Performance
A working director gives actors a precise way to redirect attention and escape self-conscious performance blocks.
The author argues that the difference between performers is better described as how blocked they are than how gifted they are. On this view the ability is already running, like blood circulating, and the work is removing what stops it. A block shows up in two forms: freezing up inside and cutting off from the outside.
You cannot know what you are doing until you know what you are doing it to. Every action has to be aimed at something, real or imagined, concrete or abstract. So no one can play "I die", but they can play welcoming death, fighting it, or mocking it.
The author claims that for practical purposes there is no inner reservoir of energy: all of it comes from the thing you are responding to. The more energy a performer finds in what is in front of them, the freer they become. Pulling attention back onto yourself drains that energy and paralyses you.
Fear does its damage by severing you from the thing outside you, which is your only source of energy, and so it starves you. Because fear makes the work worse, the fear of doing badly brings about the bad work it dreads.
Watching yourself perform is the trap, and the way out is to put your full attention on something outside you. Even the best script makes no sense once it is detached from the world it is aimed at.
You cannot struggle to be present, because you already are; you can only notice it. Fear does not exist in the present moment, so it invents an imagined past or future to live in. The way back is to notice that the fantasy of being elsewhere is a fantasy.
What you respond to is never a generalisation. It is particular, always changing, and always doing something itself. Two people looking at the same thing each see a different target.
The thing you aim at is not your objective, want, plan, motive or intention. Those live inside you, while the target lives outside you, at a distance, and exists before you need it. Confusing the two turns attention back inward.
At every moment there is something to gain and something to lose, something needed and something to avoid. The gain is exactly as large as the loss. A lot of flat, blocked performance comes from the performer knowing all too well that nothing real is at stake.
An audience does not laugh at you changing the thing you aim at. It laughs at seeing that thing change you. In the author's view, being visibly acted upon matters more than acting.