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Acting from the Neck Up

How To Get Out of Your Head Onstage

By Amy SuttonPublished 7 years ago 5 min read
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I begin this with my favourite caveat from drama school: "Ninety per cent of what we teach you is bullshit, darlings. You have to find the ten per cent that works for you, and it's different for everyone."

What I'm going to talk about may not be relevant to you as an actor. I hope not, because it sucks. But if any of this struggle rings true to you, I hope the lightbulb moment I had might help you in the same way. All I can say for certain is that it worked for me.

I had a problem at drama school. I was a hard worker and rigorous in my pursuit of form and technique. I prided myself on the clarity of my voice, the preciseness of my movement. But when I was asked to bring vulnerability or emotional intensity, the feedback I inevitably got was, "You need to give more — it's not reading. You're not going far enough."

Emotional experience, particularly romantic emotional experience, was something I lacked. I arrived at drama school a virgin, and felt my lack of experience keenly working through sexual and romantic scenes. I lived in fear of the shame of making a fool of myself, enacting things I had no real experience of. On top of that, I lived alone where many of my classmates were in student flats together, and I never quite bridged the social disconnect. I was being worked like I had never been worked before, and was exhausted all the time. The anxiety, the pressure to succeed, or at least not to fail, weighed heavy on me. I realise now that I was fighting depression for a lot of my time at drama school, but at the time I wouldn't face that. I wasn't going to let my emotions stop me from grabbing all of my training with both hands. I dissociated from what was going on inside me, and threw myself into work.

But acting work is not disconnected from emotion, and many actors feed off that inner wellspring of feeling within themselves. I'd built floodgates against my pain, and when I was asked to access those emotions, I froze up. My head put limiters on what I could access, terrified of the consequences of pulling those floodgates open and weeping and weeping until I could weep no more in front of my peers and teachers.

The issue was that, at that time, I was not in a safe space for me to be airing and dealing with my inner pain for the first time. Many years later I broke apart on a terrible depression from a traumatic break-up and went to therapy for the first time, and was able to work through all of those layers of pain in a safe space, guided by a professional. That was a life-changing experience and has definitely made me a better actor — now I have no difficulty reaching into my pain and vulnerability, and I can go to intense places emotionally without them causing me pain. But what do you do when you are being asked for that intensity and you have not had a chance to work through your trauma, to deal with your pain on your own terms?

I struggled with this for two years at drama school. I was called upon to "relax," "throw it away," "stop performing," and always, always, "give us more." I kept hitting my head against that inner barrier, trying to find a way to safely access my feelings. I began to think that maybe there was something fundamentally wrong with me as a human, the fact that I could not approach my vulnerability like others in my class could.

In the first show of my final year, my pivotal scene was a long monologue over my dead lover. Did I have to cry? Of course I had to cry. I had to weep as his body was carried away. I was dreading it. But I really tried for it, I strained miserably for a performance that would read as genuine. I exhausted myself in rehearsal, trying to access this grief. And again and again in rehearsal the director kept saying, "Just give us more." I didn't know what to do.

Eventually the director called me in for a private meeting to ask what was wrong. I explained, in as much of the words that I had, that I was giving it my all and, try as I might, I just couldn't feel this grief. And she gave me the answer that, for me, finally made it all make sense:

"You don't need to feel it. You just need to breathe like you're crying."

It was like a lightbulb turning on. Suddenly all of the pressure of dealing with my mental torment was gone. I didn't have to think about that — I just had to focus on a series of physical movements — the hiccups of the diaphragm, the great sucking in-breaths, the strangled swallows, and how they affected my speech. My performance was transformed. Where before I has felt miserable in performance, but been unable to cry, I now felt completely at peace, and tears streamed down my face as my body connected with my new breathing pattern. I hadn't dealt with my trauma, but I had found a way to work around it until I had a safe place to do so.

So if you are struggling with an emotional scene that rubs too close to some unaired pain, and six weeks of therapy is out of the question — focus on how your character breathes in the scene. What is the breath pattern of their anger, their lust, their not, their despair? Yes, it's a sticking plaster, and dear God, I would recommend everyone go to therapy at least once in their lives — but to get through a show or a rehearsal where people are demanding more than you think you can give, focusing on your body can help to get you out of your head.

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