Prague Playhouse

Meisner Acting Class Blog on losing control

January 30th, 2010 at 01:04pm boris

Hi everyone!

I’m Boris Wilke and member of the Prague Playhouse Meisner acting group. I blog about our class activities.

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This blog entry is closely related to my last one on keeping face. Brian has been telling us repeatedly to let go off control. The reaction to one’s respective partner should come “like hiccups”, involuntarily, instinctually.

Meisner’s main credo was “fuck polite”.

Politeness always gets in my way! Let’s say, the person in front of me smells from their mouth. See?! I’m being polite again! I wanted to say: If they stink from their mouth, I fail to tell them, for example. I suppress my instinct. Shame on me!

As an interesting note aside: “To stink from one’s mouth” is the direct, i.e. German, way to say it. The cowardly polite Anglos talk about “bad breath” or “mouth odor”. That sucks! In the English language there seem to be either euphemisms or four-letter-expletives. Where is the zone of truthful naming it, nailing it – so to speak – in between those two extremes?

“You have bad breath…” “I have bad breath?” “You have bad breath…” That’s as boring as a cold potato! Go get yourselves a life, people!

It is: “You reek from your mouth like a cow out of its ass!” Where is the fuck, the shit, the damn, the cunt, huh? None of that! And still, this is painfully truthful!

God! That gets me going!

Why are we like this?

I, for one, know that I am absolutely scared of total defeat. And total defeat is a possibility if one “drops one’s bowels onto the stage”. In the past people have been sneering at me, belittling me, pointing their finger at me laughing because of my openness. They called me naive, immature, nasty, weird. They deemed themselves superior and took it out on me by ignoring me, bad-mouthing me, excluding me, cursing me, even hitting me.

The worst thing was, when they let me feel like a weirdo.

I got to nurture my inferiority complexes big time.

I still knew, deep inside, that they sensed somehow I was giving them a gift: my true self. I gave them my heart. But instead of being happy and thankful about it, they dropped it on the floor and trampled on it, just because what was not to be, could not be. And love simply was not an option for them. So they destroyed it, even before it really reached them.

They made me feel like shit – asocial, useless, deranged, ugly, geeky, clumsy – even presumptuous!

Most of those fuckers, I would refuse to touch even with a ten-foot-pole. But they mistook my love for a fumbling pass.

And then I closed myself off. I kept my gob smack shut and pretended to play along. I smiled and went through the moves as well as I was able to. I started to hold back – and later ration – the love I had to give.

I know, some of you will react to my liberal and free – yes: liberated! – use of the word love by putting me down like this: “How dare he say he was loving! He thinks he’s better than us – what does he call us? – «fuckers»?”

But I am talking about my past. This hell started in kindergarten. If this applies to you – yes! – then shame on you for letting innocent, lovely people run into your ready and open knives – for subjecting them to social suicide, just because they were being bold enough – no! They simply dared – to be themselves!!! You let them suffer for their refusal to play by the rules of make believe and cheapskate charades that kids and certainly teenagers create around themselves to spread fear and misery. And all that, because you were even more scared of showing your true colors than we were.

Why?

I have been asking myself this so many times: What do people have to hide that they think they’d rather die than tell us? In class of late, we have been hearing stories like: “My step-mother laughed at my singing in public. I used to love singing. But I’ve hated my voice ever since and never sung out loud again!” or: “Just a few days after my arrival at our new home, my uncle and my father drove with me to a soccer field. And I was supposed to train with the local kids. They were playing in a way that reminded me of urban warfare – so tough! I was scared stiff and refused to get out of the car. But instead of understanding me, my elders were disappointed with me and made me feel like a total loser! They were actually ashamed of me and let me suffer for it, too!”

These stories are lovely in that they talk about true anguish and failure. They make the people who tell them human and amiable. All Tarantino-style bragadero bullshit you hear from so many people “in the business” is just so bloody lame. Yeah, Warren Beatty had sex with over 12,000 women – or was it inflatable dolls?

Who cares? Thinking about it: What do stories like this tell us about their creators? Why did they have to go to such extremes? How wretched must they be, really? Poor things!

True stories about what we feel deeply about – oftentimes it is shame and defeat – are harder to tell than those overblown success stories from the media. But the more of these truly intimate tales we hear the more we come to realize that what we thought was unique in us and dreadfully shameful, is commonplace among our peers. Even murder and incest are aspects of the human condition everybody has to deal with in some way.

Telling these stories is therapy without a therapist – self-healing, so to speak.

So what keeps us from letting go off control? It’s ancient events, the memories of which we buried deep inside, thinking if we ever unearth them we will die of embarrassment and/or shame.

How will we be able to “spill our guts”, as Brian calls it, though, if we get spooked by these ghosts from the distant past? They are just figments of our imagination, really. But they will keep on haunting us, if we don’t finally address them by dragging them out in the open and facing them in broad daylight. What seems like powerful wraiths while rummaging around in the bowels of our subconscious will turn out to be a puny puff of fog fading faster into the air and with way less smell than a real fart you let.

I have seen so many class members give in to self-generated fear. They refused to go back to class due to their reluctance to lift up their carpets and chase those pesky little ghosts from the past out. I am afraid that to this day they keep them roaming inside like gas moving up and down one’s intestines. A simple fart can give you a bad bout of colic, you know? I’m sure even the Queen of England has been told time and again by her doctors to rather create a stir among her subjects by breaking wind than keeping the little buggers inside.

And I think while it would be nice of us to expose our shit from the past to the scrutinizing light of day in class, we are free to use other ways to do it. Therapy is an option. But that takes time and money. Writing a journal about it is free and quite powerful – for the ones who can relate to that. Meditation is fine; so is yoga – even sport! Talking to one’s best friend can do the trick as well.

But done it must be! The sooner we realize that, the better off we are, i.e. the faster we can let ourselves go, the more truthful and in the moment we become. Remember: Meisner training is getting us prepared to act. And to me acting is the best thing in the world!

Yes, we can become instinctual. Yes, our reactions can leap out of us like a cough or a hiccup: wild, loud and ugly! That really is beautiful – and true!

We just have to let go off control.

So let’s do it! Just do it!

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General stuff:

Our acting class consists of some twelve new and not so new active members, who meet every Monday and Wednesday from 6.30 pm to about 9.30 at the Prague Film School. We do Meisner. And the Meisner-technique really rocks!

If you want to connect with your inmost feelings, expressing them freely in an acting environment and thus getting to know yourself better and better, feel free to join us! If you do, be prepared for some serious thrills!

There will be no class from the second week of February on until the end of the month. It will resume in March!

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About the author:

I am Boris Wilke, a German expat in Prague.

I am a writer at large and have been studying Meisner since January 2008. If any of you know of any kind of acting work that befits a laddish, tall 41-year-old, please leave a note!

Acting, Classes, General, Theatre