V 4 Artistic Listening
"All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players." William Shakespeare
Every single acting coach or at this point any human being will easily agree that the most important and unfortunately widely underused acting or life skill is LISTENING. However, as simple as it might sound, the true artistic listening requires more than just hearing what people say. In fact, there are what I call 4 major V-elements that an actor has to bring into his/her arsenal to fully comprehend the concept of listening in order to make his/her acting choices more interesting, natural, and subtle. If you are not an actor, you will still highly benefit from utilizing this concept into your daily life since we all know that life, no matter how hard some might argue, is just that a creative art form of listening.
Here are the major 4 V elements to make your acting and life more interesting, subtle and natural:
V1- visual element. Things an actor can see. These can include the body language of your partner; the surroundings of your character; and anything else that you can actually detect with your eyes.
V2- vocal element. Things an actor can hear. These include the tone of voice of your acting partner; the sounds around you; and anything else that you can actually hear.
V3- verbal element. This one includes you and your acting partner's lines and their meaning.
V4- visceral element. This one a is little bit more complicated. The definition of visceral as it appears in the Merriam-Webster dictionary is "felt in or as if in the internal organs of the body: DEEP." I personally believe that this element of listening is one of the most important ones when it comes to making the choices that are unique and specific. It also can be defined as simple as listening to your gut or intuition. We all know that a creative gut is something that requires years of hard work and can be ruined by a second of hesitation. The best way that I came up to allow myself being driven by V4 acting engine ironically goes all the way back to why many of us, and by us I mean actors, can be such lousy listeners. Many believe that actors are bad listeners because we love to talk so much that we simply are too occupied with our own agenda to say something witty and often silly to the point of awkwardness. Some will say that it's because we are too occupied thinking about our next line so we completely ignore what our acting partner has to say. There are also those who know that a lot of actors are too worried about their looks so they spend more energy on wondering how they will come out on the screen rather than on being a hundred percent involved in the moment. Although, these and many other explanations are true to some extent, all of them are missing one extremely important element that I personally noticed about myself and many other actors and performers in general: we are easily excited and naturally exciting people. That's why, many of us decided to become actors in the first place. We get excited about anything and we can't wait to share our excitement with the rest of the world. And so, we forget that we are not the only ones that have something to say. This eagerness to share and express usually prevents us from paying attention to those around us. But there is still hope. The good news is the excitement is nothing but a powerful energy stream that with a little bit of practice can become our strongest listening tool. All we have to do is to drop this excitement deep into our belly by consciously breathing into it and allowing our whole organism to open up and react to the stimuli given to us from outer reality or internal sensation. Moreover, this split second of simply allowing yourself experiencing excitement without expressing it will give you just enough time to concentrate all of your energy on being a hundred percent involved in the moment. This process will help you to avoid playing the obvious and give you an opportunity to react with subtlety and vulnerability that usually are so crucial in acting. By turning your excitement into your visceral listening tool, you will also discover thousands of layers about your character that you never even thought of. However, the most important factor is that it will always make you feel confident and grounded in your choices no matter where your character, your acting career, or your life takes you.
The great way to explore and practice your V4 power listening is by taking Tai-Chi, Yoga, Modern, and Ballroom Dance. These beautiful Mind Body Art Forms guided by a sensible professional will allow you to become vulnerable enough to get strong enough to follow your gut and turn what some people might believe to be your weakness into your most precious strength- artistic intuition.
