Dancing In The Light

by Shirley Maclaine

  I adored the graceful, lyrical, romantic reward that came after the discipline and perspiration of hard work.

  Perhaps the camaraderie of physical pain, accepted and tolerated in the name of dance, binds each of us gypsies together. But when I meet Olympic athletes and the like, I find we all have the same issues and contradictions in common. We love junk food, cigarettes, sugar, and rising to the occasion. We love to complain and set about helping each other with secret techniques to achieve more. Were we overachievers because of deep self-doubt? That’s part of it. Yet no one is more seemingly proud than a human being who knows he can do most anything with the body.

  Perhaps buried in the art of dance and in the performance of athletes is the human understanding that the body is the temple of our soul’s existence, the house in which we live, the instrument of our soul’s expression as we determine whether we are part of God or not.

  There are always periods when your body is off, out of sync, not responding to your will. It is at those times that we are forced to confront the invisible reasons why. I have gone through many such periods over the years. Certainly food, rest, and mood entered into the picture, but soon I realized that there was a very real correlation between harmonious periods physically and harmonious periods spiritually.

  I remembered my mother explaining the law of reversed effect to me. It happened to her once during a swimming contest. It was a contest for the backstroke. She had usually “raced” against the clock in order to win. On this particular day, she glided on her back, somehow feeling in total harmony with the sun above her and the water beneath. She said she exerted herself to the utmost, but she didn’t have the sensation of competing. It was more a sensation of harmonizing with the elements involved. She said she just didn’t care whether she won or not. She simply wanted to go as fast as possible. She relaxed and became “one” with all that surrounded her. The discipline of a trained body took over and, to her astonisnment, she won easily.

  I began to operate with the same principle, and found that my body hurt less and was capable of doing much more.

  Later I studied Oriental approaches to karate, judo, and aikido. Meditation was the mainstay, the discipline of becoming one with mind, body, and spirit. The more I learned to ignore negative emotions, the more positive my body felt. I avoided the intellectualization of movement and allowed my body to respond to itself. I realized my muscles had memory if I kept my mind from interfering. If I trusted the muscle memory, I could remember choreography from numbers and combinations I had done when I was twelve years old. The body always knows if it is allowed to prevail. The body is a spiritual temple with checks and balances. When the spiritual harmony is not nourished, the body starves too. When the spirit radiates happiness, the body performs miraculously.

  Often I look back on the years and years of physical discipline. I can remember nearly every classroom where the beads of sweat fell, where the water fountain was located, the smell of each rancid dressing room during the summer months, the smooth feel of the wooden bar during each warm-up. I remember the dank wetness of woolen tights when the cold night air hit my legs in the winter, seizing my elongated muscles into tight knots until I could reach a warm bath. I remember the tingling of my scalp just prior to breaking a sweat and how the food I had eaten would determine when that would occur.

  I remember the bleeding calluses on my long toes as I mercilessly stuffed my feet into toe shoes padded with lamb’s wool, how I would measure my height from month to month, shredded with anxiety that I might be growing too tall.

  I remember the inflamed lower back pain whenever I had to dance on cement floors in television studios, the incessant mental notes to land with my heels down whenever I performed a jump, in order to prevent ugly calf-bulging, and stinging shin splints.

  I remember the nausea doing pirouettes, the stretched splendor of a slow adagio, the joy of defying gravity in a grand jeté, the awkwardness of turns to the left, the strained quivering of the pointed foot at the end of an extension, the burning thighs in a slow grand plié, the certainty that my back must be made of concrete during a backbend.

  The mirror is your conscience. You’ve rehearsed with its definitive image in front of you for weeks. Then the choreographer turns you around, away from the mirror. You are on your own. You’re not sure where you are. Your image is no longer there to ratify your existence. Your orientation to space is altered. You become aware of the meaning of movement and your need to communicate to the audience because you can no longer communicate with your own image. The music sounds different. Your spacing is off. You are unable to check out your line, not only in relation to yourself, but also in relation to whomever else you may be dancing with.

  Then you begin to soar, you begin to become what you mean. You find a hidden subtext in your movement. You bend and flow and jump to the music when you allow it to carry you aloft. You begin to fill every space with body language; no move is gratuitous. You learn to think ahead, knowing which combination of moves requires the most anticipation. You learn which movements are the most fulfilling and which are defiantly dangerous. You employ shortcuts and pain-saving devices. You know how much breath you’ll need to pace yourself.

  Your shoes become your support system. If the size varies one centimeter, it throws your balance askew. If there is a clump of harmless dust on the floor, you eye it at every available moment until you dance out of its range because the slightest inconsistency under your moving weight can cause you to lose your footing.

  You test the speed of the floor under the rubber soles of your shoes. You know that if the speed is slow, you’ll have to exert that much more effort in turns. Yet if it’s too fast, you’ll lose your control.

  Then you begin to need the lights, the costumes, the scenery, and the audience.

