Tag: S.U.R.F. process

SURFing Process

F$%K … Recasting

In my process of getting out of character (SURF) the hardest part for ME is recasting. It is the point where I know what I am doing is perpetuating pain and I have to change but the question is what and how and where and when.
And i am not moving…not doing my class…no studio…just tried to get time at little Haiti and one door was locked- one was taken and the theater was setting lights as i heard the sound and knew there was someone in the light booth..

Where is ALONE….

Today i realized that

I have wanted my own artistic VOice for a long while and I have it and it is so strong that it isn’t letting me work with anyone or any company or any message that isn’t on the same path.
THUS it has become clear that it is…
dibiulitaing to me NOT to have my own company…

Knowing what I can’t do without causing me pain pushing me into a corner of the ONE and ONLY thing I Can do.

Officially establish my company
My PLACE to do MY work and work with like minded creative that are in line with ME…

Artist that are here to spread LOVE
Not pain
Artist that are healed or demand to try and be
Artist that let go and move on and forgive
Artist that take responsibility
Artist that have empathy
Strong ALPHA voices that have vision and alphaness
People who can hold me

I am heading to the graphic designer to create the SURF logo
So i can take my freind up on talking at the chamber and introduce officially to the city my company. My Artistic Company

I can set a date for the next show and how stories are our passions…seeing the story you are in and choosing to shift what is needed form your position and with those you live with so that you can have a better version of your story…pas-present and future.

Transforming through performance…

So my a issue in my tissue is that i am an amazing pleaser and I have to stop activating that becasue it is not aligned…I am pleasing others before myself and that is never a good thing. I can’t do it anymore and this last part – the accommodating – I have no time for that-

This is the year of pleasing Susie…If it pleases me…

Now I must lift weights and strengthen my core-

solidification

RECASTING AS
A strong older woman with wrinkles and a voice!
Cue the kitchen walls as they fall open like a house of cards and the world is revealed and I am free- Flowing and forgiven.

List
Logo for SURF
Trademark name
Class and process
Venue for Edinbough

S

Kitchen

Acting….the mind of us and dissociative identity disorder

I just heard about Dissociative identity disorder and it reminds me of what method actors like myself deal with…

If people can developed DID from trauma (during their early years) that is repetitive then by accessing personal trauma to create a role and then repeating it in a play or movie you can also build an ALTER ego…which is hard to get rid of…and most don’t even try to or are aware of it.

When the ALTER CHARACTER for an actor is created by tapping into their personal memory or traumas the ALTER will blend with YOU- intertwine…

If you have found peace with your traumas of your past and used forgiveness and asked them to forgive you and truly released the charge then…the ALTER/CHARACTER you create while you act is not meshed with your personal trauma and you can indeed get out of character when you finish the job if you allow yourself the time for rehabilitation.

If you don’t rehab- your fluid memory skills might absorb the characters trauma as yours…for example. Think of a person who had a knee injury and after time is was healed but the person still limped. This is bc the mind hasn’t really been retrained to know the injury doesn’t need to be protected-

Also each trauma is an ego and egos don’t willingly die and the only way to RELEASE them- i have found- is with soft kind uncharged love. The least amount of energy needed will indeed release the trauma- because if you aggressively go in… you will have that trauma aggressively dig in or return in some sort of Trigger.

Thus my Method…SURF  was created…a movement therapy like process that involves a performance aspect that releases the EGO through unconscious movement lead PERHAPS by our authentic healed self..

I wish someone who worked with Dissociative identity disorder would talk with me and what I have learned about myself and other actors who use their pain for their art.

Two fold- they hurt themselves and others as they project pain into the content and thus into the threads that weave our society

Kitchen

YOU NEVER LET ME GO…THANK GOODNESS

I WROTE this diddy the other day…part of a song someone should write

You never let me go
You never let me go
You never let me go
No matter how I try to say good-

I never let you go
I never let you go
I never let you go
I matter how you tried to say good-

And here is the scene…it is about NOT being angry or unhappy or discontent.. and how strange that feels to me

A couple sitting on a rocking wooden bench looking over the mountains…sipping kambucha..

You: Now what

Me: no idea

You: I don’t know how to move from here

ME; you want to go back

You: Back there

Me: yes

You: because newness is hard

Me: I suppose

You: All this for nothin

Me: I guess

You: Gags and tittels

Me: entertainment with blood stains

You: Marriage is boring when we aren’t fighting

Me: That’s your issue

You: Fuck you!

