Acting Is Falling In Love With Yourself
Falling in love is giving your whole self, not taking.
This is the heart of the matter!
It has to be. Because your acting must be generous. This generosity means that you are giving your whole self, not an idea of who you want to be or who you want others to think you are.
There is a difference.
Acting is not about you winning. It is about you humbly shaking out of your personal need for recognition and showing up for your calling.
Are you called to be an actor? Or are you having a hissy fit because you want the outer world to give you something you feel you deserve? (And you DO deserve it! But I’ll get back to that in a moment.)
The gift of Uta Hagan’s generosity
I remember being in Uta Hagan’s class many years ago and noting how generous she was to her students.
Her teaching was not about herself. She gave herself to her students so that they were challenged to give their full selves and thereby do their best work. She also had no tolerance for self-indulgent actors.
I recall an actor returning to class after a long stint on a TV series. His art had become his personal image, he couldn’t let that go. He was soon walking, head down, back out the studio door.
He had lost the generosity of his art.
The question to ask is, can you move from that deserving child to a mature gracious giving adult artist? Can you offer up your whole nature for the greater good of the world?
Your love affair with yourself is your love affair with humanity.
The greatest challenge is letting go of your attachment to yourself. The greatest gift is becoming one with all.
Yes, you will discover all the nooks and crannies of your personalities (yes, personalities - you don’t just have one!).
You will use your personal pain, your anger, your disappointments, your joy as the fuel in your actor’s engine but you use it in service of something greater: of theatre, of film... of art.
This is life-long devotion to complete self-acceptance and expert technique, so you can dissolve into a character and lose your personal image.
We all have wounds from our past. To be alive is to experience loss and injury. But in our art we transcend our fears of these wounds by descending into a broader sea of what it means to be human.
It is your responsibility as an actor to ask yourself if you are called to find the inner breadth to be of service in this way.... To fall in love with it all in this way.
And if you are… Go! Set out to love yourself more deeply and as you do, you will loosen the deathgrip on what you “deserve” and dissolve the limits of that self-centered thinking.
As actors we need to respect ourselves.
Acting technique gives you a platform on which to build this breadth. Practice and rehearsal allows you to explore, to discover and apply your (whole) self. Your craft helps to anchor personal reactions that veer from the true calling of the artist, and guide you back to greater service.
The love affair is compassionate. It goes both ways. You deserve all the opportunities and gifts of this life… and the world deserves you in your most generous capacity...