  You leave everything you learned in the classroom and the rehearsal hall behind you. All of it was only the preparation, the bare bones of expression.

  You mold the choreography with additional magic. Your costume feels foreign to you until you learn to work with it, use it, enhance it, make it part of the movement. You complain at first that it inhibits the movement, but you know from experience that it always feels that way at first. You rustle the skirt and toss a scarf, rendering new meaning to the original movement.

  Then you have a dress rehearsal with costumes, lights, and a full complement of musicians. Up to that time you have danced to a work light and a piano. Now you feel the complete musical poetry of the composer and orchestrator. There are levels of subtlety to the music that you never dreamed would be there. It is full, rich, awe-inspiring. It confuses you at first because you had been used to dancing only to the melody of one piano. Now there are forty musicians who are as integral a part of the overall illusion as you, the performer, are. You familiarize yourself with the totality of the sound and find that the music kicks your movement to another level and makes you certain you can do anything.

  Then come the lights, lovingly painted from the front of the theater. You realize that every nuance of your face and body will be visible. The pink jells leave your skin with a silky glow. The spotlight following you burns through your eyes. The bumper lights stage right and left add dimensional color to your arms and legs. You can see absolutely no one in the audience. It is alienatingly black. Then you realize it is all up to you. You are a performer. You forget everything you ever learned. You forget the intricate processes of technique. You forget your anxieties and your pain. You even forget who you are. You become one with the music, the lights, and the collective spirit of the audience. You know you are there to help uplift them. They want to feel better about themselves and each other.

  Then they react. Their generously communal applause means they like you—love you even. They send you energy and you send it back. You participate with each other. And the cycle continues. You leap, soar, turn, extend, and bend. They clap, yell, whistle, stomp, and laugh. You acknowledge their appreciation for what they see and give
them more. And so it goes.

  The long years were worth it. The miraculous magic of expression overrides everything. It becomes everything. Once again, you realize you are everything you are aware of. You are part of the audience. They are a part of you. You and they are one expressing talent. The talent of giving and receiving, of resonating to a greater spirit by means of the body; the talent of souls appreciating one another, of together creating life on a larger scale. The talent of understanding the shadow awareness that makes us all one, part of a divine perfection which is the essence of sharing. You are dancing with God. You are dancing with yourself. You are dancing in the light.

  And my mother and father had been responsible for introducing me to an art form that allowed me to dance with life.

  Chapter 6

  So much had happened to me in the 1983-1984 time period that some people wondered what I needed the Gershwin run for. As always, I did what I did for personal reasons. If I see no potential for human growth in any of my projects, then I won’t do them. I was finally beginning to relinquish my goal-oriented priorities, calculated smart career moves. Personal goals had become more important to me.

  I was basking in the success of Terms of Endearment and I knew I could rest on my laurels for a year or two, but as my brother, Warren, said to me, “It’s probably good to get back into the storm.” Besides, I wanted to endeavor to apply my new spiritual awareness to the professional arena. It had brought me so much inner peace in my private life. Would that also work professionally?

  First of all, a word about acting and what the process means to me. When I began, I still thought of myself as a dancer. I knew absolutely nothing about the techniques of expressing myself with my voice or how to become another character through written dialogue. I have had maybe four acting lessons in my fife, and in my view, it is questionable whether it is even possible to teach someone how to act. One can learn how to dance and how to sing through lessons because those forms of expression require a schooled, scientific, almost mathematical understanding of rhythm, music, tone, body movement, and placement of either the voice or the body. But acting is more ephemeral, more abstract. It is about individualized attitude. Of course, attitude is important in song and dance, but you have to learn how to sing and dance first. Acting is only about attitude and how to achieve it clearly. We act every moment of our everyday lives. So to me, observation was my best teacher. As I have said, my parents were the first objects of my observation. I studied their moods and the orchestration of their personalities. They were clear in their manipulation of characters regardless of how frustrating I sometimes found them.

  Later on I began to sit for hours watching people on the street. Sometimes Dad would take us in the car while he did “business,” and Warren and I were left to amuse ourselves while we waited for him. We were told to remain in the car and often hours would pass with nothing to do but observe the milling clusters of people passing by, acting out their various dramas while we watched in mesmerized fascination. Those times were among the most effective in educating me about human behavior. To this day I long to be a fly on the wall wherever I am so that I can recall the childhood wonder of observing other people rather than being observed myself.

  When it came to acting I never had a trained teacher. Life was my teacher. Concentration was my teacher. The developed capacity to observe another while putting myself in their skin and feeling what they felt became my teacher. In other words, I taught myself how to act by observing life. And from the beginning, it felt “natural” to me. In fact, if I didn’t feel “natural” in a given scene, I was usually not very good. If I believed what I was saying, it worked. If I watched myself doing it, it didn’t.

