Ever since a young age I tended to hoard and grab onto every task I was given, trying to complete that task to the best of my ability and better than those around me with the same task. I always wanted to be the best and competitiveness was habitual and innate. I still want to be the best I can be, but I think about comparison differently. I spent large amounts of time on small moments that strayed me away from being able to prioritize and do things efficiently and productively. I was also heavily swayed by my environment, letting factors like the circumstances that I was living in control how I was approaching my time. From piano to violin to viola to ice-skating etc, it took me an extended amount of time to finally quit each because I realized that I didn’t really want to continue with it. I was always really indecisive and tended to look for other people’s opinions to validate my own. I didn’t really have opinions and I was never annoyed at anyone — I was simply living in other people‘s judgments.
If my friends were taking the science classes then I was going to take the science classes too. If my friend was auditioning for the dance team in the high school I was auditioning for the dance team. If my friend was trying out for math counts, Science Olympiad, or Power of the pen so was I because I felt like I also needed to do those activities to be a better student or candidate of talent. I never went out to reach/seek for something that bloomed from inside or passion rooted deep down. Everything was based on my environment. This continued throughout high school and even intensified as I began to involve myself deeper in a friend circle that concentrated their paths on math and science — intending to be computer engineers or doctors. So as I had before, I took tons of AP classes in areas of science and math that I absolutely hated. I felt a need to get an A in those classes so I stressed myself out, lost a lot of hair and only slept for three to four hours per day during my junior year. I did get an A in those AP science and math classes but I wasted so much time doing everything that I didn’t need or want to.
I credit a lot of this habitual behavior and possible ties into my personality to a very rigid way of thinking. Believing that there’s only one path and one clear-cut way to success and having some sort of accomplishment. Well rounded or 优秀. I wanted people to think highly of me and I didn’t want to be ‘average’ I always thought about the idea of being ‘above average’. Part of this region of thinking could also be accredited to parenting. My dad thinks in one hemisphere and is rarely swayed by other people. He doesn’t expand to be flexible and think more openly.
So now comes this idea of thinking openly. My mother always said you need to 顺其自然想开一点 — think more openly. ‘Be flexible’. And I believe that entails being able to fail, being able to take risks, and spend time reflecting on self frequently.
See a part of the issue was that many of my thoughts concerning should I do an all nighter to finish this paper was followed by well if I don’t then I’m not gonna get a good grade on it and then I’m not going to get an A in the class as if everything counts. I thought every single second and everything centered around one small task was going to affect my entire life. I didn’t want to take any risks. Only until I started to work with more and more art, doing this “relaxing and fun’ thing was I able to start finding clarity in my thoughts and what I truly wanted or believed.
The center of my being is my body. Only if my body is at ease and open to my beliefs and receiving the environment can I be in tune with myself. That sounds extremely philosophical but let me get into the details. During dance competitions which I began in late middle school, I was stuck in years of anxiety and nervousness prior to being on stage which drastically decreased my performance — making me wobble all the time, never smile on the stage because I was so concentrated on the moves, and worrying about placing or the score I was going to get. I never really made realizations about how to fix these things by myself — most of the time it was my dance teacher or mentors who guided me, pushed me into being able to live freely and ‘enjoy life in the moment’ which I’ll talk about later
So by latter high school (almost graduating) I started to feel that maybe I should enjoy myself when I’m on stage and make it seem like the last stage that I’ll ever give — really cherish and enjoy the idea of performing. Instead of thinking of dance as a task to win or a task to beat my friends in, it’s more of a let me just dance the best that I can right now. This also ties into having high standards and high expectations for an outcome that has yet to happen and is likely going to be influenced by what I’m just about to do. During these dance competitions my impulse was to relieve that tension and stress in my body. What I usually did was squeeze the juice out of my best friends’ arms backstage or my dance team in a hug right before I went on. That was my way of releasing tension. As you can imagine, that only took me so far in releasing my nervous energy because the other parts of my body, not just my hands, were also really tense.
Now in college acting, where I’ve truly invested all my time into the performing arts, I’ve trained and practiced more and more how to release unnecessary tension and find my body in the most organic primal stance. The idea that your body should be lazy because then it has access to the most amount of impulse and ability to work at the most productive point.
As Kristin Linklater says in describing her Linklater technique in ‘freeing the natural voice’, ‘the best performing artist in general are relaxed in performance that is, they have no extraneous tension. Their muscles are ready to receive the impulses necessary to fill action and will rapport with energies in the service of particular stimuli. Maximum effect with minimum effort is a hallmark of great art. Great art is rooted in truth.”
