My amazing coach, Maisie Hill, has an incredible image she uses to help you understand emotion. She advises her clients to think of emotions like a beachball. Light and bouncy, but if you try to hold it under the surface, it’ll spring back up and whack you in the face.
It’s probably a familiar feeling - when you try to push an emotion down or bottle something up, it explodes out of you when you least expect it.
We’re very fearful of emotions. I think it’s something we should be taught more about - that an emotion is something we create ourselves, not something that controls us. And giving an emotion permission to exist in your body, something you can feel, is the most effective way of letting it move through you.
When I work with actors, much of our task together is identifying the correct action for a part of the show. Actioning, a technique created by the great Russian acting teacher Stanislavsky, involves choosing a transitive verb and attaching it to the line.
Let’s take an example. Hamlet’s line: “What a piece of work is a man”, creates a very different emotion in both actor and audience if it is played with a different action.
We use transitive verbs because they are active, or ‘playable’ as we say in rehearsals. You can test if a verb is transitive if you can put it in the sentence, ‘I want to _____ you’.
‘I want to amaze you’ is therefore transitive, active and playable. The verb ‘to wonder’, though, doesn’t work. You can’t say, ‘I want to wonder you’.
Going back to Hamlet. Imagine yourself as Hamlet. Go on. You could play “What a piece of work is a man” with so many different actions - that’s part of what makes it a great line. Let’s try a few. Perhaps ‘I want to disgust you’. This leans into the image of ‘piece of work’, the awfulness of humanity, the shame at the core of Hamlet’s soul. But the next line of the speech is more exultant. (“How noble in reason”, it goes). So instead, you might play ‘I want to entrance you’, or ‘I want to delight you’.
The action creates the emotion in the audience.
That’s the magic of acting, and why I think the theatre is so powerful. It shows us that emotions are not something that just happen to us, they are things we can create ourselves, in our minds, our bodies, and our souls. And it’s not just actors who can do this. They might be the maestros of it - if they are any good. But everyone can learn.
So, the next time you’re worried an emotion might overwhelm you, try spending time with it. Even just 30 seconds. See where it shows up in your body. Name it, if you can - both the emotion and the physiological sensation. Breathe into it. You could even ask it what it has to tell you. Rather than fighting it - it’s much less likely to smack you in the face.
Thanks for reading, right to the end. I’ll see you next week. You’re brilliant,
J x
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