I'll Be You

Many years ago, I worked with a director at One Life to Live who gave some of his best notes by saying "I'll be you," and proceeding to demonstrate what he wanted the actor in question to do. As you might imagine, this became particularly memorable when you saw him "being" a child, an ingenue, or a dog. Quite often, however, it was a far more effective, and efficient (and soaps thrived on efficiency!) way to convey a note than just saying what he wanted.
 
As I prepared today to step into slightly different job shoes, I found myself trying to "be" the person whose job I'd be doing. After all, shadowing someone is generally an effective way to learn--more effective than just reading a manual. What I realized along the way, however, is that while I might watch carefully for a guide for how to be, my way of doing the job might actually be quite different. I could try to imagine myself "being" the person I watched, but when I stepped in, I would almost certainly do it differently. And I suppose that as long as I could pull out the main points from the "I'll be you" lesson, I would be okay. Clearly, those ingenues would not be acting the scenes the same way as their middle aged male director. But if they were able to pull some guidance about blocking or intention from the "I'll be you" exercise, then it would have been a success.
 
We'll see how I do, "being" the person I've been watching. It seems to me that good performance comes from both attention to "I'll be you" and infusion of the role we're playing with the skills and talent that are uniquely ours. "I'll be you," then, is not an instruction book, but an interactive demo video of sorts, one that we can adapt to our own needs. And if the combination of what we bring and what we've learned accomplishes the task or the emotion or the needs at hand, then the "I'll be you" exercise has been worthwhile. We can never really be what we see in "I'll be you." We can simply allow it to make "us being us" a whole lot better.