  I never had any acting idols really. I think that was because I believed in the characters they were playing. I didn’t believe the acting. If someone wasn’t a good actor, I just didn’t like the character they were portraying. I approached acting as a child would., whether I was observing another doing it or whether I was doing it myself. And I still do. I’m not very sophisticated in my demands. I’m a sucker for the movies because I usually believe what I’m watching unless it seems absolutely false. On the stage the proscenium arch dictates that the audience be once removed from reality. On the stage you try to act real. On the screen you try to be real.

  So acting was a simple process for me. I had just enough childish wonder to be good at it. If I believe what I’m doing, the audience will believe it. If I don’t, the audience won’t. It’s making up stories so your friends and your parents will believe you. It never has been a big deal to me. At the same time, I have to admit I didn’t take acting seriously enough. It came so naturally to me that I often treated it as a kind of a hobby, a pastime that brought me great pleasure but was nothing to lose any sleep over—and I never did. That is, of course, why I did so many dumb pictures. I usually only looked at my part and if it felt like fun, I’d do it. I could never understand why so many people in the movie business treated a film as though it were their last will and testament.

  I’d read a script once, make my decision to do it, and never look at it again until it was time to do a scene. I never studied my lines the night before. And by the way, I never had any trouble remembering them. I felt the character as if by osmosis. It never seemed right for me to intellectualize what I was doing. I just, as Humphrey Bogart put it, “got out there and acted and tried not to bump into the furniture or the other people.”

  I didn’t care about the number of close-ups I had or what ended up on the cutting-room floor. I didn’t bother much with how I looked, but sometimes I turned down parts if I knew I’d have to wear corsets or uncomfortable clothes. Most of my pictures have been shot indoors because, with blue eyes, I have a hard time keeping my eyes open in the sunshine. So I usually turned down Westerns and outdoor epics.

  I was vitally interested in the number of days I’d have off, and more than anything, I lobbied to shoot films on French hours, which meant starting at eleven and working till seven without breaking for lunch. I was a night person and loathed getting up early.

  It wasn’t until my late thirties that I began to take acting in films seriously. Up till then, I had been more interested in traveling, love affairs, political activism, my friends, writing, and living.

  I don’t know what caused the shift in my attitude. Maybe it was age. Maybe it was the experience of failure (I had done years of bad films in a row). But really, I believe that I was just more interested in the other aspects of my life, until one day I realized that my talent was intensely interesting, too, and I shouldn’t slough it off anymore. Also, let me say that I was one of the last to come under the Hollywood star system. I had been brought to Hollywood on a contract which guaranteed me three pictures a year, and Hollywood was churning out three times as many films then as they are today. Audiences were guaranteed. Films were the mainstay of American, European, and Japanese entertainment. People went to the movies. They weren’t selective about which movie. It’s different today.

  So perhaps I began to take my work in films seriously when I realized the audiences were doing the same thing. When they ceased to be casual about it, I did too.

  Then one night I saw Marlon Brando being interviewed on television. He wanted to talk about the plight of the American Indian and the interviewer wanted to talk about acting. I agreed with the interviewer. But what got to me was that this was one of the really great actors of our time, and he appeared to have contempt both for his profession and his talent. I didn’t want to be like that. So I guess that had something to do with it.

  Anyway, with the advent of Turning Point and Being There and Terms of Endearment, I found that I was taking myself more seriously and enjoying it to boot.

  At the same time, I had begun my search for the recognition of higher consciousness. Life and acting, then, came together for me. Discovering my identity was a serious undertaking for me. Previously I had searched it out through the development of a sociopolitical co
nsciousness and by consciousness-raising as a feminist. I had thought that the future salvation of the human race lay in those domains. Concern for my fellow humans seemed to be best served through political and social channels. Yet all the while I knew that within those avenues there was something missing. How could I really help others if I didn’t know who I was? Organizations lacked individualized understanding. They moved as a group, as a movement. The individual identity was what interested me. And so, although there was still much I agreed with and was attracted to within the sociopolitical activism of the time, I fundamentally understood that the only change I could really effect was the change within myself. That was where I would grow and progress to more understanding. So I began to veer away from political and social movements. They seemed to shift within themselves anyway as each individual reached his or her own personal understanding.

  The raising of my spiritual consciousness, then, was a natural extension of everything I had previously explored. I had traveled the world, lived among many cultures, been active in political movements: and despite a drive for perfection, I was a happy person, not really agonized by anything much. I was psychologically sophisticated, having had a great deal of therapy as I searched within myself. But what I was asking was deeper, more profound. I needed an answer—a higher answer to what I intuitively knew was the basis of identity. That, then, became a spiritual question, but one that could only be pursued in terms of continued self-search.

  I say all this because it had a profound effect on my acting and my live performing.

  I began to work with principles and techniques in relation to recognizing that mind, body, and spirit were intertwined. In fact, I was soon convinced that a healthy state of spirit controlled my mind and body. I realized I was essentially a spiritual being, not a mind-body being. My body and my mind flowed from the consciousness of my spiritual capacity.