Getting personal

It’s such a joy to see people doing the repetition exercise and discovering how a seemingly banal observation can bring out all sorts of reactions in the other person if that person is truly listening and taking it personally. Meisner spoke a lot about taking things personally. In real life, if someone says something that hurts us and we don’t have a very close relationship with them (and sometimes even or especially if we do) we brush it off or pretend it didn’t affect us. We don’t call it out and stand up for ourselves because we’re afraid of conflict and we’re afraid that it will cause us more pain if we really let the hurtful words in.

In acting, we have to learn to take things personally otherwise we won’t ever come alive. Learning to do this is a whole journey and it’s a huge part of what we learn when we first start to do the Meisner exercises. It’s fascinating to see people’s defence mechanisms when they begin, the little tricks they sew together into a full suit of armour: The nervous laughter, the ironic replies and the fake bravado. When you fully commit to the exercises, that armour will start to fall off, bit by bit, leaving you vulnerable and open to your fellow actors and to the power of your own imagination.

Of course, our egos wouldn’t survive the real world without some armour but many adult actors have picked up so much that they struggle to relate to another person unless they can do it through the foil of a character. Meisner exercises teach us to deal with ourselves first. We cannot learn to play characters freely, with access to the whole range of human emotions, if we don’t allow ourselves to experience them first. So many people have said to me “I could never be an actor because I’m no good at hiding my feelings” and yet that is precisely what we need in our actors. Acting is revealing not concealing.

Cultural context also plays a role here. Most adults I know, and I come from the UK, where people are known to have stiff upper lips and an abrasive and self-deprecating sense of humour, are taught that showing emotion in public is simply not done. (Of course, I am also 475 and younger generations are definitely more emotionally open.)

So what does taking things personally look like? It means that when someone says something to you in an exercise, you take it as you would if someone really close to you had said it. To give an example, in the course of the repetition exercise one student tells another she is “arrogant”. She is clearly upset by this – we can all see this immediately from her behaviour – but both students then brush it away and the moment is lost. If they acknowledge the fact that one of them has hurt the other, the connection between them will change into another moment and another and another. Imagine if a colleague at work whom you don’t know well calls you arrogant in the course of a meeting. You will probably become defensive or embarrassed and try to walk away as quickly as possible. That evening at home, you might rage about it to a close friend, turn it into a funny story ridiculing your colleague or burst into tears. Either way, you will have some sort of reaction that you only release when it is safe to do so. If however, a family member or very close friend calls you arrogant, you may very well find your reaction comes swiftly and fully. Taking it personally simply means taking it as you would if the person opposite you has great emotional significance to you. The beauty of this is that once you accept that magic “as if”, it will become true. Our fellow players are genuinely the most significant people to us in the moments we are connecting with them.

Other thoughts that have come up in my classes recently include how important it is to tell actors when they are getting it right. I remember one play in which I got incredibly hung up on not feeling ready to burst into tears at the moment I was meant to. The irony was that every time I got to this point in the play, I was feeling absolutely miserable – which was exactly what I was supposed to be feeling. But instead of just allowing that to be, I would go up into my head and tell myself that the reason I was miserable was that I was a terrible actor, instead of recognising that the emotions came from the imaginary circumstances and staying with them. Unfortunately, in that case the director wasn’t able to help me with this. Meisner student and American playwright David Mamet talks about exactly this in his wonderful book True and False. It is very instructive to recognise that when you feel frustrated or hurt or hyper during rehearsals or film shoots that those emotions are almost certainly coming from connection to the material you are working on. We are very suggestible as actors but we are also very self-critical, which stops us from just allowing ourselves to be.

Another observation from teaching my workshop in Berlin last week (of which more in another post) is that the energy of a person who is hiding their emotions can have a very negative effect on the rest of the group. Feeling sad or angry when you come in to class isn’t the issue. These emotions have a tangible effect on our behaviour and as long as we acknowledge them, they can also change. Hiding our emotions however takes a lot of energy so that there is no energy left to be open to others and change. At the start of all my classes and rehearsals, we always sit in a circle and have a moment to share how we feel in that moment. Sometimes we comment on each other’s contributions but mostly we just listen. It’s Very Therapy. I keep expecting someone to rebel but so far everyone has always leaned into it, although some people find it harder than others. Still, even those people get into it eventually. It’s a simple way to figure out what you’re feeling so you can get on with what you’re doing and not constantly be in your head trying to deal with it or stop it from getting out in a Don’t Mention The War sort of way.

I also did a spoof voiceover for Fossielvrij Kultur, a wonderful group that stages performance art or artivism to get art institutions to stop accepting sponsorship from fossil fuel companies like BP and Shell or the big banks that bankroll them (looking at you, HSBC, Barclays and ING). It was one of the most satisfying voice-over jobs I’ve done for a while as I was able to bring my voice work and activism together. (In the absence of a Meisner actor to call bullshit on “my activism” I will have to do it myself and point out that it has been far too long since I joined my XR crew on the streets. I intend to correct this at the first opportunity.)

Tonight I will be working on my devised project again with one of my acting groups before our show next week. We are absolutely 100 percent not ready and have no idea what will happen. And so it must be.

_{Here are some photos of the wonderful Joanna Lucas and Anna Anning stalking each other emotionally.}