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All Your Best Selves

How the Performing Arts Toolkit Can Help You Thrive Anytime, Any Place, and with Anyone

By James J Rojas-TaylorPublished 3 years ago 19 min read
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Me, circa 1983, a curious little bastard

A curious little bastard

I'm a child of many passions but one of my more important ones is an idea that I happened to trip over and find. It's an idea connected to the transcendence of the art forms of acting and improvisation from the realm of illusion to one of realism and naturalism. To live truthfully in imaginary circumstances. Using real human emotions and a real human mindset. The thing is, we don't have two different sets of emotions. One for the stage and one for life. Nor do we have two different minds for the same purposes. Therefore all the skills actors and improvisers use to build themselves for their performance can also be used by non-actors to build themselves for their actions in life. This isn't merely a simple idea, it is well supported by science. The following is the Introduction to a book I wrote that is currently in the editing process. If I were to win this contest I would put the money towards publishing and marketing. The title of the book is All Your Best Selves: How the Performing Arts Toolkit Can Help You Thrive Anytime, Any Place and with Anyone.

As, Alex, in Hunger, Dec 2007, dir by S. Henteges

Introduction: The Handshake

It was only a simple handshake, a small token of gratitude, but simple things rarely stay simple with me. I became obsessed with it. For weeks, I thought about it, probed its significance. Why did it feel like more than a handshake?

This happened on a cold December evening on the set of the biggest job in my short acting career—a career I had got caught up in on a dare. I had landed a principal role in the film Hunger, directed by Steven Hentges. The film concerns five people held prisoner in a madman’s cave at the bottom of a well. In the scene we were working that day, my character, Alex, was having a conversation with Grant, portrayed by Linden Ashby. The professional in me was stoked to be working opposite such an established actor, as I knew I could learn a lot from him; the little kid in me thought it was crazy cool to be working with Johnny Cage from the Mortal Kombat movie.

We were in this cave set built inside a vacant RV sales center that had been converted into a sound stage. Though it was a conversation, the way it works in movies is that you shoot one person at a time, then switch. Linden was being filmed first. He was taking a bent tin cup and trying to scrape the grout away from a brick wall that he believed was a path to freedom. I was off camera, squatting down with my arms wrapped around my knees as I was delivering my lines in dialogue with him. I wasn’t “in character,” but I was there with him in the moment. I was listening and replying to him, simply and truthfully. I’d been frustrated that day, wrestling with what I call a hiccup, which is when I had trouble switching from regular mode to acting mode. For the moment, though, I put that problem aside to help Linden do the scene.

The director yelled “Cut!” and right away, Linden reached over to me, shook my hand, and thanked me. I didn’t know how to explain it, but I knew it wasn’t a regular handshake—not for me, anyway. Something in the fluid transition from his role to himself. Something in the sincere gratitude on his face. I hadn’t been acting, only talking. What had I done that had earned this seasoned actor’s respect and appreciation? A voice inside me began yelling, “Hey, schmuck! Look at this! This is important! How are you missing this?”

Though I had racked up some fifty-odd acting credits, I still felt like a baby actor. I began my journey in the summer of 2003 cutting my teeth in northern Alabama doing community theater, local films, improv shows, and even bit parts in a professional opera and my first SAG film, among other gigs. In the summer of 2005, I moved to New York City and took a masterclass with the LABryinth Theater Company based out of the New York Public Theater. Later, I wrote, performed, and fully produced my play Two Tablespoons of Crazy in mid-town Manhattan. That effort got me the audition for Hunger in 2007. I knew a few things, sure, but this handshake told me there was something important I hadn’t discovered yet.

After beating myself up for not paying close enough attention in the moment, I devoted a long time to unlocking the lesson that I was certain lay hidden there. I engaged a number of my internal mechanisms in dissecting every aspect of that mundane event. Two of the oldest and most prominent mechanisms are what I refer to as my Suits and Bubbles. My Suits are essentially avatars of myself that I use to navigate specific emotionally charged circumstances. My Bubbles are environments I create in my mind, similar to the Holodeck in the Star Trek universe. They can be any place, at any time, under any circumstance. They offer me space to let my Suits act out different scenarios, like training exercises.

