It’s a paradox of our age that we have never been more connected, nor ever more alone. We live in a time of unparalleled interaction, communicating instantly with people across the world, with intimate insight into other people’s lives. Yet we feel increasingly disconnected from ourselves, each other and the world. In the midst of so much connectivity, we are living through an epidemic of loneliness and social isolation.
‘Loneliness’ and ‘social isolation’ are different. Loneliness is a subjective, self-reported measure of inner experience, while social isolation is quantifiable: a measure of someone’s participation in collective activity. Their effects, though, correlate, with loneliness generally considered more dangerous to health. Both are manifestations of a deeper malaise: disconnectedness.
Research suggests disconnectedness is growing. Writing in The Harvard Gazette in 2023, Tyler VanderWeele, professor of epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health, outlined his recent findings:
[O]n a number of separate assessments, about 50 per cent of Americans report being lonely … We have good evidence that loneliness has been increasing in this country for the last couple of decades in at least moderate amounts for a substantial number of people.
A report by the US Surgeon General in 2023 had an eye-catching statistic: lacking social connection is as dangerous as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. The report listed specific health areas affected by disconnectedness, including cardiovascular disease, hypertension, diabetes, anxiety/depression, suppressed immune response and impaired cognitive function (including increased likelihood of dementia). Disconnectedness can literally be lethal.
Technology appears to help us tackle this affliction. For many, it was an essential lifeline during the isolation of COVID-19. Yet, not only is it failing to reverse the trend towards disconnectedness, it may be worsening it. This might, in part, be explained by the way our primary mode of online interaction – social media – presents edited, air-brushed representations of the lives of others, which provokes unfavourable comparison with our own messy and unedited experience. And the hours we spend satisfying our addiction to the instant gratification of online communication is time we might, in earlier generations, have spent in real-word interaction.
Nonetheless, the paradox of connected disconnectedness points to something deeper. It suggests that connecting via digital devices lacks qualities essential to mental and physical health. Despite, or perhaps because of, our growing reliance on external technology to facilitate connection, we are losing human technologies of connectedness – the technologies that enabled us to evolve across millennia. How can we better connect with one another without relying upon digital technology?
We possess proven ways to establish and sustain vibrant connection. They are ancient and intrinsically human, and remain available to us all. They are found in the lineage of a technique that today we call ‘acting’.
The core of an actor’s work is to create and sustain connection, to build a shared experience with her or his audience. I call these technologies of connection ‘What Actors Know’. You do not have to be an actor to use What Actors Know, any more than you need to be a philosopher to explore ideas, or a chef to cook an evening meal. It is wisdom that emerged from within each of us, and enabled our evolution into social animals.
We will start our exploration of What Actors Know a long way from the world of showbiz or the emotional intensity of the rehearsal room. Performance happens when one self meets another self so, to understand What Actors Know, we need to explore what we mean by ‘self’.
A common perspective on ‘self’ is that we are each essentially isolated from one another. Our selves are seen as discrete and clearly distinct. This hyper-individualistic paradigm leads to what the activist and writer Charles Eisenstein calls ‘The Story of Separation’: the separate self in a world of others.
But this kind of individualism has not been the dominant perspective for most of the long sweep of human evolution. From within their Indigenous wisdom systems, the Native American scholars Darcia Narváez and Wahinkpe Topa write in Restoring the Kinship Worldview (2022) that ‘All things in the world live and share [a] mysterious web of interconnected energy.’ In Sand Talk (2019), the Australian Aboriginal writer Tyson Yunkaporta similarly argues for ‘your true status as a single node in a cooperative network. [You] retain your autonomy while simultaneously being profoundly interdependent and connected.’ Such ideas are also emerging in contemporary science: for instance, in Being You (2021), the British neuroscientist Anil Seth holds that ‘our inner universe is part of, and not apart from, the rest of nature.’
Those best able to access and communicate edge-of-the-mind states became the original shamans
What Actors Know names the skills actors use to connect and communicate. It is a contemporary articulation of the ancient, fundamentally human capabilities that drove our evolution as social creatures. It draws on this sense of self as interconnected. The holders of this knowledge were not always known as actors. In different contexts we name them storytellers, seers, priests, healers, shamans. Though their function has changed over time, and in different contexts, their underlying knowledge and techniques persist.
