On the difficulty of being seen.
- The paradox of desire & the dichotomy of control: when you step on stage.
- An evolutionary perspective: how to approach our vestigial tendencies in front of a group.
- The global workspace: a model from cognitive science, what happens when we are “in our head”.
- Cognitive biases on steroids: two natural but irrational tendencies that prevent us from making essential distinctions when learning to act.
- The actor's syndrome: definition and examples.
- The problem with acting techniques: avoidance or masks, some examples from the history of acting techniques.
The Paradox
The desire for experiences that are immediately beyond our reach is counterproductive by nature.
You get on stage, in front of everyone. You want to act well. And not make a fool of yourself.
But something isn't working. You feel a knot in your stomach. You start disconnecting from your body. You invalidate your experience. You overcompensate. The more you try to think of a solution, the worse it gets.
Sometimes you put yourself in a state. Relaxation. Physical or emotional preparation. You've heard they do that in Hollywood. You try a warm up that you learnt in an acting class.
A pro in the industry who you met in a “networking event” told you to let go, but it is not very clear, and doesn't necessarily work for your scene. Plus their CV was only a list of credits. You can tell they are judging you more than guiding you, and you sense they don't really know much more than you do.
But why is it so charged?
A normal reaction
An evolutionary perspective.
We are not, in fact, built to be observed by a group of strangers who don't react.
As a spectator, watching people who aren't paying attention to us is quite fascinating. But being observed triggers, on the other hand, a reflex reaction of flight, freezing, or aggression.
Someone staring at us is not always a good sign.
Behaving badly in front of a group, in the environment we evolved in, also means risking exclusion from the tribe, social death, which often leads to real death.
In evolutionary psychology, we talk about vestigial tendencies. Our psychology and physiology have not adapted to the stage environment. Ancestral modules take over and put us in a state of hypervigilance, as described by agent detection theory or signalling theory. These models refer to our tendency toward vigilance when decoding the intentions of others, and our caution about revealing our own in unsecured environments.
This is the origin of the sclera, the white around our eyes. It allows others to precisely pinpoint where we are looking, even from a distance.
Which means that those who lacked this attentional (or even intentional) legibility were killed or did not reproduce.
“Being in your head”, or the global workspace
One of the cognitive science models of consciousness as an evolutionary function is the global workspace theory.
When several modules are in conflict: our impulses in the interaction, the need to control what happens to us in public in a potentially dangerous social environment... our consciousness emerges to manage the expression of these modules.
This theory precisely calls it the theatre of consciousness.
In other words: if our body is unsure about what we are allowed to do, we start thinking. And the body, itself, pauses.
But on stage, the more we think, the more we become dissociated, the more we judge ourselves for acting badly, the more we fear not being validated by the group, and the more this anxiety persists.
It's a vicious cycle.
Cognitive biases on steroids
We have many cognitive biases in everyday life, which also allow us to make quick decisions, save energy, or develop useful reflexes, but they impact, at the same time, the clarity of our judgment.
Some of them are multiplied in their effect when we are in this state of panic and social survival.
In particular, authority bias and conformism.
As illustrated by the terrifying Milgram and Asch experiments.
Milgram shows how willing we are to risk another person's life as soon as we follow the directives of someone who is supposed to know what they're doing (and this even without any significant personal gain or danger if we refuse).
Asch shows how willing we are to completely invalidate what we see in order to do as others do, to the point of publicly denying what our own eyes are telling us.
The Actor's Syndrome
It is our compulsive tendency to find ways out, even counterproductive ones, to escape the stage fright that paralyses us.
Trying to calm down, or doing something physical to distract ourselves, clinging to a piece of advice, even an inapplicable one given by an authority, over-adapting to please the group...
There are as many actor's syndromes as there are personalities or acting techniques.
They mask, numb, or avoid the problem.
They are ways of escaping forward, but as soon as we stop manipulating, pretending, acting... we are back in contact with this desperate situation.
Because we cannot become legible by quickly adding things on top of our experience, any more than we can fall asleep by the strength of our willpower, or overcome anxiety by frantically searching for a solution.
Methods to escape
When considering acting techniques, we often turn to an approach recommended by someone famous, or a professional we trust, but most of them add avoidance on top of avoidance, by giving us protocols to mask, or escape forward.
Stanislavski initially drew inspiration from psychologist Théodule Ribot to stimulate emotions through imaginary contemplations, heavily borrowed by Strasberg.
Meisner, who found this approach dangerous and counterproductive, advocated for an over-focus on the outside world to “extrovert” actors. At the risk of cutting their attention off from its natural movements back toward their own body or their intermittent, normal thoughts.
Many other acting theorists (Lee Strasberg, Eric Morris, Niki Flacks, Ivana Chubbuck...) approach acting through a necessary and systematic intermediary to change state or add things to do before being able to act.
The issue is that without addressing what happens at the contact with our experience, we remain cut off from our natural behavioural range, and the audience feels it.
Because you cannot add a mask on top of a mask, a character on top of a character.
First Principles Acting
To prevent an acting aesthetic, a code, a way of distorting our experience, from becoming habitual through tradition or authority, our First Principles Acting approach is scientific and reductionist.
Which means we test the effect on the audience (rather than having the teacher alone validate what works or not), and from what captures the group's attention after each exercise, we propose links with the protocols. We then verify the effects of these adjustments.
The goal being to foster the autonomy of participants in this approach from the start, both in setting up their own work and in their ability to give feedback to others, starting from what genuinely interests them as spectators.
Contact Aesthetics is the exploration of what naturally draws us in when we observe people living through experiences. It is in fact a link between the way people are in contact with their own experience and the way we, as an audience, are in contact with them.
In this research, we find that a certain type of control over one's experience on stage is counterproductive. When the “signal” does not seem “honest”, we become distracted, distant, suspicious, as when an advertisement tries to sell us something. We perceive a message trying to manipulate us, rather than organic information about someone else's experience.
Our work consists of learning to be legible, while being observed. In order, then, to be directed.
