“You want to be an actor?”

I posted this video on Thurs., Feb. 2 from the computer in the office after I shot it. Seth operated the camera as Aaron held his belt and lead him backing up. I didn’t know there’d be a guy putting together the new sofa in room #3, but I didn’t ask him to leave or even halt his work (only to not use the power tool and obliterate our sound) because I thought his presence, and the mess, would provide a kind of backstage reality. I botched a few lines, left stuff I thought I was going to say out, but, damn it… you try talking that fast and getting it all in one take.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ERBKK2iL0zw

Confronting “confronting.”

I find myself often encouraging actors to “confront” the characters they are playing opposite. Not “reason with,” not “implore,” not “demonstrate exasperation with,” but to make them face the truth, to do an intervention. This Action (to confront) is common in fiction, not only because interesting characters are frequently confrontational people, but also because scenes are selected, not to represent everyday life, but to show those times when events have come to a crisis point that calls for drastic action. Additionally, the confrontation Action enables the writer to get out a lot of good dialog about past events and present feelings.

Being confrontational can be challenging, however, for the performer who’s been raised in an environment where this behavior is discouraged because it’s considered rude, an admission of vulnerability and risky to the continuation of a relationship. I therefore (once again) recomend using a Mirror Activity for performers who want to practice getting their teeth into this Action. After selecting a scenario where it might be called for to confront someone in your life, rehearse the hell out of this behavior and don’t allow yourself to get pleady or confused or to in any way side-step the brutal, in-your-face, no bullshit reality of this particular doing.

If the character your portraying is a naturally confrontational person, you’re going to have to work to make this Action comfortable, but, otherwise, it doesn’t have to come easy for it to be effective when you do it in your acting. If it’s difficult for you, but you’re still willing to keep at it honestly, pressing your nose to the grindstone and really trying to do it in every moment, your very unfamiliarity with this way of conducting yourself will read as if your character is indeed at a crisis point, and it can come off fantastic in the playing.

Practice the better way.

There are plenty of things people do in life that we don’t want to see them do when watching them as characters in a fiction: i.e. getting snippy, being checked out, trying to puzzle a solution. You have to train away the habits that aren’t good for your acting. Athletes practice good technique: for example, football players don’t want to let their legs cross while moving laterally because if they do, when pushed backwards, they’ll trip over their own legs, so they spend time practicing moving sideways with the proper technique. Dancers put in hours at a bar practicing their form so when they dance there’s no chance the sloppy way we move in life will show up in their work on stage.

If you tend to confusion (that knitted brow of yours trapping the event, instead of it flowing through your face and changing the world within your stomach), practice confronting someone who has done something that you might normally consider confusing (your gentlemanly Dad hit your Mom, your lovely sister stole from you, you are being accused of an ugly crime, etc.), all the while that you are doing your fictional confrontation try and keep your eyes and forehead relaxed and open. Embrace the event, the better to correct it.

Nice is better.

Whether it’s pigeons, rats, dogs, monkeys or human beings, tests show the best aid to learning development is pleasant rewarding rather than unpleasant punishment. There is, however, a natural law of nature that muddies this reality called: “regression to the mean.” Whenever you do something really well, the chances are it was, in part, a fluke, and that means the chances run very high that the next time you do it you will not perform so well. Someone who has rewarded you for your success might then draw the faulty association that it was their rewarding, rather than the natural regression to the mean, that caused you to perform less well on your next effort. The mistaken conclusion is to believe is that because they were nice, you felt you could slack off now, whereas in reality, once you’ve tasted that wonderful rewarding there is an increased desire to perform well so you can get more of it. By the same token, when you fail to any remarkable extent, the chances are good that there was some bad luck involved and the following effort will be regressed to the mean and you will have improvement no matter what anyone says. But the person who applied the punishment for your failure (and failure creates anger, so it feels good for them to act mean) will wrongly believe it was their rough treatment that brought about the improvement. The actual fact is the fear of further punishment creates a nervous condition that has a cost to your relaxed concentration.

It’s Work… But You Might Be Amazed

There are many factors that can severely inhibit the expression of a person’s natural charisma. For instance, a childhood environment that was insular or had rigid conventions with regards permissible traits (i.e. boys shouldn’t get upset, girls shouldn’t get angry), or for a particular family it might have been that the mother or the firstborn boy were the designated stars and no upstaging of them was appreciated. Maybe a physical abnormality of some kind became stigmatized and a need to retreat was felt, or a trauma struck the entire family and everyone got diced, iced and shoehorned into a box to compensate. Yet still, what appears at present to be a cut off and uninspired outward personality, may in fact be someone with an explosive talent for dynamism just waiting for the supportive “oos” and “ahs” of a rapt audience to ignite it and restore it to its true glory.

This is why we need to be told stories. We need to be put back into balance. By being presented with ethical dilemmas and feeling within them the struggle to select the right path, we learn, or reaffirm, the true way to conduct ourselves in the world, regardless of the distortions of the truth we’ve been made to deal with and been confused by. The arts have historically been associated with progressive cultural movement because they make plain and celebrate an audience’s shared values, resonating those values in a sanctified fashion in community. They keep moving us away from the Us vs. Them mentality and toward a greater truth we all recognize because it strikes that ideal average we know because we feel its beauty.

