Yeah, But How Do You Feel About It Now?

There is a misconception that doesn’t want to go away. I’ve touched on this subject a couple of times before in this blog, but now is a good time to address it head on. All of our work lives in the here and now, not in the there and then. Yet many actors think in the past in order to get in touch with something necessary for a scene.

This is only one example, but there are many times when discussing his/her work after a scene that an actor will tell me that they are using a “substitution” to establish the relationship between the characters. They go on to say, “my character is in love with the other character, and I am creating someone I used to be in love with”. This is the time to put everything on hold an investigate what is organic and real as opposed to mental.

At this point I go on to ask the actor if s/he is currently in love with anyone. After all, if they are, they might not have to look any further than that to find a suitable substitution. But if they are not, then that actor will certainly have to look for some alternative. What that is, is a subject for an acting class and not a blog. But one thing I can say with certainty is that going into your past and creating someone “you used to be in love with” will not help unless you are still in love with that person.

I like to tell my students that if I could help them create someone from an earlier time in their lives and get back in touch with how they used to feel about them, I would give up teaching acting and call myself Dr. Dave. People would line up for miles to get to see me and have me help them recapture lost love. And make no mistake about it, I would charge exorbitant amounts of money in order to help these people feel “the way they used to”.

This need for immediacy in our acting is true for all of the other creative work that we do as well. “Personal Objects”, “Childhood (or otherwise important) Places”, “Overall Sensations” “Music”, etc., even the “Affective Memory” are only as good as today’s perspectives and responses. Why do so many people have this wrong idea? I don’t believe that there is any one reason, but as in so many other areas of our lives, we learn from our mistakes.

If a person misbehaves with us we learn not to trust them or their behavior. When we see them again we automatically expect them to be the same way and we protect ourselves. The cliché, “once foolish, twice a fool”, has a vey real place in our lives. But sometimes people do change, and more importantly, so do we. The very thing that we thought of as unpleasant may no longer be so. Our sense of taste holds a great example for this. As children we might have tasted something that we perceived as “disgusting”. Strong tasting fish such as sardines or anchovies are often like that. Many of us avoid these tastes for the rest of our lives because we remember our first experiences with them. Yet if we try again as adults we often find that we actually like them.

We even carry memories of events with us that lead us to believe that we would never want to have that happen again. Recalling a time when we had to stand before a classroom and recite a poem, but were so nervous that we couldn’t remember the words that we knew so well can be terrifying. But when we recreate that very event with our sense memory skills we can be left laughing and feeling silly instead.

The lesson that we have to take from this is that even those things that we take for granted must be explored with fresh eyes – especially the first time we revisit them. Maybe the person that we remember intellectually with such anger only sparks pity (or nothing at all) when we see them again. Remember “the rule of seven years” though. Whatever your responses are after that amount of time has gone by are usually set for life. Those are the responses that help us build our craft, and give us consistency in our acting.

How we remember something is a good place from which to start, but where we are today is what we must accept and use.