Like contemporary actors, they connected and communicated.
Within every society, there have emerged individuals to explain and interpret the visible and invisible world to their communities. In their book Inside the Neolithic Mind (2005), David Lewis-Williams and David Pearce explore the origins of human community by analysing the art and architecture of Neolithic settlements. They suggest that early shamans/priests created stories that bound their communities together by drawing on the universal, embodied, human experience of sleeping, dreaming and hypnogogia (the transition between waking and sleep). Those best able to access, articulate and communicate edge-of-the-mind states became the original seers, priests, shamans, storytellers.
Those ur-actors articulated dimly perceived shared realities (for we all have dreams) in ways that connected with their listeners. They described travelling from one dimension to another, merging with animals and plants, conversing with the dead, meeting gods. They imagined into existence cosmologies and religions. They bonded community. Echoes of their stories remain in the carvings and architectures their communities left behind.
Shamans wove together tapestries of connectedness in which their audiences could imagine their place. To paraphrase the theatre director Peter Brook, they made the invisible visible. The stories they told resonated because they articulated half-remembered experiences of their listeners. As Lewis-Williams and Pearce write:
[N]ot … every member of a community experiences the full gamut of altered states … Those who do not experience states at the fully hallucinatory end of the consciousness spectrum manage to glimpse in their dreams something of what the visionaries experience. That is their reassurance …
These early shamans developed skills to hold the attention of their listeners long enough to share their visions, visions that emerged from their ability to look inward and make public what they found there. These techniques still guide the actor. Actors still look inward to their unique humanity and, simultaneously, outward to their audience and to the world. They employ techniques to develop fully integrated, interconnected human-ness.
An actor’s first and most important job is to connect. Without connection, there is no communication. The connections an actor makes are multidirectional and dynamic. She connects inwards, to her imagination, body, senses, breath, blockages, fears, memory and every other aspect of ‘inner self’. Simultaneously, she connects outwards with the people she is performing with – real or imaginary – and with her audience.
Her connections are dynamic. She does not issue information for others to absorb. Nor is her inner world an unruly classroom waiting to be controlled by reason and will. She both changes and is changed by what she connects with, internally and externally. She simultaneously shapes and is shaped by her imagination or memories, and by how others respond to her. She develops, but is also defined by, her physical (in)capacities. She sends quanta of connection to co-creators and audience, and is changed by what comes back: an unusual inflection of voice, a shuffling audience member, an unexpected laugh. If she ‘over-acts’ or in some other way performs poorly, her audience responds with ridicule, discomfort, bewilderment or boredom. They break the circuit of connection she has initiated.
A musician may not ‘know’ the harmonic theory beneath the music she makes, but she still works within it
Acting is based in dynamic, multidirectional connectedness. I refer to this connectedness as ‘interconnection’. What Actors Know is a technology of interconnection.
I first encountered What Actors Know, the wisdom of live performance, working in live theatre. I started in the Western tradition, and gradually expanded my work across multiple art forms and cultures. I performed, directed and taught extensively on almost every continent, with actors, physical performers, improvisers, clowns, musicians, puppeteers, circus artists, singers and many who resist categorisation. I became especially interested in physicality, mind-body integration, presence and ensemble. In all my work, including corporate training or community development, I noticed universal, transdisciplinary techniques and capabilities: a common sub-structure for the effective creation of connection.
It is not a sub-structure actors are necessarily aware of. A musician may not ‘know’ the harmonic theory beneath the music she makes, but she still works within it. Similarly, when an actor creates and shares a performance, she draws on What Actors Know, even if she does not name it as such.
There are seven elements of What Actors Know. Each supports the actor’s fundamental role: to connect. Each, if we apply them to our own lives, helps us connect better both inwardly and outwardly, fundamentally counteracting both loneliness and social isolation.
Though each of the seven elements is important, if there is a foundation on which everything else is built, it is this: an actor develops the capacity to be present with both her internal landscape and the world around her. This is the first element of What Actors Know.
