Here are the things I’ve started doing again since my last post: Teaching; civilly disrupting; worrying about what I’m going to make for supper and occasionally actually making it; and, when I’m not doing those things, coaxing myself back into writing mode so I can get on with the funding application for my Rehearsal for a revolution performance project and maybe even the sit-com that is threatening to become a sit-forever-on-my-com(puter).
I also received some wonderful things in the post recently, including a piece of self-made art from one of my nieces, a fantastic play that I saw in London called Word-Play by Rabiah Hussain and my certificate from the Meisner Institute in Los Angeles certifying that I am now a designated Meisner teacher. Isn’t the post wonderful?
Last month was difficult as I got a severe pain in the neck from standing up to the fossil fuel industry. It all started in July when I went to London and back by bus for a school reunion. I try not to fly and I’d left it too late to book an affordable Eurostar ticket so the bus was the only option. The school reunion bit was great, but everything else about the trip was enormously stressful and on the way back I was thrown about so much in my semi-sleep that I ended up with a very stiff neck and left shoulder. Camping and hanging out with my beloved and bonkers family over the summer didn’t seem to improve matters so, a few weeks ago, I finally went to see a physio. I explained the situation and she set to work. It got a bit better but on my following visit I told her that I’d been stressed as I had been in the Hague getting battered by water cannons and pulled about by police during the Extinction Rebellion blockade of the A12 motorway. We have been going back every day since September 9th. (At this point, I had personally been three times.) I’d been quite nervous revealing this to her as of course people don’t always agree with our tactics but felt I needed to tell her, partly so she knew what I was going through and partly because it’s important to me to be open about what I do and why I do it. Fortunately, she wasn’t horrified by my actions. The next day, on Prinsjesdag, the day the king announces what the Dutch government plans to do (like the Queen’s Speech in the UK), I was back again and this time I was in a long dress in honour of XR’s own version of Prinsjesdag. After sitting on the ground attempting to shield myself with the one rain-proof thing I had remembered to bring (a re-useable plastic bag) I stood up and started dancing to keep warm and keep up my spirits. At this point, the cannon blasted me so squarely in my belly that I lost my footing but at the last second, I righted myself and placed by foot firmly back on the ground. This delighted me so much that I continued to pull what I thought were some very clever moves, making me feel like a Ninja. The next morning, my neck announced to me in no uncertain terms that I was, in fact, a moron. So, to summarise, the fossil fuel industry gave me whiplash, but I’m still standing, yeah, yeah, yeah! Even if my neck wishes I’d just have a nice lie-down.
Meanwhile, in the UK, Rishi Sunak announced his “I’ve scrapped it” U-turn on any measures to ensure our children have a future. The thing that terrifies me most about this is that his story that he’s saving the British electorate from the dictatorial imposition of expensive and unnecessary policies, isn’t only a lie, but will actually open the door to genuine eco-dictatorship. When our planet is past the point of no return, governments will come into power that brutally ration energy, food and travel for those who already have very little while allowing the powerful to continue to take whatever they want. Citizens’ assemblies (XR’s third demand) would allow us to come together to decide how we fairly and effectively distribute the burden among ourselves and this is why no Tory government will ever allow them to happen.
The world is a difficult place sometimes and I rage at all the injustice in it. At the same time, I am lucky enough to experience its beauty every day, even if that is just the way sunlight breaks through a cloud and lends the world its gold for a few moments. Teaching the fourth class last week, I realised that we had reached that moment in each of the three courses when the students struggle to understand what we are doing and I struggle to remind myself that this, too, is part of the process. To be truly authentic is to learn the ability to really listen and take in, and take personally, what the other person is communicating to you.
In the Friday’s foundation class, which I am teaching in the luxurious cinema space at OT301, we had a visit two weeks ago from Meisner-trained actor and all-round lovely human being, Lee Kaplan. Lee had some really interesting insights about choosing an activity that “lights you up” for the independent activity exercises. The aim of this exercise, which gets more elaborate as you progress, is to get actors used to working off each other truthfully as they have already learned with repetition, under a “circumstance”. Meisner defined acting as “living truthfully under imaginary circumstances” and developed the repetition exercise as a way to help actors get out of their heads by putting their attention on the other person, thereby releasing spontaneous behaviour. So now we learn to take our attention off ourselves even further by fully doing an independent activity (really putting our attention on it) and responding to the other person. The activity can only be done by you – your scene partner is not allowed to help, hence the “independent” bit. It can be anything but you must really do it, so you must bring in everything you need in which to complete it. You must also do it in a set amount of time, e.g 15 minutes, and to a certain “standard of perfection” so that it’s clear to you if you succeed in your activity or not. And of course, the point of this exercise is not whether or not you complete the activity but what the doing (or not doing) of it does to your behaviour. Perhaps the activity is a pot broken into many pieces that you are going to glue together so that it’s completely whole again; perhaps it’s a song on the piano that you want to perfect or a bike tyre that needs replacing. The more difficult our task, the more it will absorb us and cause us the struggle that creates inner life. Students often find it hard to bring in activities that truly “light them up”, either bringing in tasks that are too easy of that they don’t really care about. (For me, this part of the work was relatively easy as I suck at so many things and desperately want to be better at them!)
