AWARENESS IS ACTING

These are questions that require less philosophical pondering and critique and more playfulness and presence. Are you free to think? Or are you thinking to be free?

Acting is awareness.

There are thoughts that correlate to actions. Thoughts cannot be performed. They can be remembered and traced in their nuance and specificity, which creates a new layout every time. Some thoughts—networks of them, their patterns, their rhythms, overlaps with other ones that live in a similar neighborhood—provide sturdy support for the obvious action being taken. They hold up the action’s life: its movement, momentum, breath, weight, and depth. Thoughts can sometimes separate speed and direction from its velocity, creating a different experience as an actor and observer.

The architecture of the conscious mind is similar to a blueprint of a home. On the same floor, there are bedrooms, a kitchen, a nook, a bathroom, a half bathroom, a toilet that flushes your subconscious thoughts through an aged, dark plumbing system.

What do you hear outside the home? A ringing from upstairs, under a striped silk duvet requesting banana pancakes. In that sound, one may hear Sunday, affluence and the stickiness of maple syrup.

I think for some people these details are silly, unnecessary even, off track, unfocused, superfluous but they are essential to the functionality of the home and its freedom and containment. And I find breaking them down are essential to deepening my craft. It’s like when you have a book report project due for class and you gather glitter, markers, glue, glitter glue, googly eyes, pom-poms, stickers, magazine cutouts, and four different kinds of tape. Or if you are a plumber laying out your array of wrenches, pliers, pipe cutters, augers and snakes. You may not use all of those things, but just in case they are called for, they remain within comfortable reach.

These mechanisms are not glamorous, which is precisely why I mention them. I am interested and motivated by hidden systems that support the existence of visible reality. In the absence of such inquiry, I feel erased, and this emptiness finds its way into my work, which makes it feel performative.

My own freedom relies on comforts and needs I mask aspects of to appear palatable and acceptable. To eat, sleep, hydrate, excrete, create, repeat, think, wander, hoard, declutter, and build an acceptance around such simple needs that are dressed up or dressed down depending on where I am in life.

In my own acting work, I notice myself struggling with this set of questions on stage and off stage:

These are questions that require less philosophical pondering and critique and more playfulness and presence.

Are you free to think? Or are you thinking to be free?