
Lately I’ve been feeling how much hardness my body has taken on over the years. It is felt as protection around my shoulders, shoulder blades and my upper chest.
I can feel it for example when I walk towards people and they towards me in the street or in a corridor. There is a tendency to brace in this area of the body, always ready to get the punch. And even though no word has been spoken yet, everything seems to be already communicated via our bodies.
Have you noticed that you lift your chin a bit and the other person as well? Ready to fight although you both might even smile at the same time. How contorted is our reality!
In the past I found myself squirming even more when walking towards someone in the street. I prepared myself already seconds before seeing them come closer to me. As if I needed to make sure they didn’t feel threatened by me or, better still, like me so I played small to make them feel better – or so was my belief.
Nowadays it becomes so visible how much protection there is in women. How much women think they need to play tough in order to keep up with men or deal with the jealousy that comes through other women and with the circumstances that we live in. It actually only covers up huge insecurity.
The exquisiteness of women and their innate caring tender quality seem to have no space anymore. It seems to be old-fashioned.
Everything is supposed to be leading into a fight. Fighting for your rights, for your equality, for equal salaries, for being taken seriously and so on. And this way our sensitivity is totally harmed and crushed. We might not feel it but with the example in the beginning it became very tangible for me how different the body feels when it is in contraction to when it is not and also how our interactions change when we bring focus to this part of the body and just let it go. On the outside nothing seemingly changes, but the response is massive.
The person coming towards you immediately doesn´t feel threatened anymore and feels safe to hold your gaze. Try it, you can feel it!
It also has an amazing effect on stage. If I let go of this protection towards the audience, I immediately have no fear of forgetting the lines anymore.
We are so used to thinking that holding on to something like the text, the intensity of the emotion in the body, the safety net of the rehearsed performance will give us security. But that’s a lie.
I experienced that it makes me feel very dull and not alive and so is my performance then if I have to repeat it every night.
If I allow my body to let go and feel what is going on around it without losing myself in it, then there are uncountable ways to play the same things and say the same lines over and over again and still it will sound very different every night.
Every night something else is needed for those that watch – so who am I to know, to judge or to interfere with what comes through me?