Me: Your welcome.

You : I feel better now…thanks… ( Kisses)

Kitchen

Hello …Hoʻoponopono

The prayer of Ho’oponopono is as I learned it to let go of the TIDES the generational pain you carry so as to not transfer them to the next one. IT is based on the idea of the lineage of emotional pain.

You say the name of the person that you have an “issue with” ( past or present
Then say
Please forgive me
I am sorry
I love you
Thank you

You will find that it is difficult for you to do for certain people and those are the people you need to keep saying this to until you don’t have difficulty doing it.

For me it was like I was slowly releasing  myself from a rope that was tied around my neck and with each repetition over time it was a thread that broke until I was free and so was the person I did the prayer for…

THe prayer is Hawaiian and it was given to me by a Reike teacher who told me to say it for the people I claim have hurt me. At the time the list was long. I was late 30ths and I had a colorful life and in it there were missteps but the thing about this prayer, for lack of a better word is that it changed the villain from them to me…it gave me a sense of responsibility in the relationship because for one reason or another I was still holding onto it in a negative way. IT needed a correction if I wanted to be set free and who better to set yourself free than your own self.

It was about ME asking for forgiveness of the “people who wronged me” and in that I slowly began to realize that I had created extended pain and stress in my body by holding others in their characters—-their roles in my life. My negative thoughts had warm homes becasue I gave them that place in my body. I allowed them there..THis was a wonderful key that unlocked my own ability to negotiate my thought process and since then…I try to immediately release negative thoughts and then use that grace toward my own desires or destiny…

This energy we have is strong and when you speak ill of someone you can indeed maintain the “pull” that story you are telling yourself has on you.

The wild thing i learned from this experience was that I am NOT my stories or my experiences…I can let them go through forgiveness and movement and in the end I find that I am what I think about…who I see and how I do what I do.

My stories are justification…beliefs that only mean as much as we lean on them

Look at your life, your daily habits- you are all those thoughts and those things…

if you are thinking nastly thoughts about others and yourself…then you are  dare I say nasty person… becasue I have come to learn that being kind means… you can address those thoughts in your own head..and heart…and spend time trying to see the situation from as many angles as possible so that YOUR point of view is just ONE of them and not the only one.

Then you begin to dilute your Nasty thoughts and ask them kindly to leave because as long as you have them… you are them…

I know this because I have spent the last 5 years walking though my life and although I am not friends with everyone in my life..i hold no ill will to anyone…no matter what happened between us and I have asked forgiveness if not personally then spiritually as often as I can until I feel I let them go or vis a versa… because Karma is a boomerang and unless you let people go from what they “did” to you” you will hurt them …maybe more that they ever hurt you and then WHO is the VIllain?

Be sweet because you can…and the world needs that now…don’t be nasty or mean or sarcastic…because it is overplayed…

Be the one that is ok and if you can’t be OK then go and work on trying to be…one relationship at a time.

Xo
S

Kitchen

London vs American Acting

Pretending to be a role is very different than being the role. It gets really messy when you discuss this with the acting community… because the style of off shoots of METHOD acting Have become integrated in our teachings. The teachers of today were among the first or second generation of this approach. It is imbedded and systemic…it can’t be undone…like the vine that a German guy brought to NC and it now covers all the trees and looks like a forest but it is a vine killing the forest itself…looks can be deceptive.
I went to London in 1995/6 and worked with the best teachers from RADA that we now working at Webber Douglas I was kind of like the vine…going there to learn what they were doing but in a way…starting to expose the alternative American training to these classical teachers…perhaps they saw the future…a. Bunch of emotionally unstable artists…just waiting to happen.
Here is a perfect example of how my American approach to acting was received.
I was the ONLY American actor there and they accepted me into a class of post graduate students. I was beyond thrilled and thankful.
we had midterm performances and I did a monologue that I thought was amazing. I mean I broke down on stage crying and opening up my heart. I was amazed how OPEN i way, how connected to my true self…and what happened after that was that the school threatened to kick me out.
They were very confused by what I was doing and said…”why are YOU crying? That’s not your job! That is the job of the audience!”
It was such a wakeup call. I was sitting across from an acting instructor and she was holding a tissue box and I was just crying again. Now from her critique of my amazing breakthrough movement…and she was like..
“what the hell are you doing?” That was ugly and sloppy and not professional at all”
all I see in my memory bank is a constant flow of tissues.
I am not sure I ever fully adapted their approach as my first language but it gave me structure to my work in many ways.
After they suggested I consider leaving the school I cut my emotional connections off and started making fun of the teachers ( this this was s suggestion of one of the teachers themselves) in My final showcase monologue of a high strung woman…..pretending to Steward Pierce our high strong voice teacher.
This time I was greeted with accolades…. They were fully impressed with my IMPRESSION of a character- my ability to ACT…not become…
I remember this one teacher was like do you want to know who we were all most surprised by? I was feeling like such the pathetic student I was like…no…
She smiled and said. YOU.
It was such a huge shock and wake up call.
However. I rarely see classical teaching anymore and even London theater…in their contemporary theatre seemed so become so American- talk about the tail wagging the dog.