You are sitting in a coffee shop, talking with a friend. Suddenly, he is no longer listening. Nothing has changed. He continues to nod, smile and ‘uh-huh’ at appropriate moments – but you know he is thinking of something else. In evolutionary terms, this signals danger. Perhaps he is aware of something you are not, or he has lost interest in you, and you are at risk of exclusion from the community your friend is part of. Humans are hardwired to recognise and respond to presence and to its absence.
Presence attracts attention. Breaking presence distracts. This is the foundation of an actor’s work: she must be present with the people (or camera) she is performing to. That is how she holds the attention of her audience. She connects, then sustains connection. Both require sustained presence. Without presence, performance is lifeless: a display of technical capacity, a demonstration rather than a vital experience.
The presence an actor develops involves quietening the mind, eradicating distraction, developing mindful awareness of inner and outer impulses, and a capacity to react spontaneously and appropriately. It is a two-way ebb and flow of stimulus and response. She simultaneously guides the journey of her performance and is affected by other performers and her audience. Unless she is present, she can neither notice nor respond to what is unfolding. She disconnects.
Effective and engaging communication – verbal or otherwise – requires dynamic shaping
Enhancing our ability to be more fully present is profoundly healthful. This is a subject covered widely in self-help, spiritual and other literatures. Jill Bolte Taylor, writing in My Stroke of Insight (2006) about her journey of recovery from a stroke, describes presence as integral to calming an anxious mind: ‘Step one to experiencing inner peace is the willingness to be present in the right here, right now.’ In All About Love (1999), bell hooks quotes the Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh on the power of being present with the world outside of the mind: ‘Our appointment with life is in the present moment. The place of our appointment is right here, in this very place.’
But, once established, how does an actor maintain connection? Integral to this is the second element of What Actors Know. Actors must develop skills to shape time, energy and space. Audiences disconnect from monotony. Speech without variations in tone and rhythm is deadly. It plods along, devoid of inflection, pause, dynamic or a satisfying sense of completion. We struggle to attend to someone who speaks like a poorly trained automaton.
To avoid this, the performer starts, develops and completes gestures, phrases and movements. She intensifies, sustains and relaxes focus. She constructs her performance by introducing new detail, tone and content, or deepening and developing what already exists. She learns rhythms of creating, sustaining and ending. Effective and engaging communication – verbal or otherwise – requires dynamic shaping. If you watch Denzel Washington, Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart each performing the same ‘Tomorrow and tomorrow’ soliloquy from Macbeth, you’ll see clearly how their capacity to shape time, energy and space radically alters the text’s meaning:
Actors risk public failure, rejection and shame, encountering the (primitive) fear of exclusion from community. A stage is, intrinsically, a hostile environment. As John T Cacioppo and William Patrick write in their book Loneliness (2008): ‘[T]he lonely person too often assumes the worst, tightens up, and goes into the psychological equivalent of a protective crouch.’ Stage-fright is strikingly similar to loneliness, based in our evolutionarily adaptive need to belong. In an article in The Guardian in 2020, the psychotherapist Linda Brennan anonymously quotes well-known actors describing their experience of stage-fright. ‘I become hyper-reactive,’ one said, ‘and any sound, movement or comment can make me jump – or scream.’ Another spoke of ‘feelings of shame and humiliation … like they were going to die.’
Acquiring skills to communicate counteracts the urge to sink into a ‘protective crouch’. It enables us to develop agency. We take control of the multi-directional flow of communication. We replace fear with empowerment: counteracting our feeling of impotence. We un-crouch.
Maintaining the essential ‘liveness’ of performance requires actors to train the third element of What Actors Know: how to be flexible and adaptable. Faced with risk, we tend to seek control, to have a detailed plan. Neither reality nor the external world are under our control, though. Life is dynamic. As Heraclitus pointed out 25 centuries ago, you cannot step into the same river twice. It is not the same river, nor are you the same person. For, as he also wrote: ‘Everything flows.’
When we stay rigidly wedded to a plan, we are trying to inhabit a reality that does not exist. An actor who rehearses a performance, then reproduces it regardless of the size of audience or auditorium, unaffected by her fellow performers, is neither dynamic nor live.