I ran the scene again and again in a Bubble that looked like the film set. Different Suits took turns in my or Linden’s roles as I tried to analyze what, exactly, I had done, and how he must have felt. I pored over my acting books for some overlooked term or concept. When I saw my acting friends, I tried to pull information from them indirectly by asking questions I hoped would lead to their own handshake stories. It was an intense month for me to say the least—two more weeks of filming and another two weeks of obsession—but I kept coming up with nothing…until I didn’t.

As Leandro (center standing) in Two Tablespoons of Crazy, Oct 2007, Crowne Theater, Hell's Kitchen, NYC

The Quickening

One day, it just hit me. Whether my subconscious had finally cracked the code or I was finally able to perceive the information at the right angle, I suddenly realized the truth, and it was like I leveled up: Suits. Acting. They’re the same fucking thing! In a split second, all the knowledge I had gathered about acting and improvisation crystalized from a vast formless mass to a single beautiful gem. The secret I was looking for was in the tools I already had inside me. I was hiccupping because I was trying to create this thing called “acting” instead of relying on the personal and interpersonal skills I had been developing since I was a toddler. Linden was grateful to me not because I had acted well but precisely because I had not been “acting.” Instead, I had clicked into one of my Suits and let the experience unfold from there. But that, in fact, is what the best actors do; I had missed it because I had treated it like a big secret rather than something right there in front of me. I finally understood what it meant to be simple and truthful as an actor and why acting is an art that searches for truth—for truth and simplicity are what bring honesty to the work and character. In that moment, I felt like the Highlander undergoing the Quickening: “I see everything!”1 It was like all at once an immense store of wisdom downloaded into me and my whole life became clear.

My Quickening moment took the form of two worlds colliding: my inner life and my acting life. Not only did I see that, in creating my Suits, I had stumbled upon some of the fundamental tools of acting, but I perceived that the tools for the stage could likewise be useful in the daily routines and circumstances of life. My Suits were essentially characters, and my Bubbles were a form of Stanislavski’s “Magic If” exercise, among other things. It was as if I’d spent 30 years on the road to being an actor—I’d just been too dumb to notice the signs telling me where I was going.

Because of my inner life, I had formed myself into a wildly versatile being. I had always been called a natural in whatever I learned to do because I appear to take so easily to things. All people see is that I’m a quick study; they don’t see all the internal processing going on with my Suits and Bubbles playing out scenarios and working through scenes. They don’t see the years of strengthening my emotions or developing habits of thought that help me to observe, assess, strategize, and execute. In other words, they don’t see that “being a natural” takes a lot of work—just as I had not seen that this work was the same I was being asked to do as an actor.

It was about more than acting. It was about how we create our lives. Using our imaginations and our bodies to channel our thoughts and emotions in ways that change our environment. It felt like such a fundamental reality of life, yet no one had ever tried to teach it to me. It certainly isn’t part of how we educate our children. But if the thoughts and emotions we use on the performance stage and on the stage of life are the same, why wouldn’t the tools used for one not be valid for the other? Yet, what do we teach our kids? We fill them with knowledge and scoot them along. What is the good in telling our children that they can be anything they want when we don’t arm them with the knowledge of how to be?

Think about it. We tell ourselves we live in a modern, individualistic society where everyone is free to be themselves. It’s true that each person you meet is like a walking supercomputer that has more opportunities to customize his life than any person in human history, but go to enough American towns and after a while you start to see that there are maybe a couple varieties but mostly they are all pretty similar—and the people will tend to fall into some familiar categories, too. With a nation of 330 million potential scientific-artists, towns should look wildly different everywhere you go. Instead, artists are still looked upon as oddballs while everyone else is expected to find some way to slot themselves into the economic machine. The real pretending that goes on with our culture is that we believe that this society we have is the best or only way to build a society. That things are beyond our ability to change—or, worse, that they don’t need to. The real problem is we don’t raise up people who are adaptable to change and support them through those changes. We haven’t created a society that values the whole person more than their ability to be “productive” in the way that a big corporation defines “productive.”

What if we chose to raise our future generations having a strong base understanding of their emotional lives, unlocking the artists within them? What if we nurtured their curiosity and let that lead them to knowledge, unlocking the scientists within them? The ripple effects would be transformative.

