Reveal Yourself in Your Work

Revealing Yourself in Your Work

 

Happy New Year to all of you!  I wish each of you an exciting year filled with wonderful unexpected opportunities.  To start the New Year off, I want to talk to you about revealing yourself in your work, an often misunderstood subject.

 

When preparing for a scene that you’re going to do in an audition or film, know that revealing yourself in the scene can bring a truth and depth to the scene that otherwise wouldn’t be there.   What that does is light up your performance in a way that makes your work compelling and hard to ignore.

 

So how do you reveal yourself?  By allowing your thoughts, vulnerabilities, worries, awkwardness, anger, excitement, or pain to actually be there as part of the scene, you elevate the reality of what’s really going on between the two people in the scene. It’s already there, so use it creatively.  Don’t push those feelings aside; they bring a humanity to the work that you want to be there.

 

The text is your road-map, not your destination.  It’s not about what you’re saying, it’s about what’s happening while you’re saying it.  Let go of all of your preparation and preconceived ideas and find out what happens when you do that.  It’s what you’re really looking for in your acting, but have been afraid to find out.

 

By not learning the lines in a particular way, you can bring more of what’s really happening to you in that moment as you perform the scene.  Actors must be brave, and bold, and dangerous in their work to create an experience we won’t easily forget.  That’s what revealing yourself in your work is really all about.

 

Lynette McNeill

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