Many years ago, I watched a performance in a student showcase. It involved two lovers sitting on a park bench under a streetlight, singing a duet. Unfortunately, the bench had not been screwed together properly. As one lover leant towards the other, the bench tilted and let out a loud squeak, then, as they leant back the other way, so did the bench, its squeak a counterpoint to their duet. It was brilliantly funny – or at least it would have been had the actors adapted to what the audience could see and hear. Unfortunately, they carried on regardless, sticking to what, in rehearsal, they had planned. Though we tried not to, the audience laughed. Connection between their intention and our reception broke. They were performing as if in a ‘controlled’ reality, one that does not actually exist.
A skilled communicator treats mistakes as opportunities, using whatever happens to enhance her audience’s experience: a misremembered line, a sudden question, a restless audience-member, a misplaced prop. She might adapt significantly, changing the entire direction of a performance. She might adapt subtly, shifting details of energy or tone.
Some actors may be self-centred, but the craft of acting is a balance between self and others
You have probably endured meetings or lessons where the speaker drones through a script, ignoring what is evident to all: that people have lost interest, do not understand or have urgent questions. It is a deadly experience. Balancing intention and flexibility, the actor, and the rest of us, can use connection to create conversation, not to lecture.
Connection is essential to forming community. The fourth element of What Actors Know is this: actors balance individuality and the collective. Despite popular perception of a profession filled with rampant egotists, acting is collaborative: communal both in creation and outcome. Some actors may be self-centred and self-absorbed, but the craft of acting is based in a balance between self and others, knowing when to take centre-stage and when to leave space for others.
An actor negotiates the interplay of individual and collective expression. She recognises when she is the centre of an unfolding moment, and develops the confidence and discipline to deliver fearlessly. She also recognises when someone else is the focus, and finds how best to support them. She empowers and encourages others, without sacrificing personal agency. She shines, and enables others to shine.
A performance during which one player monopolises attention, disregarding everyone else, soon becomes unwatchable. Performance, even virtuoso solo performance, is seldom simply showing off. In the wider world, the person who constantly has to have the last word, or steal the punchline of a story, or turn every conversation back onto their own brilliance, however interesting and intelligent they might be, is ultimately a bore. We may initially be attracted to their wit, but soon tire of their egotism.
Performing develops empowered humility. When someone refuses to leave centre stage or, equally importantly, refuses to occupy centre stage, their performance dies. There is no space on stage for tyrants or passengers. Interconnection requires exchange, not domination. This perspective, integral to understanding the workings of ensemble, offers a powerful model of community: each person has agency, none is isolated. All are in service, both of their own needs, and of the collective intention of the group of which they are a part.
Developing from the notion of the healthy integration of individual and collective, we encounter the fifth element of What Actors Know. Creative processes need participants to move beyond binary thinking. Actors do not operate from an attitude of me-or-you, but of me-with-you: not self-or-other, but self-with-others.
There’s a much-quoted line by the poet Rumi: ‘Beyond notions of right-doing and wrong-doing, there’s a field. I’ll meet you there.’ It is in this field that an actor’s work begins. Binary thinking is predicated on either/or. It assumes separation. It is the thinking that underpins the Story of Separation, predicating disconnection as the default state in which we exist.
At a technical level, notions of right/wrong are sometimes useful: text and movements need to be memorised and reproduced correctly. But, beyond the technical level, binary thinking hinders. There is no right nor wrong way to play Hamlet. There is no correct or incorrect way to dance. Creativity works on spectrums of choice – more/less appropriate, more/less conventional, more/less accessible. An actor embraces spectrum thinking: working with choice rather than certainty. Spectrum thinking recognises that between apparent opposites lie many possibilities. From within, an actor creates sometimes competing choices.
When we bring binary thinking to a relationship, we replace awareness of what actually exists with insistence on what we think ought to exist. A teacher might want respectful silence or excited interaction. If it is not there, she might behave as if something is ‘wrong’. This impedes her ability to respond to what is actually happening in the room at that moment. It hinders authentic connection.
Playing fuels creativity. Creativity leads to discovery, and discovery leads to learning
Putting aside binary thinking helps us connect. It reminds us to treat each moment as a unique opportunity to create a unique bond. Each unexpected response or ‘inappropriate behaviour’ becomes a chance to reorientate connection. We meet people as they are, and invite them to meet us as we are. We navigate diverse environments in a spirit of generosity and discovery.