This isn’t “socialist” talk. It’s human talk. We as a culture have not built a society that exists to raise up good people. Our conversations about education, economics, business, the environment, public services…literally everything we do as a culture are dominated by the question of jobs and productivity, as if the value of a thing lay only in its ability to generate profit. Nobody actually lives their life as if this is true. We know that some things are valuable simply because they are good or because they help us to be better people or live richer lives. Yet we let this profit obsession dictate our political, economic, and pedagogical choices. Instead of chasing after the good life, we’re chasing after the high life, idolizing wealth and power rather than personal fulfillment or doing good.

The irony is that value is whatever we say it is. Literally. If we chose to value personal growth and emotional maturity, then there would be lots of good jobs in fields that helped you become a better person. Self-development is a painful struggle; it’s easier to sell people instant gratification for hollow effort. We all have an individual choice as to who we want to be; society is that collective choice of us all. Sadly, I believe we are making terrible choices.

As Menelaus in The Trojan Women by Euripides, Circa 2014

Everyone Can Be a Superhero

I imagine by now you’re saying, “Who is this Highlander-fanboy weirdo telling me about what’s wrong with our culture?” and I get that. I’ll tell you more of my story shortly. Spoiler: It won’t be a story of earning such-and-such degrees or making millions of dollars. It’s a story of getting knocked down and getting up again and feeling mostly satisfied and content with my choices along the way. It’s a story of a guy who devoted himself to creating a system, but that’s not the system I’m going to share in this book.

I do have a system and I do believe it can help us fix some of our personal and social ills, but the story of the handshake is that it’s not a system unique to me. In fact, thousands of people have gone through some form of this program before and didn’t even know it. I’m here to draw our attention to this program, to take it in hand and extract untapped potential from it. The skills that helped me succeed as an actor were the same skills that had helped me succeed as a person—they just happened to be the same skills that people are taught in acting classes.

Shakespeare said all the world’s a stage, but we never take him seriously when we quote him about it. Instead, we treat it as a clever way for a playwright to elevate his art. But what if he meant it more literally than we think? Are we not all called upon to play roles in specific settings, reacting to characters over the course of events as we’re each trying to overcome some personal obstacle in our way? What if the reason we misunderstand the importance of performance in our everyday lives is that we simply misunderstand the nature of performance?

I think the Bard was right: The world’s a stage. Therefore, we should learn how to move across that stage in the most competent and compelling way possible, in a way we can feel good about at the end of the day. You might think it strange to speak of acting as a tool for living. If we are acting all the time, aren’t we being fake or inauthentic? Aren’t I supposed to be my “true self”? This is an understandable concern, but it misunderstands what acting is—and what the self is. Acting, as I’ll explain more later, depends on the search for truth, a truth that’s part of human nature. And the self is not one simple thing that’s always the same but a sophisticated variety of aspects and abilities that we draw on when we need them. Sometimes I think of it like multiple dimensions. The theory goes that there are all these other versions of yourself in other dimensions, versions of you that made other choices and took different directions in life. Well, what if we used our imaginations to bring those other selves into this dimension so they are all possibilities inside of us? It’s kind of like that Jet Li film The One. Li plays a multiverse cop who travels to each of 124 dimensions to absorb the lifeforces of all his other selves so he can become “the One.” Li’s character had to kill his other selves; my way is a lot nicer, thankfully, but the result is the same: You become all your best selves.

Think about it. How would it feel to walk into any new situation and feel totally prepared to navigate it? What would it be like to know you had the skills to rise to any occasion or adapt to any new situation? I believe we can all have access to this if we only put in the work on our thoughts and emotions, and the performing arts toolkit provides us the very exercises we need for this training. The best part is this is all teachable, and it has become my life’s purpose to show others how they can use the performing arts toolkit to unlock all their best selves and change how they move through their daily lives. That’s what I want to show you in this book.

The flip side of this is that corporations, politicians, marketers, and technology companies are all studying human behavior and motivation for the purpose of influencing our behaviors, especially when it comes to what we buy. We know this is already happening, so why wouldn’t we equip ourselves to confront this reality? You’ll never outspend or out-research these groups all by yourself, but one thing they’ll never fully grasp is you, your whole, complex self—all your selves. They will try to play on your ambitions and your fears, aspects of your best and worst selves. If you are in control of yourself, however, you undermine their ability to manipulate you. Self-mastery has long been held to be the most important form of freedom. It's up to you to break your shackles.

