GAP Atelier #1 Post 3
One of our team said they had been looking forward to this session all week. Frankly so had I. I knew that with the shortened time of the last session, I had left too many questions and unresolved propositions. This time we started without delay, with the second part of the “Dieter’s Cake” exercise.
The exercise revealed something common amongst actors and increasingly common in everyday life: a short tolerance for psychological discomfort.
Sitting in discomfort is a skill that appears to be increasingly avoided. Whether that be emotional or physical pain, or even the discomfort of being challenged, wrong or just different. Perhaps it’s social media and the increasingly divided world we live in? The reassurance that comes with living in our bubbles of like opinion… we avoid being challenged, or having our values or opinions threatened with alternative or new information. Isn’t that nice?!
Life has a habit of puncturing our bubbles. When we are in an argument with someone you love we are forced to sit in a place of intense discomfort. I think you can agree that inability to sit with this discomfort can lead to being puppeteered by the old brain - the limbic system - fight, flight or freeze.
Actors who successfully embody a character's discomfort have another option. By retreating to their own mind they can keep the impression of still being in the moment, whilst stepping away, dis-embodying the character. This is why playing a role for a long time makes staying in character easier as the actor has repeated the discomfort enough to know that it is safe to play in. From this point of view, any acting method should aspire to reach this place of instinctual play as soon as possible.
Methods that keep you in your head with semantic description and analysis offer a safe refuge, especially when in a place of character discomfort. I suggest that for many actors, great performances come about in spite of such methods, because of long immersion rather than effective mental analysis. This is especially true if the actor is playing far from his natural range.
This is why I developed the GAP technique.
I know how tightly I used to hold on to the techniques I learned at RADA that enabled me to be “good enough” in my first jobs. However, that’s not the goal of a vocation.
Seeing actors realise the power of this new tool is something I have never tired of. It’s also a responsibility I don’t take lightly. I am already looking forward to our next session.
