Love.
It’s our natural state. It’s all around us. It permeates everything we do. It’s the greatest force driving our actions and creative lives. (Although fear can be a very powerful distraction!)
Think of love as a metaphor for our acting. Why we do it is very important to remember.
I think one of the goals in life is to become more aware of that great act and to create with it more consciously.
Love is service. It’s self-expression. It’s creation itself.
And it’s absolutely essential to let our work and our lives flow from this inexhaustible, rechargeable resource.
So here are 3 principals (about life and love and acting) that we want to apply on a daily basis.
Let go of control. You’ve heard it said many times before. It sounds so easy. That’s not just in life, but in our work. Let go. Controlling isn’t empowerment. It’s very scary to trust that the moment supports you. But without implicit trust into that moment, the magic can’t appear. It’s like a strange Buddhist Koan. What you want is right there in the moment of letting go but in order to experience it you have to trust that it’s all going to work out. But we don’t, so we hold on, thereby missing what it is that letting go would provide us.
In our work, no one wants to see controlled, premeditated performance – we are all in it to experience the free-fall of the spontaneity of the moment. I know it’s scary because it requires us to stop working out our agendas through all things, but try it. The results are so much more powerful when you let someone else take the wheel.
Get in the crazy. Love madly, truly, deeply. Create with abandon. Stop apologizing for yourself and the choices you make. Stop editing yourself before you’ve even had a chance to experience what can come out of going for things fully and committedly.
We respond to people who are alive. Not some dead representation of living. Not mimicry. Not trying to be someone else. Get in the crazy that is your own life. (And incidentally, you’ll never have to do a “substitution” again, because you’ll discover you have very, very rich raw material to choose from if you just follow the 1st point and let go of control to allow yourself to share it.)
Don’t get stuck on any one form of love. It comes in all forms. The capacity to have an open heart is all that’s needed to find love. To stay open when it’d be easier to shut down. When you’re rejected or fired or you can’t seem to book a job. It’s all part of the same process. A process isn’t just picking and choosing the stuff that is always great. The stuff that’s challenging and maddening is also part of the process – and I would say more important than the good stuff – as it forces us to either open up or give up.
Life is constantly trying to open us. Just let it do what it wants to do.
Remember all these qualities are inherent to being human. If it’s part of being human – it’s going to be part of your work. We don’t think about qualities like this because we’re so often taught to do things perfectly or according to someone’s reductive, textbook answer to an acting question. But in reality – exciting, dynamic work comes from a person letting loose and being brave enough to do it his or her way.
And that’s ultimately the greatest expression of Love right there.
Actors in the video (in order of appearance): Justin Loyal, Angelina Assereto, Jack Turner, Nina Rausch, Adan Rocha