Kitchen

Letting GO of ….N.Y.F.A

I never wanted to be an acting teacher. I have a Masters in Classical Theatre from London but the idea of teaching never really accured to me.

Fast forward many years and I wind up teaching my MOVEMENT technique to entry level acting students. Students who for the most part never had an acting class and they are In thier first year of college.

I brought with me my WARM up…what I had created in the pole dancing room at IRON FLOWER gym on biscayne….MISS THIS ROOM SO MUCH….and I added to it a few of the required curriculum for thier degree.

From here I created a gamification of movement that opens the artist and also allows them to heal themselves and let go of trauma- theirs of their characters.

The process was simple and I felt it can be used to help other people in the community as well as link the community to the actors.

My last semester working there I invested 10 people from here commnunity to be our guest. We worked as a team to help them release their stories and it was amazing. I knew at that moment that the training we had can infact thelp NON actors and Allon people who were searching for a way to express themselves and deal with something an alternative to “Therapy”

I presented this to the head of the theater department and along with that several internship opportunities. He responded NO to all the attempts to extend the school outward. It became very clear again that this was not the place for me to GROW anymore and it was time to say goodbye.

I had one talk with the New head of the Miami Beach school who sided with the Head the acting department and then one talk with the head of the international school who was down from New York.

THey both lasted hours and they both came to the same conclusion. What I had to offer wasn’t really their front burner and although I enjoyed teaching I didn’t enjoy the ceiling the program had on what I could do with with teachers.

What I learned is people want and need to be seen in thier LIFE,..

People’s lack of being heard or seen without judgement is lacking and once a person feels heard they can begin to let go of the story they are telling…it is the unhearing …the lack of it landing on loving ears that understand and accepts .that perpetuates once’s story.

PErhaps that is why once I spoke with the HEAD of the school and he heard me and my thoughts I was free to leave the school without any sense of resistance or negativity.

I even went so far to meet with one of the other teachers that I was told approached acting form the opposite direction and we had coffee then he took my class and now he also SEEs what I am doing…

All this allowed me to feel HEARD and regardless of the outcome I was free to peruse my next adventure…

MAybe share without needing people to agree. Share becasue you don’t need them to agree but rather you need to speak your truth –
And it is on you t one able to share without existence becasue it is in how you deliver the information.
If can be aggressive or hurtful or just soft and simple and with the lease about of energy as possible. That is when you will have the lease amount of boomerang energy on the return and you can exit in that window…. of FLOW

S

Kitchen

An Actor’s Approach to Letting go of a Character to Avoid Personal Psychological Concussions

As an actress I devoted myself to years of intensive training that taught me how to embody any type of character I wanted to portray. The training was based around the concept of tapping in to a thought or belief within my personal life experience that I could then manipulate and repurpose to say and do things that would be convincingly portrayed via a character to the audience. This style of training is successful, yet I also find it capable of causing psychological concussions. Concussions caused by stitching your own personal experiences into the material of a character so seamlessly that you struggle to remember where you end, and your character begins. In my intensive training I was never taught how to tear apart the seams, to separate, to let go, to get out of the character and back in to myself and only myself. I find the omission of this additional training to “fall out of character” fascinating since the ability to let go of a character is part of being able to get another job. So, why wasn’t I taught that? I have my theories!

