BEING IN THE MOMENT by Neil Schell     09-25-07 Ah yes, that illusive thing of “being in the moment.” You’ve heard many an acting teacher tell you how important it is. Maybe even a director or two has referred to it. But when it comes right down to it, you may not even know what it is or how to achieve it. So here is yet another treatise on the subject of “being in the moment.” Simply put, being in the moment is being in present time, right here right now. That’s simple enough. So why is there so much emphasis on achieving it when it’s such a simple concept? Well there are many reasons for this, one of which is, the actor is often lead to plan things – many things. He or she is taught to plan “beats” and objectives in a scene. And then there is the other simple plan of “knowing your lines.” All of these things can be attention grabbers that seem to take your attention off of the present moment. Or maybe it’s something like knowing that at the end of this scene, you have to cry because it says so in the script and the director has made it clear that it has to happen too. All of these factors can contribute to the actor moving up into his or her mind and putting their attention on the future – the future line to be spoken, the future mark you have to hit, the future emotion that is expected, the future “beat” you must change at, etc. It’s your intellect that gets worried about these things and puts your attention on the future and pulls you out of the present. But how to deal with this? Well, one thing is for sure, your body never leaves the present. And if yours does, well, you should be in a different business! So if your body never leaves the present, staying in contact with it is a very useful tool for an actor. And what better way to stay in contact than to breathe! This is why you hear so many acting teachers telling actors to breathe. Not only that, when an actor gets anxious about what’s coming up in the future or what their “supposed to do” according to their plan of beats and objectives and emotional plateaus, their breath usually gets very shallow or they stop breathing altogether (watch out for that one, it’s not too healthy). So if you breathe and stay away from planning, you should be able to stay in the moment. Correct? Well, yes and no. Because this is just a short article, I cannot possibly go into every aspect of how to be in the moment. But I can give you an analogy that will lead you to understanding and trusting that being in the moment is far more powerful than you may have imagined. As you know, I studied and apprenticed and practiced the art of film editing. During those studies I learned a few basics, one of which was that there are 24 single, non-moving (still) pictures taken every second with a movie camera – in video it’s 30 pictures (frames) every second. So let’s look at this for what it really is. An audience sits down in a movie theatre and watches approximately 173,000 still pictures during a feature film. None of them are moving. Because of the way people’s minds work and how the eye sees, they perceive that there is motion happening during those two hours. Yet in reality, there is absolutely no motion whatsoever. The audience adds in the motion. They literally fill in the blanks because half the time there is no picture on the screen at all! (Hence the term “flick” from the light flicker from dark to bright the whole time the picture is being viewed.) Something very similar happens with an actor’s performance. When an actor truly plays the moments and not the story or what is about to happen in the future (for example, the actor “knows” she wins the argument at the end of a scene so she plays that at the beginning of the scene), the audience now has the job of putting the moments together into a story. You, the actor, have the job of connecting with truthful moments as they come to you by trusting every impulse in every moment and fully committing to it without worrying about what’s going to happen in the future. You don’t have to worry if you are portraying the character or if you are telling the story. In fact, by not telling the story and staying in the moment, you allow the audience to participate in the film and put the story together themselves. Audiences absolutely love doing this. And they are very good at it. They are just as good at putting together the moments the actors are playing in order to make the story as they are at putting together the still frames in order to make the motion. This analogy has helped hundreds of actors to understand what “being in the moment” is about and why it works. Of course, there is much more to it. But it does illustrate what a good actor does and why the audience loves it Until the next newsletter… Neil PS Feel 'free' to write to me at  anytime. I will answer. PROFESSIONALS HAVE COACHES, AMATEURS DON'T