Character: Does following Impulse help or hurt?
I just returned from spending a week with my friends at Willow Creek Community Church in South Barrington, Illinois, just outside of Chicago. I was privileged to be teaching at their annual Arts Conference, attendance of just over 5000 for the week. I taught an acting class, a directing class, and a writing class, all of them centered on the idea of playing action: how to act it, how to direct it, and how to write it. Lots of wonderful, eager students all hoping to use their gifts and passions for God. I also led a bit of worship in the Dance/Drama breakout sessions, and also did a performance of Leaving Ruin, attendance at that event about 300. The play continues to be powerful for those seeing it for the first time, and the moment-to-moment seemed very alive, more so than its been in a while.
One actor was very excited after my acting class, because I had finished the class by talking about the difference between doing a thing (playing action) and pretending to do a thing (pretending to play action). He got excited because someone was finally beginning to talk about the power of the imaginative life of the actor in a Christian context. That imaginative life frankly scared this particular actor, because he grasped the potential dangers lurking in the shadows of certain kinds of imaginative stimulus. How do you play the intimacy of relationship imaginatively and not get lost in inappropriate impulses that are traveling from body to body between actors on a stage?
It's a good question, and one that frankly, I've never heard any professional actor address--at least not to my satisfaction Robert Cohen, in Acting One, states frankly that the actor must be able to imagine anything. And much actor training is, admittedly, about breaking down social constraints that keep us from being able to freely respond in the moment to the imaginative and physical stimuli racing toward us from the other actor, as well as racing through our own bodies.
I've written about this notion before, I think. That we train what Stephen Covey calls "the gap between stimulus and response" out of actors, wanting them to respond spontaneously, in the moment, in physically truthful ways. And to do this, one of the chief targets is the "censor", that little judge that sits on our shoulders and stops us from acting truthfully not only on the stage, but in real life as well. We work to shut the censor up, so that we can begin to respond freely to the moment presenting itself, and there is truly magic about watching a young actor first begin to connect to this freedom.
And it's true: many of our inhibitions are bad, results of others trying to dictate to us. Or perhaps we simply are afraid of life, inhibiting our action in a sham of carefulness. There are many sorts of inhibitions that are worth overcoming, and we do actors favors when we help them, through training, return to a more truthful place of self understanding and expression.
But not all inhibition is bad. What does it mean for Covey, and Daniel Goldman (Emotional Intelligence) and countless others to name the ability to inhibit impulses as the cornerstone of creating "character"--"character" as in moral fortitude?
The truth is that the kind of intimate realism so many of us champion in the theatre is too stark, too dangerous, and too threatening for the church venue. Which is not to say that approaches to realism in the church aren't full of potential for good. But it is to say that when the imaginative processes of acting come explicitly to light in the church setting, lots of people get nervous.
Art tends to do that...
2:49:07 PM