As Judas Iscariot in Jesus Christ Superstar, July 2004, Huntsville, Al

Everyman or Outsider

Again, I know that, by society’s standards, I have no business writing a book about anything. I am a high school dropout. I have no advanced degrees or training outside of my time in the U.S. Marine Corps. I have also run through about sixty different jobs because sitting still is not what this Tigger does best. I’m not even a writer. At best, I am a thinker who writes down my thoughts. I am also convinced I’m on the crazy spectrum. Where I land between guano and genius has yet to be determined. It’s probably guano.

The reality is I am not a product of society’s standards. I’ve always been a bit of an outsider; I took the long way around and took my beatings for it. Since I can remember, people have called me self-deprecating, but it’s just that I don’t feel the need to sugarcoat my character, only my food. People also tell me I don’t fit the mold, whatever that is. I never set out to break any molds; I just made legions of them for myself that I’m constantly stepping in and out of. People want to pin me down to one thing, but I am many things, and owning this has made me strong. People tell me I am short, but do you know I couldn’t tell you what being short feels like? Even in a room full of giant people I have to crane my neck to look in the eyes, my spirit is so large that I still feel as if I am towering over them. You can have that, too.

Everything in life is a learned skill—including being human. The human being is far more complicated than the standard smartphone, but like the smartphone, most of us only have a small percentage of functional knowledge about it. That’s why we’re always so astonished by people who have opened up more of their potential: mental athletes who, through the use of mnemonic techniques, seem to accomplish superhuman feats of memory recall; mathletes who calculate mind-boggling numbers in their heads in mere seconds; or great leaders who can wrap a crowd around their little finger. Some people may have natural aptitude for these skills, but as skills, they are all fundamentally teachable. I may be an outsider, but I’m also an everyman, a regular guy with no prodigious talents. Yet I have learned how to succeed in any situation I find myself in. If I can do it, so can you. Mastering this thing we call being human doesn’t require advanced degrees or years of coursework. It requires training, but I’ll show you that anyone can learn the basics and build from there.

The performing arts may not be the first place you’d look for skills anyone can learn. Not everyone wants to go up on stage or in front of a camera. But everyone does enter settings where other characters pose a problem that they will be called upon to help solve. A play or film is only a way of casting our real lives in dramatic relief. The same time-tested tools and techniques that actors use to create real human thoughts and emotions in imaginary circumstances can be used by anyone to fulfill more of their human potential.

The central insight of this book is simple: You can use the actor’s tools in real circumstances. You only need to train your imagination. In the process, I believe you’re becoming a better person. Think about it: The acting toolkit teaches you skills like listening, reacting, empathizing, discerning character and motivation, and being present with others. These are not virtues only for the stage or screen. Where are these taught in the non-entertainment world? Why are these taught in the non-entertainment world?!

Our world feels more in conflict than ever, with real wars and oppression and with hostile arguments happening online. The time to train our thoughts, feelings, and imaginations in richer, more flexible ways of being is now. Imagine if we stopped shouting at one another and started listening, trying to understand another’s position, and then saying, like an improv comic, “Yes, and…”

If we can take the truths we have learned in the arts of acting and improvisation and reformat them for our everyday lives, we can teach ourselves how to be in our minds and bodies more effectively. These are truths containing wisdom from 2,500 years ago as well as connections that contemporary social scientists and artists have made between psychology, physiology, and creativity.

This book will show you how an ordinary outsider like myself stumbled upon the techniques of performance and found early success in being more fully me. Then we’ll look at how the answers scientists and artists are looking for go beyond the stage to help those who have been spiritually broken by trauma or debilitated by malady, and why they should be taught to all people to enable them to live a more vibrant and complete life. This book isn’t a step-by-step guide so much as an effort to shift the paradigm of how we look at creativity, the imagination, and the self via the tools and techniques of acting and improvisation. My Quickening moment, when I realized what that handshake meant to me, put me on a path of becoming a better, more complete human being. Now, I want to share what I have learned with the rest of the world, helping us all become all our best selves.

Outside the Producers Club, Hell's Kitchen, NYC September 2007

humanity
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About the Creator

James J Rojas-Taylor

Adventurer, Creator, Thinker, Grand Master Artist, Mad Scientist, Asshole Savant, Warchief.

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