These physiological concussions are creating repercussions on actors and the society they help mold. The ability to go in and out of a belief system or physical world of one character and into the belief system of another is powerful, playful and at times dangerous. It can be noted in Jim Carey’s documentary, Health Ledger’s experience playing the Joker and Denzel Washington’s journey in Fences to name a few. We should suspect there are countless others if we all dared to look, or they dared to tell. With such a negative social stigma on mental illness it is not safe in the world of acting to admit such a thing, a mental weakness of losing the ability to identify self from character. Perhaps we would train our actors to be better equipped for the life of an actor if we can accept the risks of the business and the management of rewards from success. Leaving yourself open and vulnerable to people in the business, as well as the embodied characters, is dangerous and steps should be made to be more honest with this truth. Perhaps at the very least offer early counsel to parents and talented young souls of where a career in acting can lead.
Much like football we all watch the entertainment with little or no concern for the players. If we cared too much the game lose its luster. As a culture we would have look for another option of entertainment which may not be hard to do however, it would still require a shift in culture. We are starting to hear the desperate concerns from players and their families regarding the long-term ailments from early and repeated concussions. It was only recently that the football world mentioned this and yet it was a known issue, but they would just put the players back on the field until it was publicly addressed.
I love acting and have decided to teach it even though I feel my career as an actor was demonstrative and toxic to my life. I was greatly affected by the psychological concussions caused by acting and they were a heavy burden. They not only impacted many aspects of my life but those of my husband and children as well. The burden was so much to bare and the continual negative outcomes from the concussions created an environment so toxic that I couldn’t maintain a healthy and fulfilling work-life balance. I decided to leave the profession and focus all my love and compassion to raising my children. As my children have grown and their independence has matured I found myself with an opportunity to return to acting which lead to teaching acting.
To part surprise and part dismay I returned only to be haunted by the ghost of the characters I had embodied. Sometimes they are helpful by giving me skills I had yet to learn and other times, because I was a method actor, they put my whole family and everything we had built on the chopping block. How could this be happening even after taking a ten-year long hiatus from the profession? I have pondered this for quite some time and believe it is because of the way I was trained to set up a story for the character and how to format the character. The format demands the character be present in my own life. It parallels a bad habit, an addiction, that now becomes something you must contend with in your own life.
I found myself captivated with the practice of acting and the aspect of movement. I began to create my own concept of training that keeps the acting skills at the forefront of character development but also provides guidance on returning the actor back to neutral- home again, to fully self-identify and unstitch the seam they created to embody their character of choice. My concept is successful and yet my concept creates a dilemma. It is contradictory to the training that many other teachers in my department implement. They rely on the same techniques I was subjected to in my formative years to get the actors to tap in to a very personal place to format a character, yet they do not intend or advise them on the absolute necessity to peel that character away when they are through with the act.
Another challenge I am currently facing is where, do we as teachers, draw the line of acceptable behavior from an actor who has failed to disembody a character? A male student acted out a scene where he portrayed an abusive lover. This actor himself is believed to have attacked a fellow actress at the school. The actress had to leave because of the trauma from the alleged attack. The faculty is aware of the attack and has opted to allow such behavior to happen in the name of artistic expression. Failing to distinguish a realistic attack versus one that was allegedly performed under guise of acting. They can’t seem to distinguish the actor from the character because their belief in the formation of a character doesn’t require such separation.
Parents should question the use of their money being spent on such practices? Are we as teachers at any point obligated to nurture character formation yet also teach the limit of the actions of a character? I have brought my concerns to the school faculty, but the consensus is that no action is required on behalf of the school. I hypothesize that the concepts they rely on to train actors use pain as talent and they refuse to try and find another way to format characters. The issue is that the actors must KNOW THYSELF-know home, self-identify and even more so be taught to know themselves as to create a more defined boundary between them and the character.
Many actors enjoy acting for the opposite reason, it keeps them away from self. If they wear a mask, then there is somewhere to hide physically and emotionally all the while never creating the environment to mature in to their own personal selves. My concept of training teaches the actors to be whole people who have healed their own anger by learning how to get out of character. Know who they are and recognize the natural paths of their own personal maturity. Understand that they are powerful and must respect their abilities or they will become part of the problem. An open and willing actor can find themselves being used and manipulated emotionally without any concern for what they are enduring. Thus, subjecting themselves and those around them to the emotional and psychological concussions from acting. They return to other players in the profession such as agents and managers who don’t delve in to the intentions or practices of the director nor care to, if the actor is getting roles and providing a profit regardless of what those roles represent and the concussions that they are likely to cause.

Kitchen

Hello…Content

Hello Content-

It feels like getting a massage but a soft tissue one where Nothing feels like it is happening.

