Vulnerability is something that I have been focusing on a lot this past week. Not just in my acting, but in life as well. It's amazing to me how so many aspects of acting can be integrated into my daily life. For example, I now look at situations in life and find myself considering, "what is my objective in this situation and what is my obstacle? How can I project in this situation?" I guess there is a lot of acting going on in life in general. Well, being vulnerable is one of those aspects.
Something that was mentioned in class really hit me and made me stop and think. We were workshopping one of the performances of one of my classmates and we started discussing authenticity. It is often difficult to be authentic when you are trying to be someone else, but it is so important to find that. We were wondering how that could be discovered so readily and our instructor pointed out that when you release tension it goes to a place that is authentic and real. That is a very scary and vulnerable place to be.
Thinking about it, it is much the same with my singing. The whole point of voice instructors, are to help you get out of your own way and discover your true authentic singing voice by releasing tension in places that you don't need it. It is scary. It is scary to let yourself be seen and to allow others to see the rawness of you. It is so much easier to hide behind a persona and a mask. That way if a mistake is made then the blame is lifted off of you a bit. This is even easier to do in acting. You are not being yourself, right? Unfortunately, authenticity is essential to make a character believable. As Stanislavski beautifully put, "Acting is behaving truthfully under imaginary circumstances." That requires you to be truthful. That rawness of you needs to be shown in order to help the audience understand who you are portraying. As an actor, your job is to portray the human character and as a member of the human race, you are the best one for the job.
As I have mentioned, this type of vulnerability is scary and oftentimes difficult. Vulnerability often leads to self-consciousness, which has been said is "the actors greatest enemy." As we learned in the last workshop in class, the way to overcome self-consciousness is to do. "Being" is not something that can be forced. Authenticity automatically leaves when you are trying to force and emotion or a persona. In order to portray a certain emotion, projection needs to take place. Find an objective and focus on the "other." It is the same when we are having a bad day in our life and we focus on helping someone else's day to be better. As a result, our day will improve and our persona will improve without us having to consciously change it. That is what projection can do in life and in acting. That is the antidote to self-consciousness.
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