Falling into limbo on purpose: the art of letting go

Being a performer can be very overwhelming at times. Between the stress of appearance, reputation, and the overthinking of interactions. It is hard not to be carrying a lot on your shoulders. Also as performers we are generally more dramatic in our day to day lives than the average joe or jane. (understatement of the century)

For me, and let’s all keep in mind here that I am a gay performer with crazy anxiety and an ability to overthink when someone says hello to me, I was able to find that acting was a place for me to channel my anxieties and feelings into a more useful and productive direction.

In College I had a hard time not being perfect. Being a perfectionist raised in an asian household and being raised as a singer, my mindset was formed with the beliefs of technical precision, accuracy, and the overwhelming thought that anything but perfect was not to be celebrated.

In my classes I had directors and coaches tell me over and over again the same things. That I needed to loosen my physical tension. That I needed to let go and trust the process. That I needed to feel where I was at and let it breathe so I could become a vessel for the work.

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I thought they were idiots and that they surely had no clue what I was feeling.

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Yeah, so they were, in fact, shockingly, correct.

(this was heartbreaking to my ego)

I remember sitting in a vocal and physical dynamics class once. We were working on a scene where we were in an extreme close up shot, the goal of the assignment was to cry on the 4th line of the script (we all did it and I still think that is a crazy assignment).

I was having a hard time letting go of physical control and just cry and be honestly emotional. I’m sure all of my friends who were watching that day’s performance on the monitors were cringing watching me try to muscle through tears.

Our professor called “cut” and he walked into the shooting space and asked me if he could touch me. This was not a weird question considering the fact that I was in acting school and we were used to being adjusted, I agreed. He told me to close my eyes, he put his hand on my chest and his other on my shoulder. He pushed into my chest and rubbed my shoulder. He told me to release tension and to just breathe into the pressure he was pushing onto me. As I exhaled he said something that chilled me to my core and sent me straight into tears. (sobbing in fact)

“You are enough” , he said.

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So I’m sobbing at this point and I had no idea why.

I was able to perform the piece and was somewhat successful in my assignment.

After the class I walked up to my professor and asked what I needed to do to be better.

He laughed and yelled at me to stop. He explained that it was that thought process that was standing in my way. He poked at the center of my chest and said that if I wanted to “fix” my problem, that I would need to let go and just bring what I was carrying into my acting.

I left that class upset and confused, I sat dramatically on the train and went home to my Brooklyn apartment and went through every note and acting book I had (too many) to try to understand it.

So I did the opposite of what I should’ve.

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After a couple of weeks of figuratively running into a brick wall from trying everything but letting go, I gave up.

I showed up defeated and exhausted. I was done trying.

I went in for a performance for a script analysis class and I decided I was just going to be a good scene partner so at least my partner would get something out of it.

(Do we all see where this is headed??)

I showed up and actually did not care how it turned out. I was so frustrated and tired. I focused on my lines and was just going to respond to what my partner gave me. (cough cough that’s the goal, like the answer to my problem could’ve hit me in the face and I wouldn’t have known)

I was shocked about how I got lost into the piece I was working on. It felt so honest and charged and I was able to just breathe and be a vessel for the character.

DUH.

After the performance was finished my teacher praised me for the simple and honest performance and asked me how I finally figured it out. I told him (shocked myself at my own performance) that I just let go of control and trusted the work I had done, that I just put my attention off of me and onto something or someone else. I had taken my focus off of me and onto my partner and the circumstances in the script.

Acting shouldn’t be selfish. You should be selfish about your acting, but the craft itself is selfless. It should be an exchange and it should take control completely. You as the actor have to allow it to be what it is. It doesn’t care what you look like, sound like, or what insecurities you have.

Personally, I was approaching it the same way I would approach music and academics. I was holding onto every detail that I had worked on, I would plan out how I thought the performance should go. I needed to memorize the answers to the unknowns so nothing new would come up and surprise me. I would rehearse my physicality so I could control how I looked in different emotional points.

This was all wrong. The objective is to be surprised and to discover.

The work I was putting in was helpful, but only if I was willing to let it all go when I performed and trust that, at most, it would only inform my performance, not control it. The goal was to discover and be imperfect and to be a vessel for the experience of the character in the story you are telling.

It’s about humanity.

This realization was both heartbreaking and lifesaving for me.

After that performance I learned to become addicted to that feeling. The feeling of the unknown creative emotional limbo.

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Now years later, as a coach and director, I use a similar distraction approach for my students to get them closer to success.

The point is to take your attention off of yourself. If you have done the work there should be no issue.

Start with something simple, count the number of lines in your fingerprint, focus on a mark on the floor and don’t take your eyes off of it, ect. Or You can go the focus route, put your attention on ONLY one piece of the work (internal monologue, vocal variety, pacing, point of focus, objective, audience, scene partner, sensory work, ect) .

It’s through this process where you can also find which pieces of the work are going to keep you grounded.

These tools can be applied to more than just performance, Get out of your head, leave yourself alone, be prepared, but trust the work.

In performance the best things to do are the human things. Breathe, feel (literally what are you physically and emotionally feeling), look at who or what is in front of you. Find the comfort within the discomfort.

Think about the performances you love, the ones that make you feel inspired, the ones that make you cry, the ones that make you laugh.

The actors who made you feel this way all have one thing in common. They were able to be a vessel for the emotion and that emotion was captured on the camera or on stage.

We as human beings are so fascinated by other human beings. We are curious things and we have become insecure. We act as if we need permission to feel emotion. We are scared to break away from the stable or the normal that we have become bland and colorless.

We now look to visual and audible entertainment to give us that sense of color back. In the form of visual narrative entertainment we look to the actors to give us permission to play with color.

It is through books, tv shows, and movies that we are reminded how deeply we feel or rather how vivid life can be if we allow ourselves to feel more openly.

So I challenge you to do the work. Be incredibly detailed and then let it all go. Be informed and let yourself fall into a limbo. Discover.

Give yourself permission to be more vivid.

-Sammy Meneses