On taking an acting course and loving it
How enchanting
Hey crew, it’s been a while, but don’t worry, I thought about this newsletter every single day over the last two months. How are you? How’s your spirit?
Ok so this wild thing happened - I quit my job (it haunts me still). The week I wrapped up my work, all these fascinating, brand new things opened up in my life, you know how you close one door and then five other doors open? It was kind of like that. One of those things was a one-off three hour acting workshop.
Most people in my life weren’t surprised by my announcement I had signed up for this, I think someone even said “finally”, but really, how did I get here?
I’ve been waiting a really long time for my parents to notice that I’m incredibly performative. Incredibly dramatic. Loves the spotlight. Like I’ve been waiting since ::checks watch:: 1995 for these people to put me into acting classes instead of on a soccer field (where I would zone out singing little songs to myself).
I’ve been waiting a really long time for someone else to notice and give me permission to do something that I’ve always wanted to do. I got stuck here, in this need for outside approval, outside belief in me. Something clicked and I realized I was going to wait for the rest of my life for parental encouragement. If I was going to pursue acting, I had to choose it for myself. So I signed up for the one-off workshop to see if I liked it enough to take the 8-week course. Kind of incredible what can happen when you choose yourself.
Let’s skip my long winded story and cut to the chase, dear reader, the one-off workshop was incredible and I salivated onto the floor talking about the theory of acting. All anxiety left my body when I delivered my lines for the small scene we’d been emailed the week prior.
So when I say - I quit my job and signed up for acting classes - it might sound romantic, but it’s actually true.
My cohort and I are approaching our final week of the course, we’ve gone from shy and nervous to boisterous and also still nervous. We’re knee deep in scene analysis and have our assigned roles and have been filming the scene every week with different partners. (Shout out to my friends and to my dad who’ve run lines with me outside of class). I’ve been a patient in the 1950s looking for life saving medicine, terrified what will happen if I don’t get it. It’s so fun. Spoiler alert: I can’t wait to continue acting training after this course is done.
Here are the top three ways this acting class offered me more than just acting:
One. “Perfectionism is an enemy of the artist” - Our teacher gave us a handout about perfectionism and it reminded me of all the times I’ve thought about my practice as an artist, as a poet, as a person: that I have a loud inner critic demanding I be perfect in every moment, in all my communications, in all my relationships, in my decisions, in my work, in my life, but honestly, I am incredibly messy.
Our teacher reminded us that the more we try to be perfect, the less brilliance we bring to our scene; the muck, the mess, the stumbling is an important part of the process. It’s also really fucking human. On our first day of filming, I felt my lines slipping away from me as I waited for my turn. I was quite literally on the edge of my seat, anxious that I’d mess up in front of everyone and they’d all know that I didn’t study hard enough or worse, they’d know that I wasn’t cut out for acting at all. So I tried to surrender to the anxiety, a practice I’m familiar with even if sometimes I forget to do it. By the time I was on camera, connecting with my scene partner, I had every word, every movement, the tone of my voice spilling from me as if there were no script, just my own thoughts. No sweat, no raised heart rate, just a groundedness that I was aligned with this moment. Once I decided to not be perfect, I leaned into being me.
Two. Fear of humiliation negates fun - From day one I noticed the ways my body felt constricted, my sense of self felt constricted, by life, by my own stories I latch onto and repeat over and over again. I shared with my cohort that I feared humiliation and a huge reason I was drawn to acting in this moment in time was that I wanted to meet that fear and do it anyways. Our teacher reminded us that if you’re scared of humiliation, acting is going to be really, really hard, and probably not fun.
In our intuitive movement warm up, I noticed how vigilant I was that others might judge my movements, might criticise how I took up space. From that place I fell into the inner controller and made all my movements calculated instead of unfolding, rigid instead of fluid. This is how I’ve navigated fatphobia most of my life: be as small as possible, hands behind my back, do not take up space, do not even breathe. But we do this warm up every class and there’s parts of me that want to be big, want to be outlandish, want to stick my ass in the air and crawl around, so why not try now? The biggest progress I’ve seen myself make in the last 8 weeks is going from quietly running my toe along a crack in the concrete to skipping around the space wobbling and flubbering, breathing loudly, churning up energy around me.
Three. My body is my body is my body - Laura Gibson has this incredible lyric that says, “I met you the year I stopped fearing my body”, I return to this sentiment often. Sometimes I catch myself in a moment of low self worth and recognize internalized fatphobia echoing within me. It’s an ugly voice, a hurt voice, and it’s so fucking subtle that I don’t know what life looks like without it. In acting, my internalized fatphobia came center stage (pun? intended?), suddenly I was reckoning with perfectionism, humiliation, being on camera, interpretive movement, dropping into my body over and over again. I can’t say that acting class suddenly shifted some deeply conditioned beliefs within me, but it did shine a light on work I’ve been doing for years; the work that allows me to post half naked on the internet, swim topless in the ocean, feel sexy on my own.
Acting shows me that my body can loosen, can take up space, can hold me in ways I didn’t realize. It is the place I write about the most often, the place that stores the most infinite wisdom, a place I sometimes have a hard time listening to. I’m recognising these things from the heat of my body, the curve of my body, the hum of my body, the fullness of my breath, the gentle rhythm of my heart. My mind has intellectualised enough for many lifetimes, it’s time for my body to hold these truths now too.
I love you, from my heart.
Nic x