first one can you flick from seeing the faces to the vase? And in the second one can you flick in and out of seeing the triangle?
CURIOSITY
Space exists not only on the page but also between people. What is the rare tool that allows us to reach across this space between us? Curiosity. We need to stop obsessing about ourselves and sharpen our sense of curiosity about the other. If you have read my article about SELF-TAPING, you will know that I think the reader is the most important person in the room. The camera wants to see you thinking, wondering, dreaming about the other person, not about your own performance. Reverse the flow!
CASE-STUDY: PRISONS
Here’s a story about the moment I was freed from self-consciousness in acting.
I had toured my multi-character solo show VERBATIM (1992) to all the prisons in New Zealand before I toured it internationally.
A year later, I took the show back to the prisons in New Zealand. At Waikeria Prison in the Waikato region, an inmate was deployed to help us unpack the van. As we set up, he asked me, “Hey, where’s everyone else?” I said, “Umm, it is just me, this is a solo show.” He said, “Nup. I saw this show last year and there were heaps of people in it."
For that prison-inmate, it was not the solo-performance he had noticed and remembered. It was the story. The director, designer and I had worked hard on crafting intricate transitions, compelling characterisations, the magic of theatre. But this guy did not care about that stuff. He was not there to review the craft in the work. He was there to feel the spirit in the work, to see himself and his own pain reflected back at him.
That experience was very free-ing for me. I realised that when I took this story to prisons, boys’ homes and schools, no one was looking at my acting. Sure, the acting had to be good enough to carry the show, but the acting was not the point of the show. This lifted the burden of “proving myself” off my shoulders and allowed me to invest more deeply in the relationship each of those characters had with each other and the audience. To invest in the space between them and me. The experience made me a better actor.
It enabled me to take this new freedom with me, out of the prisons and into theatres and onto the screen, to act without the limiting fear of feeling watched and judged. What a gift.
THEORY OF MIND
On that same prison tour, an inmate at Paremoremo Maximum Security Prison told me that our show VERBATIM had allowed him to “take a walk in someone else’s shoes”, in the shoes of his mum or his girlfriend or his sister, and to see from a different perspective how his crime and his choices impacted on their lives.
Theory of Mind is the measure of our ability to take a walk in someone else’s shoes. It is a measure of our empathy and ability to understand that others have beliefs, intentions, desires, emotions and knowledge that are different from our own. Psychologists say that functional theory of mind is crucial for success in everyday social interactions in which we need to empathise with, interpret and infer the motivations for the behaviours of others.
This also seems to me like a pretty good description of what it takes to be an actor!
Reverse the Flow. Hide Self-view.
LINKS
Here you can find a link to the documentary ACT OF MURDER, following the show as it toured through the 22 prisons in New Zealand.
And here you can find the published play, alongside another verbatim play PORTRAITS (1995) by me and Stuart McKenzie.
… Va is the space between, the between-ness…. Albert Wendt ONZ