That is what CONTENT- feel like…and FLOW is that with a soft wind at my back…

It is a flow state and it is hard to manage IF you don’t respect it. Honor it…

It has taken me a while to simply enjoy the GO WITH THE FLOW but this past summer I became aware of what it feels like, who challenges it in my life and what I do to Sabotage it and why.

Let me walk through it using the SURF process
Four steps that are taken if desired softly.

S- I am in flow- the world is providing me with everything I need at every moment
U- I understand that being micro managed in other peoples homes is tough and makes me want to have my OWN vacation home- something to grab onto-
A fellow actor offers me a role in a film he is doing about an unhappy wife who brow beats her husband and I take it without a thought. Jump at it- FAST and WITHOUT CONSIDERATION…a high comes over me and a feeling of aggression towards anything that is FLOW or building or helping comes over me..I instantly have NO patience for being KIND and I get angry and sad…
R- I think about the feeling and walk around it and quiet it…and then the guy in the film backs out and I slowly think about it and back out as well and then this cool peaceful feeling—saying NOT to acting like a jerk in someone else’s story.
F- THe wind is bare able again and I smile at my mom and my husband and my family and I am content…

Kitchen

EMOTIONAL TRAUMA

Having an injury- be it physical or emotional requires rehab and rest. It may even require switching movements or thought processes so as not to reinjure a sensitive JOINT or Sense Memory.

Sense Memory is what actors can use to recall a feeling in order to conjure up an emotion. It was introduced through several American teachers in the early 19th century.

But much like exercises that have been shown to agrivate more than heal or strengthen I believe the same is true with this approach.

The actors who use this method of tapping in to their own personal story open themselves up to becoming the TOOL themselves. Rather than the Classical approach which it to IMAGINE yourself in that world.

This internal approach of using YOURSELF as the PAINT the CANVAS the everything lines one up to tend to NOT heal their own pain.

They are softly guided in the acting world to USE IT. THus is something happens one may BANK IT…burry it…and in a way smile at another tool they have but

The follow through it that the person themselves become the victim. THey become NOT the artist they become more the material…as well and eventually this I believe is why many actors find themselves with unsealed trauma which lead to mental illness.

IT is unsaid but in my class in 7th grade we all stood up to tell a story. The one with the worst story won. See.

WHen I returned to London to see a fellow actress I trained it Star off the WEst End I realized that they too have converted to the AMERICAN approach to acting but in the end
It is brutal and emotionally damaging and I feel by watching and paying for this trip of ENTERTAINMENT we have to understand that there is no REHAB going on…
NO one is rushing to these actors backstage and walking them OUT of the role… They have to figure it out themselves and that is a hard task bring that many of them aren’t even aware they got stuck in the Matrix to begin with…

I believe the clapping it what wakes us up—end of the play – it severs like a SLAP that is meant to shock…but truly——the actors need to be aware that like foot ball playing they are undergoing emotional concussions and the more they use their OWN pain the more severe the injury is and over time it will and could cut their lives off-

Being empathetic is an amazing skill actors have…being too willing to bleed for real is going too far..

I tried to adjust this during my time at New York Film Academy but in the end the whol industry that is currently teaching is based on PAIN as ART…so I decided to step away and speak from this mountain top.

IT is an issue. No one is talking about it. No one is warning a person with severe emotional pain NOT to play like minded roles…no one is teaching actors how to GET OUT OF CHARATER…and the only one really addressing this MASSIVE issue with Becoming the role…regardless of whose well you tap….yours or a spirits is Jim Carrey…He saw it…we are who we believe we are…and that my dear ones is why your mind is so important to know and love and respect and treat kindly.

PEacE and LOVE

Kitchen

Hello…acting?

I miss you. I know we had a great time and I know I got worked up a bit but I’ve taken myself out of the running as far as legit work and focused more on student film. Becoming a student myself.

I was just told about another role for a film and it made me smile. The one acting teacher who actually took my class and participated in it asked me to film this with him. I am not sure yet if the director will cast me but the idea of working again made me smile.

I guess you Ae like a lover acting. I have to sometimes let you go – give us space- so we can fall in love again.

I am still interested in that CO-OP Agebcy for actors where we train and also help each other land roles.

They have models of this in the UK and I feel like I would like to connect with a few actors in Miami and build this out…as was my original idea many years ago.

I am going to ask a woman in Miami who is super kind to take my photo and start there. Why do I always say I am not going to act again? Just to keep acting interested in me?
Again…timing——