
As an actor it is your job to play the emotional life of a character, to imagine the circumstances under which the character does certain things and all this by using your body to make it visible for the audience.
At times we need to dive deep into the abyss of emotional tragedies, killing people on stage, get killed ourselves, sometimes night after night, over and over again; being desperately in love with someone who doesn’t love us back or someone who does love us and we don’t really like them or do love them back. The range has no end in either direction.
How do you keep this away from your own life? How do you make a difference between your life and the life of the character when it sometimes seems that you have so much in common? Or that you have always wanted to say or do what your character does or says on stage?
I experienced over time that I didn’t leave the drama on stage but would take it home with me.
I would see being on stage as a form of therapy as I wasn’t someone who was very outgoing when not on stage, so I enjoyed the seeming freedom where I could do the things I wouldn’t do in my everyday life.
But what happened was that I cultivated some form of emotional range which I was convinced was my right to have especially as an actress because I can only live on stage what I can also live off stage, right? Or so I thought.
So the shyness would turn into aggression towards others whenever I felt that they were wrong or stupid or incompetent and the lovesickness that I experienced off stage I would use to feed my acting on stage.
But isn’t that what Method Acting is, you might ask? Aren’t we supposed to use our own experiences to fill a character as well as fantasy and imagination? Those are all great questions.
And everyone uses their own way to get to where the director wants you to go.
We think that we need to be super emotional in our everyday life so we have access to all the emotions like a reservoir that we can use while acting.
I experienced that this is not necessary at all.
The opposite is the case – the less drama I have in my life the freer I am to give life to a character on stage because then there is no mix up and no confusion of who am I and what the character is.
I realised that the more I healed all the undealt with issues like seeking recognition, not feeling good enough, being in comparison and competition, needing to prove myself … the freer I was to give a performance to the audience that was free of my own stuff and full of the character. Yes, my body was and is being used but what comes through comes through in this very moment without needing to prepare myself apart from learning the lines of course, but it feels like it only comes through and doesn’t stick or has a hold on me.
And when I feel it does then I attend to it by walking my own walk and breathing in my own rhythm backstage or feeling and connecting to my body and its natural gentle movements again and not, for example, the tense movements of the character.