I had a great acting teacher in grad school. One of the things he said that always stuck with me is that you have to obsess about your work.
Sometimes you get to a point in the process where the work starts to take over your daily life. The sooner this happens the better and I realized last night it was really starting to happen.
How do I know?
After I typed the blog I started to get ready for bed. I'm brushing my teeth and then the next thing I know, I had been in the bathroom for probably about five minutes going over moves for a particular section of the fight... over and over. Now, I have a nice hotel room, but the bathroom isn't THAT big. It's not the ideal place to be working a fight. hahaha...
Then I was laying in bed, and my mind was just going over this one little section of a scene... over and over... thinking about the lines... the "dance"... etc.
In both of these circumstances, I didn't consciously say I was going to start working on those moments... it just starts to happen. Like the moment just takes me over for a bit and I start obsessing about it. Then, I all of the sudden I realize what is going on, and I kind of snap back out of it.
This happens to me in the shower all the time. Haha. I'll be in the shower and then 10 minutes will have passed and I will realize that I have been working on an audition monologue or a scene from a show I am working on or whatever. I bet this happens to me at least twice a week.
All of this is great when it is just happening in my hotel room, but it's kind of funny when it happens out in public. Many an actor has just been walking down the street and then, all of the sudden, they slip into a monologue or something. I can only imaging how crazy we must look. I bet half of the "crazy people" that visitors to NYC report home about are probably just actors who have momentarily done this "snap" into a role. I'm always excited when students in my Acting One class get to this place... because, to me, it means they are really starting to get to a place with their work that transcends any sort of grade for the assignment. It stops becoming about a grade and starts to become about really finding the role.
Meanwhile, it's fun to see that a conscious obsessing is starting to take place amongst some of the actors. I'm going in early to rehearsal today to work on the fight (and I'm bringing the dowel rods to use since we won't have our swords.) The audience doesn't care how much time we had to rehearse. They only care if it's good. I've said things like that before but it is worth repeating. So, I suspect a lot of us will meet with each other outside of rehearsal just to get certain moments where we want them since the rehearsal schedule might not allow us enough time to do so. If you really are obsessing about your role, the allotted time you have for rehearsal is never enough, so you find ways to rehearse more.
That's the best part of it, though, finding it everywhere else. Because without that, what's the point?
ReplyDeleteActing... at least the way I've always seen it... is living with a hundred people stuffed inside one's body, a hundred souls mingling with one's own. It isn't something one can ever turn off - not if one is doing it correctly - because for the rest of one's life the character one designates as oneself is going to be shaded by all of the other characters in that body. One can never really escape. One shouldn't ever really want to.