The Courage to Be Calm

Stay clam

The need for certain kinds of courage is pretty obvious. It takes great commitment to perform well – and energy, and a willingness to expose oneself. Trying out interesting and bold choices takes courage too. But there's a kind of courage that, while not totally independent of the others, is a bit different, and is at least as essential to actors. I think of it as the courage to be calm.

Whether auditioning for producers and casting directors, or performing in front of audiences and cameras, there really is some truth to the notion that you have only one chance to "bring it," to "do your thing," (as they like to say on American Idol). Yes, there may well be more performances, more takes, perhaps even more chances to read an audition piece, but, still, each performance is its own unique live event, its own record of the time, and, therefore, your own singular chance to shine.

But what, exactly, does it mean to shine? Huge emotions? Technical skill? Personality? Tears? Most important is our ability to live and breathe naturally as thinking, feeling, self-contained human beings within artificial conditions and contrived circumstances. It takes focus, yes, on our actions, but it also takes courage to enter the performance space unflinchingly, calmly, at ease with ourselves on this earth.

It's helpful to have existential goals in addition to content-oriented goals. But it's hard sometimes to know just what psychological state to pursue, and, for that matter, how to go about pursuing it. Few goals, it seems to me, are superior to calmness. And the mere realization that it often takes courage to be calm, that calmness is not something that simply visits us arbitrarily by grace, but, rather, something we can martial, as if heroes in our own stories – this awareness is the first step toward a calmness technique.

To approach something so apparently docile as calmness with a proactive, warrior-like spirit may seem counter intuitive. Certainly there's paradox at play (as there so often is in acting). The Chinese call it "wu-wei" – effortless effort.

Source: The Actor's Roadmap. This free online book for serious students of acting offers a systematic approach to the craft, as well as perspective on many of today's most common theatre principles and practices.