Show Your Words

"Acting is doing and being." I tell the students I guide. And I encourage them to show the words as well as tell them...and to show the words even without telling. An actor is a storyteller who puts everything they are, everything they have, everything they know, and everything they imagine...into creating an honest performance of character. This, in it's highest aspiration, is not an act of dishonesty whatsoever...the act rids itself from dishonesty just by doing and being it.

But there always lurks the shadow of the storyteller to fall into like a trap door. Watch your step; there is a thin line to walk between one spiked X to the next. We are all actors, after all, if you think of it on this clean slate...no pre-conceived notions of 'acting like' this or that.

Alyrica, for example, constantly brings what I teach to attention just by being and doing who she is and what she does. The difference between the way she acts here and in her kindergarten class has been demanding my attention...and the difference between what she tells us and what she actually does has lately widened its gap.

I have only had her at three hour-long classes of mine in the 2 and a half years I've been teaching acting in Omaha. And she's seen two recitals where my students performed...and seen Michael and I in two plays...and watched a few other plays as well.

I've realized this year that it's time I teach her the truths I've learned in life through acting. Like many of us, Alyrica's first impression of acting is something more like being someone other than who we are, playing pretend, and having people pay attention to that and then applaud you for it. Of course, this is only what the surface impression will give you of the art of theatre...that it's all a show, and no matter how willing to 'suspend your disbelief' the performances encourage you to be in their duration, you come back to your senses when the curtain closes...get up from your seat and go home to a seat you already know. But it's quite a ride, right? An escape of sorts...one good enough to pay for, usually.

Still, under the surface of the show, there is a variety of verity to inspire us to BE and inspire us to DO whatever it is in one's own life that needs inspiration. These are principals I teach...sometimes by telling, but always by doing and being...showing my words.