“If you’re really having to create a different person,
you’re tricking your subconscious. It’s a big, fat magic trick.
The hat you’re pulling the rabbit out of is your own psyche”.
I’m reading an article in The New Yorker on Emma Thompson’s life and career. The quote above represents her thoughts, as an untrained actor, on the craft of acting.
In the article she comments on a scene in ‘Good Luck to You, Leo Grande’ in which she stands in front of the mirror naked and observes her own body with neutrality, neither approval nor disapproval: “that’s my body and I know that it can bring me joy”. I love the neutrality in her observation. It echoes this essence of being without judgement.
It stands out to me, because as a performer your body is the translator of all you want to say. The relationship that you have with your body is one that defines in a very tangible way the expression of your art.
As a performing artist it is especially liberating to sit in your skin with acceptance and to let the body be what it is. The physique that is completely accepted, can be fully inhabited, giving freedom of expression, artistically and personally.
We are so surrounded by images of the sexualisation of the body and I don’t negate the sexual essence of our physical being, but the neutrality of unconditional physical acceptance is liberating. A body that is subject to the demands of being ‘sexy’ or conforming to a certain visual aesthetic cannot tell a story as freely as the body that is unencumbered.
This inspires me.
Across all genders there is much that we do to optimise our appearance, both in the physical and digital sphere. We tend to manage our appearance as though our physicality is a social construct. Without delving into this further, let me suggest that this inclination reflects the relationship between our public perception and private esteem.
In performance, issues of esteem can detract from what we are trying to say artistically. It is like recording instruments in a room that has its own sound. Our self-esteem is the sound of the room in which we tell our artistic stories. A neutral space is one in which sound is not reflected, not relayed back to us from an external source, reflecting an external opinion. In a neutral space of self-acceptance, the voice is true, giving itself freely and without obstruction to our artistic narrative.
If embedded in our performance there is the quest to be (physically) accepted, to be loved, it is heard in our artistic voice. If we perform with a question to the audience, “am I esteemed?”, then the audience feels that.
Self-acceptance is to our performance what blankness is to a canvas.
This is a bigger tangent than I intended to go on, but I am inspired both by the candour of Emma’s confession that she doesn’t accept her own physicality, and by the quoted statement about her own neutral regard for her body in this movie (which I haven’t yet seen).
This query, “am I accepted?”, “am I esteemed?”, “am I loved?” feeds fear into our performance. When self-love answers those questions, we come to our audience not with a query, but with an offer to completely and unreservedly embody a narrative.
Living with another’s gaze is confronting, but it presents the opportunity to lean into the neutrality of self-acceptance, and as an artist, this can only be described as a gift.
© Renaté Bianca 2023