It will require more than just the wanting of transformation to evolve and get more charming. It will take a lot of uncomfortable experience to break down and get free of those old programs. It will take the same kind of willful effort to push through as someone undergoing physical rehabilitation after a part of their body has been restricted and unused. Like that, it requires a forced flushing of blood and nutrients through previously closed off areas of the system. There are some very real psychic forces a person might be up against in changing their conditioning. It might feel like a violation of the code of your family, or even your entire culture, and the fear of change, and the unknown world you would then be stepping into, all will be working against your opening yourself to a new way of being. James Baldwin said: “Nothing is more desirable than to be released from and affliction, but nothing is more frightening than to be divested of a crutch.”

The good news is, you may not be as far off as you think. It may be your personality is not so mutated out of line with the average personality, but rather all this time it’s been desperately compensating to look like it is, and what you think of as your less than charismatic self is really a weight you’ve gotten used to carrying that you can actually do without. Maybe you aren’t the way you think you have to be, and those are just ingrained habits you can let go of, adaptations you no longer need. Maybe you’re reacting to obstacles no longer in your path, and with relatively little work, your natural inclination, which is much more consistent with the charismatic average, can reassert itself. And free again as you came into this world, charismatic, with a natural connection to all that it is to be human, you can shine. Not by working to be a stand-out. Not different, but the most like everyone and true to your deepest self, both. You are the X Factor.

Exchange with your audience.

To get in tune with an audience, it’s the performer’s job to empathize with why they feel the way they do. If the performer isn’t naturally “an Everyman” and they’re attempting to play the charismatic lead by adopting values not their own, they’ll need to nonetheless, as with all good character work, truly feel the feelings of what they are presenting.

A significant percentage of performers approach performing in a way that doesn’t allow for much exchange with an audience, they think of performing as only sending a message outward, nothing coming back their way. It’s a scary thing to be open to the judgment of a large group of people. If you don’t trust that they’ll maintain their unspoken compact that everyone is there to take part in a positive journey, there is the risk that the crowd could become an angry mob (perhaps an ancient, genetic fear), and, because of this, there may be an unconscious desire to communicate a firm rule to the group that this communication is only going to be going one way and that no judgments (or rocks) are welcome.

The performer may avoid receiving input by delivering a “canned,” self-contained performance. Creating behavior externally where they indicate the life of a character without any actual emotional involvement, safe from the danger that their true self could be condemned, because their true self is nowhere on display. These performances may be clear as to what the intention of the character is, but they’re really that not much different from a puppet that’s doing the correct moves. This type of performer will hold for laughs, but not out of any sense of interplay with the audience, only so the next line, (delivered the same way as it always is) can be heard.

There are also actors who have very little feeling for an audience’s response because they are so caught up with themselves being in the limelight. These players have the agenda running that everyone is there only to receive what they are expressing. They may feel a storm of real feelings, but it was this type of performer who Constantin Stanislavsky spoke to when he warned: “Love the art in yourself, not yourself in art.”

While its optimal to have an audience present, it’s possible development can be achieved from performing for an instructor alone, provided they have a strong sense of the universal and can articulate where a response was out of sync. They may point out, for instance, how an event should have come with a greater cost, that it was too easy to be sharp with a father, or not to speak up as your brother was being rude to his wife. If the instructor’s judgment has weight, then their notes will have an impact and will deepen an understanding of the universal. They may point out how you particularly need to exaggerate your deference to authority, or your assertion against abuse, and in this way compensate for your normal manner that is not in sync with the ideal yet. You can then work to habituate a compensating behavior in the same way an athlete, knowing he tends to throw high and to the right, willfully will throw low and to the left.

Charisma By Trial

To develop more charisma a person should repeatedly act out fictional scenarios in front of an audience, running the gamut of human behaviors. As yourself (using your name) imagine and live through improvisational exercises that challenge your value systems, getting yourself caught between a rock and a hard place in front of a group of people.

Example #1: play out a scenario wherein your father is getting remarried after the death of your mother, and, as his best man, you have to practice your speech, but you are interrupted by your wife who wants you to travel with her across the country because her sister is in a coma from a car accident.

Example #2: While using a doll to practice the diapering and the tending of an infant, because your adopted baby is about to be brought to your house, a sibling enters who you despise because they killed your mother in a drunk driving accident, and now they want you to help them get money for a lawyer because they’ve gotten another DUI and are facing extensive jail time.

The performer must live honestly within these fictions having their attention on each moment, working off the behavior of those opposite them, not “getting into their heads” and standing outside the experience, but endeavoring to stay in contact with each experience as specifically as possible and encouraging the greatest degree of their own reactivity. To do this properly, some instruction will probably be needed for charting a course through this moment-to-moment involvement. Although the experience necessary to learn the group value average will be to spend a lot of time exposing oneself to an audience while challenging values, this comes with the danger of pandering and merely presenting ideas of what is thought to be what an audience wants to see. By not living truthfully through the experience, a person will only get further from the authenticity that is crucial for charisma.

