Emotions, Energy and Electricity!

Me and my energy field.

Today we were instructed to look at four different points around the screen-acting camera and act out the following extreme emotions: anger, joy, sadness, fear. At this point I felt my body just sigh "no more feelings". Being at Drama School you get hit with many emotions- personal, peer emotions and then you’re acting out so many all in one day, maybe even all in one scene, or one workshop that it’s hard for me personally to understand…well how am I actually feeling? How are people around me feeling? What is it like on the real world again? Do I even want to know? What is Christmas?

In my last post I talked about the negative parrot on my shoulder who I've lovingly named, Cher. Some of you may be wondering how Cher’s getting on. Apart from believing in life after love, Cher is also coming round to the idea of believing in myself and my abilities as a performer and as a member of the class. I believe Cher’s been able to take these steps because of an awareness I am attempting to develop around my own personal field of energy as a person/performer as well as an awareness of how I am feeling everyday.

We had a phenomenal lesson this week from the actress Niamh McGrady. She started us off with a sound healing exercise and then we did the “I am’s” ,our weekly ritual which is the birth-child of Bronagh Waugh (our regular and bad-ass screen teacher) where we say three positive things about ourselves in a circle and its fucking incredible. It’s amazing but you can feel the energy lift in the room when we are all thinking and affirming positive thoughts about each other. Some weeks I find this hard but recently I actually have so many words to say and no one can technically take them away from me, I can say “exuberant” or “jubilant”, I even branched out and said I felt beautiful, because well I DID and I’m learning not to apologise for feeling in the words of Maria “pretty”.

Niamh also told us to write down all five of our biggest fears about acting and turn them around- so I wrote down the fear “I’m not original enough” and switched it up by affirming to Cher “I am unique and special”. These things can sound really silly, especially as I’m so English about self-appraisal- but Cher enjoyed it and I have a duty of care to her now. She’s only going to repeat what she is fed (think about the tangent I could go on here!!!), so I have to feed her healthy sparkles.

One thing I’ve been working on this term is what kind of energy I bring into a room. At the beginning of the course I really bought in an energy of fear. I was scared of my classmates, scared of my own abilities and just wanting so badly to be enough. I suppose what I’ve really learnt over these last weeks has been about controlling and understanding my own radiation and energies: how does what I emit help or hinder those around me and how can I affect people to feel positive about themselves or be happy? I find it hard to sometimes love myself, so seeing it as an act of loving others and helping to promote a healthy room is a cool way of sort of giving myself access to changing my energy field and being more positive.

We’ve also been learning that the difference between acting well and not acting well is listening. Allow yourself to absorb and take in the energy of your scene partner or your thoughts- and then radiate them back out. It sounds a little witchy but it works: when we listen and really tune in with one another, magic can be found in that moment of shared energy, and maybe that’s what acting is all about?

Circling back to the emotions I am happy to report that I am indeed in love

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From the moment I saw Doris Day in Calamity Jane when I was three years old, I knew I was in love. Fortunately, not with Doris, but with watching her movies, singing along, twirling around dancing. Since that day I have been utterly, completely, madly in love with performing and learning to perform. In my teenage years whilst people enjoyed house parties and something I later found out to be known as a ‘social life’- I wanted nothing more than to listen to Barbra Streisand, dream about the theatre and practice my lines for whatever part I was playing next. Once you get bit by the desire to be a performer, it’s really the beginning of a great love affair. My love for the stage and screen never ceases to inspire me and make me feel alive and I know with a certainty that I want to merge, rather I need to merge my life with the life of the theatre in some way or I simply won’t be happy. Theatre’s the one.

When asking Billy Elliot how it feels when dancing, he replies after some meaningful verse work: “electricity”. And that’s how I feel every day at drama school, like there’s electricity coursing through my nerdy veins. Of course, sometimes I genuinely feel like a piece of old gum, sometimes I doubt myself and sometimes life is just ahhh so emotional that I don’t even realise how lucky I am to be in the room! However, every day without fail there’s a golden nugget of joy that is the fact for the first time in my life I feel completely excited and electrified by my 9-5. I’m writing this because I know it’s hard to get places at Drama School or even to talk yourself into thinking you’re worth of an audition. I know it’s hard to be an actress, I know there’s going to be rejection and heartbreak and bruises along the road, but true love is worth fighting for isn’t it? And I’m learning that Elton John was right, and not just about eccentric eyewear: it’s a bloody electric feeling when your dreams start coming true.