Acting Without the Drama

December 28, 2008.  In acting, as in life, there really is no such thing as nothing.   The statement “nature abhors a vacuum” holds as true for the stage and screen as it does in the Newtonian world.

Even in the brave new world of quantum physics, there really isn’t any such thing as nothing.  Antimatter isn’t nothing, it’s the opposite of matter, just like negative one isn’t nothing.  It’s the opposite of positive one.  Even zero isn’t really nothing.  It’s a place holder.

The reason that I bring this up is that if you think you’re not doing anything at all, it still reads as something to the audience.  It can come across as disdain, boredom, ennui…but never nothing.  The problem is, if we don’t make a choice, the default is almost never what we want it to be.

That’s one of the reasons I talk about stillness so much.  When you make a choice to be still, filling up a moment with a decision or a memory or an epiphany, it is a bold choice.  We expect actors to be always doing, so when they aren’t, just for a moment, we pay attention.

This is an idea that I’ve brought up multiple times, both in my blog and in my podcast.  I bring it up so much because I believe it to be a powerful tool.  Even in life, there can be and should be moments of stillness.  We spend so much of our lives filling up the supposedly empty spaces with music, with television, with food, with texting (or even more troublingly, with alchohol, drugs, gambling, sex, rage).  It’s in the…let’s not call them empty, let’s call them uncomfortable…spaces that we find the still, small voice that guides us to where we really want to be.

So, next time we feel compelled to fill up an uncomfortable space, let’s just take a moment and just be.  Let’s take the time to let the moment unfold the way it wants to.  We may just find something amazing!

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