It won’t serve the purpose to do poor quality acting in front of an audience, no matter how much of it you do. You can forever make it an exercise in maintaining in place the mask you’ve developed to present to the world, through cleverness, confusion, dissociation or other impediments of the intellect. Without a sincere effort at vulnerability and the revelation of your true self, a performer never feels the validation or condemnation of values. Only by letting your emotional responses be known, without mental defenses and camouflages, will you know where an audience stands with respect to them.

10 pieces of advice from Josh Gobin

Josh Gobin recently blogged a lot of advice, and these are my top ten picks from his list:

1. Expose yourself to art you don’t yet understand
2. Precisely measure the results that are important to you.
3. Stay blind to the metrics that don’t matter.
4. Make an impact on the people who matter to you.
5. Be better at your baseline skills than anyone else.
6. Ignore unsolicited advice.
7. Appreciate how placebos are underrated by almost everyone.
8. Seek out habits that help you overcome fear or inertia. Destroy those that do the opposite.
9. Backup your hard drive.
10. Hide a key (really well, unlabeled, maybe even two blocks from your house).

An Audience Will Teach You Charisma

It’s often been noted that an audience tends to be smarter than any single member of it. When applied to a democracy it’s been called “the wisdom of crowds.” The averaging of each member of the audiences responses could be why audiences again and again seem to be so on the money. All these people with different backgrounds enter a theater, sit in the dark and consistently laugher erupts at the proper spot, moans of disapproval arise where they belong and exclamations of support are heard right where they appropriately should be. One person, a bit too mean, laughs too much at a character’s fall on a banana peel, while someone else, too prim, laughs too little, and their resultant blended sound comes out close to what is just about right.

Additionally, the compact an audience implicitly makes with the presentation they have come to witness seems to be, in some simple, profound way, a call to the better angels of their nature. I’ve been to over 500 live performances of plays and not once have I ever seen, nor have I ever heard of first hand, anyone trying to disturb the proceedings outright. Think of that. With all the crazy people in the world, they nonetheless respect the sanctity of this undertaking. I believe the nature of these gatherings opens us to deeper values we may not fully embrace in the practice of our lives.

A distinction ought to be made between how societies behave and the average values of the people living in those societies. For one thing, many societies are ruled by a power structure constructed to enforce the status quo, not really countries with an army, so much as armies with a country. The national average of opinion in these places is something to be managed and brought to heel, like any other force of nature. Beyond this, the way people act as a society (or a corporation) has a lot of “us vs. them” in it, and so (like the psychopath) they can adopt a mentality wherein, besieged by enemies, without and within, these “others” are not people to whom the values of “us” apply. This makes for distortions in the expression of a country’s Brown Rating as we evaluate it from the perhaps more enlightened perspective that we are all of us on this planet an “us.”

There is a rich conversation to be had about how a performer connecting to an audience’s shared values can influence the evolution of the society as a whole, moving them away from this “us vs. them” toward something more civilized.

Acting Charisma

There’s an old expression about acting in the movies: “It’s all about being honest, if you can fake that you’ve got it made.” Someone may develop their natural charisma and transform themselves forever in their lives, or they can merely place themselves closer to the universal for those times when they want to increase their hold on an audience, and inhabit those aspects during the portrayal of a role, like an actor doing good character work. To increase their charisma a person doesn’t have to alter the ethics they actually hold in life. That may not even be possible.

Studies have shown that a person’s ethical standards are pretty much fixed by the age of 14 (and sorry, parents, they seem to be almost entirely determined by our associations with children of like ages between 9 and 14). It is possible, however, to adopt the sweet spot of ethical values just for the time when one wishes them to be portrayed. While there are actors with great charisma who really are the way they appear on screen, there are also those who adopt this more universal personality only when performing.

I’m guessing you’ve had the disturbing experience of seeing someone interviewed on a talk show who appeared very different from the way they were when acting, perhaps now too silly or too sullen. You might have felt some regret for having been exposed to this actual person. There are plenty of personal assistants who could disabuse you of the myth of how delightful to be around some of the radiant celebrities they work for are. John Lahr, the son of Bert Lahr (the Cowardly Lion from “The Wizard Of Oz”), says that while this father was a hilarious, galvanizing performer when on stage, this person was nearly unrecognizable from the grim, nonentity he was in life. William Hurt is a brilliant actor who, in his acting, carried himself as a rock solid gentlemen during a time when, it’s come to light, he was being wildly abusive to several romantic partners.

By using the same skills that’s used for doing character work, performers are able to embody a central personality they’ve correctly assumed will connect with an audience. We see this in singers who successfully adopt personas not their own when they perform, clearly demonstrated by English accented singers who sing with accents of the American South (Amy Winehouse, Keith Urban) and American accented singers who sound Cockney when they sing (Green Day’s Billy Joe Armstrong).