I’ve heard from so many artistic mentors the first step to being a great artist is to be a great person.
They are interconnected, and now I truly believe so.
AcAccepting and not denying th thoughts and feelings that you’re receiving.
In voice class, we train to release tension in all body parts connected to our voice that way we are on the way to freeing the natural voice — the one that is not controlled by habit and changed by environment. This can be applied to all daily activity because only when our body is truly at ease and in a state of relaxation and pleasure can we be able to work in an efficient way.When we do not control our thoughts and just except all the feelings that we get, we are letting go of impulses and also avoiding the action of bottling everything up and having a mental break down. I broke down from bottling up many times throughout high school. Now I consciously let go of impulses, not hindering or trying to hide him from myself. I’m trying to live truthfully and except the truth.
That leads into another big concept of a Meisner technique. The ability to live truthfully is vital in acting but it is under imaginary circumstances. Meisner says “acting is the ability to live truthfully under imaginary circumstances’. Last semester when we focused on training for the Meisner technique, one of the main goals in each exercise was to live in the moment and only say or respond off of what you were feeling in that particular moment. In the next moment there’s no need to refer to a past moment or a past event because that moment is already gone. Prior and at the start of doing Meisner exercises there was tendency in me and many other students to refer back to what someone said before or something that happened before. This reflects how in life, we rarely live in the moment. Either thinking about something that went wrong in the past or things that we need to do in the future.Living in the moment comes back to the idea of being accepting and willing to change and be changed. This goes against the rigid thinking that was ingrained in my brain and is still tainted up there.
With all these forms of release enters the idea of laziness and shortcutting to goals. A concept or genre that the Alexander technique has helped me identify as ‘endgaining’.
In Body Learning by Michael J. Gelb Clarifies a direct approach as “the kind of of approach characterized by a dance teacher who pushes down on a pupils raised shoulder or a drill sergeant who shouts chin and chest up is of limited value and will probably produce comp and compensatory maladjustment elsewhere.”
He continues to explain that “Alexander called the indirect method of change the means whereby approach which can be defined as awareness of conditions present a reason and consideration of their causes inhibition of habitual responses and consciously guided performance of the indirect series of steps required to gain the end.”
The Alexander technique is used in body awareness to find our most relaxed body posture. In the simplest way it can be used to find a standing position without any extra tension. We must use an indirect approach to find these points of habitual tension by focusing on specific body parts, spending time reflecting and observing muscular tension specifically..
Oftentimes, an indirect method seems time-consuming and non-enjoyable. Of course I would like to learn or achieve a new technique in an instant. Which is why there is a tendency to replicate or imitate the end/ outcome of mastering a technique. For example, when learning a new dance, it’s easy to just get a basic idea of the dance moves and imitate the dancer. But in reality there’s so many details and body part initiations that I’m still unaware of. I have to go in detail, playing the video in slow motion over and over again to really see how each move is mastered. If I endgain while learning a dance, in my mind, I will think that I have the dance down. I can do the dance! But if I recorded myself and watched myself on tape, I would be mortified by all the problems I see. And I would still have to go back to zero, starting all over again. So why not just start from zero and build with detail, allowing slow pace.
Fighting urges to endgain is still a struggle for me, but knowing why I should, reminding myself of the difference between direct and indirect approach, I hope will help me in developing better habits.
I find many of the techniques we learn in acting classes, the awareness of the body and our habits to be extremely beneficial in how I interact and communicate with people in non-artistic settings. I’ve become more emotionally open, not inhibiting frustrations, sadness, and even happiness that I don’t want others to particularly see. Control has always been caused by a burden of fear of judgment from other people. Living with more flexibility and honesty to self, has made me all together more productive and closer to achieving my true passions and desires in the performing arts and my relationships with others.
Works cited
ATES, Alex Alex. “The Definitive Guide to the Meisner Technique.” Backstage.com, 19 Apr. 2019, www.backstage.com/magazine/article/the-definitive-guide-to-the-meisner-technique-67712/.
Gelb, Michael. Body Learning. Aurum, 1994.
Hagen, Uta, et al. Respect for Acting. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2009.
Linklater, Kristin. Freeing the Natural Voice: Imagery and Art in the Practice of Voice and Language. Nick Hern, 2007.
