It's Harder To Be Sensitive Than To Be Heavy

It's harder to be sensitive than to be heavy. It's much easier just to die once I'm up on stage. That's the easy route. I've mastered the courage to get up and try something now, but I haven't mastered the courage to risk through listening and following impulses. To try something new, to play, to discover.

I cant rush this process. I have to trust, to practice following my instincts. Not denying them, but not forcing them either. For me, 'ideas' are a way of trying to get it right - to win the audience wth tricks. But from what I learned today, the best trick is to have no tricks, and instead, show your vulnerability and humanity by discovering something with the audience.

Exercises today:

• Game with chairs - Five chairs, four that make a square and one in the middle of the square. The person in the middle has to try and sit on somebody else's chair. The people on the four chairs have to try and cross to another chair without the person in the middle getting there first. 2 points against the person in the middle every time two people cross chairs. 4 points if people cross diagonally through the square. When a person in the middle gets 10 points the game is over and they are selected for the play off of the class' biggest idiot. The loser of the play off was Anna (shaaaame!).

• The same...but not the same... - This time the person in the middle can speak text, improvised or Shakespeare or a poem. Use your voice over the pleasure of the game. I tried the prologue to Romeo and Juliet. For me, the pleasure of the game fell away as soon as I started speaking.

• Nightmare of the workshop - Start lying on the floor sleeping. Have a nightmare about the workshop (e.g. "Talk too much!", "Boring!", "No complicité") and bring it to life somehow for the audience. Philippe would assist with music sometimes. I tried first. Pushed, rushed, too many ideas.

Let ideas go: "Too many ideas. We don't see the actor...Horrible."

Take your time: "Too much in a rush, like a crab looking for pubic hair."

Gwen (from Scotland) really got it. She was light, she listened to us, she discovered the game slowly (taking her time), she was surprising, and she never gave up even when she neared a flop. She returned to what she knew worked (screaming 'GWEN!', trying to get Philippe to be able to pronounce her name correctly) and kept it simple. She also had pleasure, and good fixed points. We loved her for trying - for her courage. Even though she was performing, we saw less acting and more of her.

This starts to make sense of what Philippe talks about about the audience wanting to see us, our beauty, and our pleasure. And it makes sense of the casting process too. When we see somebody, or perhaps, their qualities, it's usually far more interesting than seeing a really technically strong actor but that lacks connection. It's often hard to articulate what this is, when we see a performer, we often put it down to that person "just having something special". It's a shedding of the actor's unnecessary 'sugar on top' and just showing the core of who they are. This is maybe why sometimes people that have never acted before in their lives are better than professional actors. They haven't learned any good tricks to hide themselves.