"Theatre" weird

You wanna know why people always say that theatre people are weird? I'll tell you why...or at least one of the reasons why. Once you go through formal acting training you can't just...go back. You learn all the ways to break down someone into little pieces that make them who they are. You are taught to notice these little things, have homework to go study them for hours and hours (I do really mean hours and hours), so that you can take little pieces here and there and create characters at will. To create someone who doesn't exist, but give them so many human-like qualities, so many things that make them unique, that they start to seem like a real person. The result:

You can't stop watching people's mannerisms to save your life.

How the old lady holds her tissue, how a guy flicks his pen as he waits impatiently for his wife, and the change in how the girl walks when she sees her boyfriend. All the sudden everyone is a character, and the world is a stage. Most of the time it's fascinating, but sometimes it's just annoying not to be able to turn it off. Getting distracted comes naturally. The small things. Eye movements, hand gestures, and arm postures. Clothing choices, accents, shoes, and the formation of words. Walking patterns, pauses, clicks, and fake smiles. Laughs full of disdain and silence that screams "someone just love me". Relishing awkward pauses and sitting in silence for long periods just waiting to see how long the other person can take it before they have to say something to break it. One little movement, and the mind goes to breaking down that movement and analyzing what it means about the character. What was the motivation behind it? After all, every action is caused by some kind of motivation.

Chances are we could tell you how you hold your body, little mannerisms about your face when you talk and how your mouth twists when you say certain words or talk about certain people,or how you move your hands when you are frustrated. We are not creepers. We have just been taught to watch people. To use real life examples for our characters of how the old man scratches his ear when he is nervous or how the man rubs his neck when he is tired. How the mother tightens her neck when her kid runs too near the street, or the boy flares his nostrils when he thinks something is funny but isn't supposed to be laughing.

You know sometimes you see those people in a movie or t.v. show that you think "is there really anybody in the world that is actually like that?" The answer is yes. And I will bet you a lot that the way that character was formed was by someone finding that person and studying them. Every now and then I run across one of "those people"; the people that people like me love to watch because they are exactly the kind character you would spend countless hours to create. I can't explain that part...you know what it's like after you've spent so much time trying to create this character, and then one day you just see them walking down the street. It's basically the way the author felt in "Stranger than Fiction" when she met the main character of her book.

My husband and I will be walking in public, and all the sudden I get completely distracted by a passer-by. "Did you hear her voice?!" Something else that we are taught (specifically as it pertains to accents and voices) is to learn by repeating. When learning a dialect, you listen to a phrase and immediately repeat what you heard the same way that you just heard it. Over and over and over again. People do that naturally but mostly only if something they heard was strange or funny. Rarely do people repeat phrases purposefully. We are taught to do just that. Instead of labeling it strange or funny, we repeat it until we sound identical, literally put our hand on hour face and feel how it sounds in the mouth and how it changes the lips as the word is formed... and then file it away.

It's actually pretty informative watching someone when you first meet them. Try it. Start people watching. It's a skill just like anything else. If you practice playing piano, you get better at it the more you practice. The more you watch people and the mannerisms and patterns that follow, the better you get at reading people and what those patterns mean. You don't have to be a creeper to be a people watcher. Just today I met a few new people, and had the privilege of listening to them speak and interact with each other for quite some time. I was sitting in a circle with them, but chose to watch and listen instead of talk for the first twenty minutes or so. You learn so so much just by listening, but but by listening carefully to words AND watching the mannerisms that correlate with those words, you can learn a whole lot more.