“…art: to give all you have. And what have you?”
Michael Chekhov
What is the all that YOU can give that a corpse can not?
Continuing on from yesterday per my promise to address more about the meaning of “you” as a human and as an artist. THE END IS A MUST READ FOR ALL PERFORMERS!
My belief is that we are here to pursue a life in a constant state of Peak Performance. In this zone of awesomeness, time and space cease to exist in our daily continuum. Dimensionality and separation cease to exist in our field of experience. Feelings of Beauty, Ease, Entirety and Form engulf us and our witnesses. At such moments of this, who are “you”? Are you the same being who tripped over the door jam a few minutes ago? The same you who txtd ur bff 3 secs. ago? The spiritually centered prayerful meditator? The you that was mortified when that guy did that thing to you five years ago? The you that earned that trophy up there? The you that holds that infant in your arms? Or the you upon whom you shall reflect moments before you cross the threshold?
Are you your body? Are you your thoughts? Your Feelings? Your dreams, your biography of pains and joys? Are you the chronology of events that have paraded through all your days of existence? Your life time or lifetimes? What is your identity? Is your personality your identity-the sum total of you? Are you limited to the you that needs to feel unique? To feel worthy? To feel approved? To feel in control? To be right? To be happy? To be safe?
When in our lives we whittle the definition of a human being to any of the above, we separate from the grander you. The human being who aims to give can offer so much more than an opinion formed from thoughts. Giving the whole of you can include giving your highest vision life and expression. Giving your whole being can include giving interest to another’s ideas without judgment. You can give a glance, a helping hand, a written word, a sketch, a prayer. You can give a step forward, a saving embrace, a laugh, a well timed moment of silence. And you can give it to another–an other’s whole being- body, mind and spirit. The YOU into whose eyes I gaze. In all cases, the vehicle for your giving is your body. To be capable of giving your all, your body must be capable of expressing your all, beyond the boundaries of its habitual patterns of “me”ness.
ARE YOU ON A PATH OF SELF DEVELOPMENT?
Have you been seeking to upgrade your life, to increase the depth and wholeness of you and have a passion to give more fully? Have you struggled through learning, redefining, resolving to do things differently, only to revert back to the old habits? Have you ever been disappointed in your progress? Dissatisfied with the outcomes of your efforts? Perhaps you have not encompassed the whole of you in your process. Is it possible that your body was absent from the seminar or didn’t read the same book your mind did?
The pattern of everyday use of our bodies has evolved and refined itself since our conception. Your energy managements systems are as old as your body is and mostly likely using the same “OS” as when you were eight years old. That Body Operating System might be as out of date as the computers that were around when you were in third grade. Imagine operating on such an old hard drive? With out of date programs? You could purchase ap after ap, seminar after seminar, book after book, and truly build a body of knowledge about how new software could be serving you. Wait-Without updating the body of hardware, installation of the new, time-appropriate, efficient and speedy operating systems with lightning browsers will be improbable. And the greater the gap between your ever increasing knowledge and your unchanged body habits, the more likely the system will freeze, lock up, crash. OUCH! Why do I still do that, when I know better? Perhaps its because “You” forgot to get your body to know better.
For any human seeking to live in continuous peak performance, I encourage you to develop the joy of restyling your walk, the way you reach for an object, the way you breath, how you move your eyes through space. Freedom for deeper, more rapid growth and integration of knowledge will abound.
For any artist who can not get their ideas to come out right—you know you are talented. You know you have the creativity within. Therefore, any gap between image and expression must be due to old energy management systems incapable of delivering the more powerful new inspiration. The solution is to adopt universal energy management systems that allow any image to express it self-retool your movement partterns-NO MORE MIND-BODY Gap.
And NOW– specifically for ACTORS:
Who is the You that most actors aspire to use as their source of emotional power? The personality you have developed? That has grown into your biology? That has shaped your posture, your gestures, your habits, your walk, your tempo, rhythm and all other bodily means of expression?
When you are asked to be YOU–who is that? and more to the point–if it is just the everyday me-why would anyone pay to see that? Why wouldn’t they just want to be my friend? Why would they go to a theater or sit in front of a TV? They can just FB me.
It is the higher I that is of interest. Through the Higher Ego, the artist can draw forth inspiration from the whole of creation, and filter through the lens of universal principle and unbounded imagination. From my lower ego, I am limited to drawing upon my past, or relegated to a co-dependent relationship with my partner. I must rely on my reservoir of past triggers to be activated by some other actor and remove my established filters of social propriety to respond truthfully. And if I never was in those given circumstances before, I magically assume that my uniquely developed personality, now unmasked and hopefully provoked, will be the identical response that my character would have in this circumstance. Would my character actually respond any more like me than you would? And would it have to remove all of its social filters in order for its response to be considered Truthful? Yikes, its all gobbledy gook and its bought by actors across the globe because they fear that if they don’t use a technique that is hip-that they won’t make it!
Your body is what the audience sees–55% of what you communicate! Your tonality, tempo and rhythm of voice is 37% of what they take in. The writer’s text is 7%. If you are not training the ALL of YOU, to be expressing in the movement of body, sound and breath-then you are conveying less than a human being. THERE IS NO MORE OBVIOUS FACT THAN THIS: IF YOU TRAIN YOUR BRAIN TO RECALL OR RESPOND OR IMAGINE, WITHOUT TRAINING YOUR BODY TO BE SENSITIVE TO IMAGES, YOU MAY BE AN INTELLIGENT ACTOR, BUT YOU WILL NEVER BE SATISFIED. YOU MAY FOOL YOUR AUDIENCES, BUT NEVER FOOL YOURSELF.
YOU WILL HAVE FLEETING MOMENTS OF PEAK PERFORMANCE AND YEARS OF THE PAIN OF UNEXPRESSED CREATIVITY. MAKE A NEW CHOICE. GET PSYCHO-PHYSICAL TRAINING.