If you learn to commit fully to doing your activity, once you bring in the justification for doing it, alway as imaginary reason related to a real person in your life who has great emotional significance to you, you will find yourself completely absorbed. I promise you this works and here’s the reason: Your subconscious cannot tell the difference between an imaginary circumstance and the real thing. Think about how you can bring yourself to a state of tears, anger or great joy through a daydream. This is precisely the way you must come up with your activities and the crafting for them in the later stages of the exercise. Above, you can see one of my first attempts at this exercise: sewing three buttons onto a cloth that belongs to my daughter, who at the time was two, to comfort her while she was in hospital for life-saving surgery. I’d set it up so that I had to finish the sewing and get to the hospital in 20 minutes. The daughter and the cloth were real; the hospitalisation was not. The buttons were spare buttons from a cardigan I have which she loved. The sewing was a struggle for me and at a certain point my scene partner told me truthfully (by which I mean, from her point of view) that the cloth looked ugly … and I burst into tears. When students say, “But I don’t know what activity to do!” I say: No one but you can know what will really bring you to life, so shut down your phone, go for a walk and allow yourself to dream a little dream that is entirely personal to you.*
After Lee had left, some of the students and I had a conversation about what it is you need to progress in the Meisner work. For me, it’s primarily commitment. Progress can often seem frustratingly non-linear and while a student may think they’ve “got it” one week, the next feels like a slide backwards. The truth is, every time is an attempt and the more attempts we make, the more we build our skills and ability to stay in the moment, even if that’s by learning to recognise when we are not in the moment. Keep turning up, keep trying, keeping processing and you will progress.
The intermediate class, otherwise known as the Phenomenal Thursdays, are a case in point. There were a couple of people in this class who started with me in a different acting class and have made such incredible progress that I barely recognise them, even though I do recognise the thing in them I saw the first time I met them – commitment. This group is now learning to improvise within an imaginary relationship, continuing to use the skills they learned in the foundation course: listening, putting your attention on the other person, responding authentically moment to moment and using emotional preparation for the first moment in the scene. There has been some beautifully compelling work with actors learning to be vulnerable and compassionate, as well as safely releasing emotions like anger and despair.
An Italian artist friend of mine, Domenico Magnano, recently asked me to translate the lyrics of a song/poem he has written for his co-creater and lover for a video that forms his part of their performance art project Yes, I do at the Niewe Dakota gallery. It is a beautiful poem that reveals him completely. Reading it, it struck me that what makes an artist an artist is not their talent, but their need to share their vulnerability, in whatever form it takes. It is a generosity that often comes from deep pain and leads to more, but continues to be present despite this. (You never really develop a thick skin, because if you did, you couldn’t be an artist anymore.) At the opening of their show his partner, Marieke van Rooy, performed her part of the project, donning especially-made majorette-like clothes doing a dance and singing “Be yourself and do it”. There were stares of incomprehension from the crowd when she started and afterwards too but she remained completely committed throughout and was mesmerising to watch. When she finished, she created a bed using a cloth and some shelves, hid under the cloth and then started telling us a very personal story about her father’s funeral.
So now when people ask me what you need to become an actor, I say: Thin skin, commitment, and an intense desire to share your authentic self. Mix well and add plenty of hard work and daydreams to taste!
*And I am very happy to say that, two weeks on, the students have brought in some wonderfully life-inducing activities that have taken them on journeys from deep sorrow to anger to laughter and back again.
UPDATE: I meant to post this a while ago so it’s now out of date. I am incredibly happy to say that after 27 days of blocking the A12 highway asking for an end to fossil fuel subsidies, the Dutch parliament just passed a motion to ask for scenarios for two and seven year time horizons which need to be presented before Christmas. We’re not there yet, but hopefully this is the first moment that will bring us to where we need to be.
Leila Gray 