"Either it brings tears to their eyes or else..."

"Or else what?" said Alice for the Knight had made a sudden pause.
"Or else it doesn't, you know."

Just a warning, I'm going to get super actory in this entry!  I could go a lot of different routes with this quote but I'm going to write today about my acting class yesterday.

So, as an actress I get misunderstood a lot.  Not so much misunderstood in the literal sense of what I say but misunderstood in how I operate.  I am an extremely emotional being.  My emotions remain at a peaked level so that I can easily access them.  I've actually always been this way but I've learned to harness my emotions and keep them just under the surface so that they are there when I need them.  The problem, well it's not a problem for me, for others is that I am an open book.  And for the first time yesterday in class, we discussed how important it is to be this open.

I'm not saying that every actor or actress has to tell everything about themselves or communicate as much as I do, but for me it helps to have nothing weighing on my thoughts.  So the scene we did yesterday was from a new film and it was heavily emotional.  In four pages I went from anger to extreme sadness to happy then back to sad.  It was glorious!  Seriously, I live for these kinds of scenes because they are a workout.  My emotions are like muscles for me and I need to exercise them regularly.  Where I falter is breaking out of the emotions as quickly as I can get in them.  Sometimes casting will ask you to do something over again and if I have to jump out of sad to anger cleanly, well let's just say yesterday I couldn't.

It's interesting to see how other actors operate because one of the girls was worried about going to such an emotional place without hurting her psyche.  I wondered how I would explain to someone how I get there without affecting myself but I honestly don't know.  I guess it's just one of those things that comes so naturally to me.  Maybe I just stopped fighting my emotions so long ago that now they are free flowing all the time.  HA!  I'm like the Hulk only with tears.  My secret is, I'm always crying.  Not really but oh, that just made me so happy.

I guess my point is that everyone responds to emotions differently and there is no right or wrong way.  Either it brings tears to your eyes, or else it doesn't.  That's just how you handle them.  But the great thing about working with other actors is that you can see someone handle a situation with tears and it's beautiful and you can see someone handle the very same situation without tears but still with the same level of emotion and it's is just as interesting.  There really is no correct way when it comes to acting and all of these discoveries yesterday just filled me with a new freedom.

So now I have a new assignment.  I have to find my trigger out or my off switch if you will.  Something that can easily pull me out of my emotional state because ultimately, I am still acting.  I also get to now study emotions without tears.  YEAH!  I want to understand being just as emotional without tears flowing because how powerful could that be?!  Such is the life of an actress :)

Thanks for reading!
Love ya!
Kimberly