The sixth element of What Actors Know is a truism, but essential nonetheless: actors play. ‘To play’ is to try something without risk of significant consequences. Playing fuels creativity. Creativity leads to discovery, and discovery leads to learning. Play is the intrinsic mammalian learning mechanism. Rehearsal is where actors play, discovering things without being watched by a critical public.
An actor does not stop playing when she performs. She remains a ‘player’, ‘playing’ a role. Playfulness, or lightness-of-touch, is integral to the unspoken contract between actor and audience. Connection fractures without it. If an audience believes an actor is really hurt, really being punched, really dying, other human impulses such as concern, revulsion or a desire to help take over. However serious the content of a performance, we assume an actor is gaining enjoyment, gratification or reward.
How playful an actor shows herself to be depends on the material she is performing. How playful you choose to be in a meeting or conversation also relies on context. Always, though, an element of lightness, or detachment, nourishes the flow of energy back and forth between you and others. This is not easy when you feel crushed by a sense of responsibility, or fear of failure. Fearless play is a rigorous self-discipline.
One of my main jobs training performers is to encourage genuine playfulness, inviting participants to lay aside notions of shame and binaries of right/wrong. When things go in unexpected directions, fearlessly we can use those moments to create genuine, open and vulnerable connectedness, inwardly and with the world.
Ultimately, an actor must trust the process. This is the seventh and final element of What Actors Know. An actor has no product. She structures a creative process which she then goes through in front of her audience. She communicates via the connections she establishes and sustains. Each connection is a process: an unfolding sequence of moments.
The elements of What Actors Know enable this process. They show us how to connect through presence, sculpting communication, being adaptable, balancing self with others, moving beyond binary thinking and developing a playful lightness-of-touch.
These are not acting skills. They are human skills. They draw on intrinsic human competencies, including imagination, attention, self-awareness, empathy, body/mind integration and neuroplasticity. They enable us to transcend isolation and, interconnecting, to establish community. They have shaped our evolution, and can shape our progress towards our shared future.
Reviewing the millennia of human evolution we’ve emerged from, Cacioppo and Patrick write of the adaptive evolutionary imperative of interconnectedness:
Survival of the fittest led to creatures that were obligatorily gregarious. These were creatures that were deeply connected to one another through a complex web … Individual success was … driven by the ability to transcend selfishness and act on behalf of others. The selfish gene had given rise to a social brain and a different kind of social animal.
Since prehistory, the tellers of stories, those who learned to connect, sustain connection and communicate powerfully, have built the bridges between isolated individuals and, in doing so, created social beings. They constructed the ‘social brain’.
What might it look like today, in our increasingly disconnected world, to fully embrace What Actors Know? We could each start by paying attention to the areas I’ve outlined. You can notice and resist distraction – enhancing presence – put aside the judgmental nature of binary thinking, embrace playfulness and flexibility, pay attention to sculpting the dynamics of each moment, balance personal agency and the empowerment of others, and trust the unfolding nature of lived experience.
Each of us could employ the skills of performance to connect during meetings, in classrooms, at political events
Opportunities to do this emerge not only from personal choice. They can also be supported by public and organisational policy. Schools, businesses, health services, governments and community organisations might recognise interconnection as integral to health, and structure themselves accordingly. Performance – both to watch and participate in – could, as it once was, become central to education, community, politics, aged care, healthcare: as essential as good food, fresh air and clean water. We could embed lifelong opportunities for people to remember, develop, value and celebrate their intrinsic human communicative capabilities, rather than increasingly outsourcing them to technology.
Re-centring performance does not only mean enhancing cultural provision, though that is one strategy. It means each of us employing the deep-level skills of performance to connect and communicate during meetings, in classrooms, at political events, in discussion groups. Doing so, we enhance our capacity, internally and externally, to integrate, interconnect and be more fully human.
Could we recommit, unconditionally, to revitalising our interconnected humanity? I’m not suggesting a romantic return to a past that never existed. I am suggesting that we move forward humanly. Might we accept what our ancestors, from neolithic shamans to contemporary actors, discovered? That we become complete through connection, inward and outward. That we all interconnect.
Utopian? Perhaps. Maybe we need some fresh utopian stories to live by if we are to counteract the isolated, lonely, dehumanised dystopia threatening to engulf us all.
