One very sobering feature of teaching is to stand up on your soapbox and claim a Truth of Acting – only to have to eat or at least modify your words a few days later. You think by now I would have all of speeches, lined up and verified – – but not so . . Perhaps one reason that I keep coming back is that the flaws in my teaching appear every day – causing 22 years of re-writes. My advice to new teachers joining the profession, “Know that you will be wrong a lot, admit it freely to the class, and get back on that horse of teaching.” And now my advice for students, “Never trust a teacher who claims to KNOW what they are teaching – they should be questioning their knowledge every day to retirement.”
And to my mea culpa: I have always lived by the acting training axiom that you do not fight for something, you merely allow it. I am thinking that may need some modification. Now, for story of how a lowly ketchup packet made me a better acting coach – at least for today. On Friday, I was sitting in the Blackbox doing some after school coaching of three of our most talented seniors. They were on point and fully prepared and up doing their acting magic – but I was bored. Truly exciting things were playing in their head, but nothing was being sent out to me in the audience that I could catch, enjoy and personalize.
As any competent teacher, I shouted out the same line I have truly used since the 80’s . “Stop Trying. Start Allowing. Stop Trying.” No response. I get it. And now a much better approach – – say the same thing but LOUDER. Obviously the best approach when something doesn’t work is to simply shout it louder. Clearly LOUDER is always better. [insert emoji for sarcasm]
Then I recalled a private moment that I had with a ketchup packet that afternoon. (and really, aren’t all moments with ketchup done in private.) I had cut the packet open and laid it on my napkin. Nothing came out. The entire side of the packet was cut off but nada – not a drip. What was the problem? I was SO ALLOWING the ketchup to come out but no. Hum, hum, hummmmm. Image a circumstance when “allowing” just didn’t work.
Smart me, I took this as an insight from Thespis Almighty and I asked and worked with the actors to SQUEEZE the monologue. Squeeze the monologue out through their feet and hands. Squeeze it through and out their chest. In essence, I was asking the actors to treat their monologue as if it were a packet of ketchup. One actor in particular took the time with his monologue to squeeze it though all of his joints. He neck squeezed his words around his thoat; his legs squeezed and stretched and pressed his words through the bottom half of his body. He turned into one figurative ketchup packet – -and then the magic happened. His monologue poured out him. He didn’t think himself to this result, he literally squeezed it out through him. I wish I could take the credit for his success, but my actor discovered this himself; his body felt it was the right thing to do. I only take the credit for connecting this experience to my lunc