I am a Fitzmaurice Voice Teacher-in-Training. Over the last eight weeks, I’ve practiced teaching the technique to small groups of people, mostly actors. Since the technique, in its early stages, centers around a physical exploration of breath in the body, students often experience unexpectedly deep emotion as they practice it. This experience may be tied to a specific emotional memory, or it may be a response rooted in the muscles and breath, with no specific event memory tied to it. Either way, the response is very real and often powerful, frightening, and difficult to handle, especially for new students of the work.
As I’ve begun to teach this sensitive practice, I’m struck with an important question: what is my role as a teacher of this work when a student encounters an emotional response, and how do I undertake that role with honesty, awareness, and compassion?
As a student of the work, I’ve experienced emotional responses in two very different ways. The first, more common response for me, is one that takes me by surprise, overwhelms me, and causes me to step back from it. I feel the emotion as it starts to overtake me, and then I sort of brace for it, wallow in it for a while, and then recover from it. I leave the class feeling exhausted, like I’ve worked really hard. The second kind of “emotional response experience” I’ve had feels more like moving through the emotion and stepping out the other side, transformed. Here, I traverse a path through the experience I’m having, not knowing what will be on the other side but forging ahead nonetheless. This kind of experience is a true emotional “release” and leaves me feeling open, enlivened, and empowered.
If my students encounter emotion through their explorations of the Fitzmaurice Voicework, I’d like for their experience to be empowering, not crippling. I’d like to bolster their courage to move through their experience rather than being paralyzed and turning away from it. At the same time, I know their experience must be uniquely theirs, and I cannot project my own experiences or expectations onto what they are exploring. My task is a delicate one; but if I get caught up in the delicacy of it, I run the risk of sucking the joy out of an exploration that, while sensitive, should also be buoyant and playful.
Is there any hope for me?
Yes, I think it can be done. I’ve been thinking about a number of principles that can help guide my journey. They aren’t concrete answers, but in this question I don’t think any concrete answers exist.
Compassion. Joan Halifax, a Zen Buddhist, anthropologist, ecologist, civil rights activist, and author, says in a speech entitled Compassion and the True Meaning of Empathy (www.ted.com/talks/joan_halifax.html): “Compassion, which activates the motor cortex, means that we aspire to transform suffering; and if we are so blessed, we engage in activities that transform suffering. But compassion has another component, and that component is really essential. That component is that we cannot be attached to outcome. . . Any attachment to outcome [will] distort deeply [our] capacity to be fully present.” As a Fitzmaurice teacher, it is my job to help my students transform their deep emotions (which may be frightening or uncomfortable, like suffering) to a feeling of empowerment. But as I endeavor to help them, I cannot have a fixed idea of what lies ahead; I cannot be attached to outcome. While offering my own strength, vulnerability, and presence in the moment, my job is to witness them honestly as they traverse their path themselves.
Presence in the Moment, or Embracing the Unknown. Galway Kinnell’s poem Prayer says:
Whatever happens. Whatever
what is is is what
I want. Only that. But that.
In teaching the Fitzmaurice Voicework, especially as it relates to dealing with students’ experiences of emotion, there are elements of letting go and diving into the frightening, vast, and delicious unknown (“Whatever/ what is is”) with an entirely appropriate mix of careful compassion and reckless abandon. There are times for both, and only attentiveness to the present moment will illuminate which is which. In and then you act, Anne Bogart calls us to “imagine art as the space at the end of a breath before the next inhalation. Time stops. An actor knows that each inhalation can come as a surprise” (133-134). Bogart invites us to discover our breath together, and the space between our breaths, as a doorway into letting go of expectations – which is also what the Fitzmaurice Voicework helps us do.
Attentiveness/Availability. In Firstlight, Sue Monk Kidd suggests that “attentiveness is entering fully the moment you are currently in . . . and simply being present with it” (37). As a teacher of the Fitzmaurice work, I seek not only to do this myself, but also to teach my students to do it. “Such deep availability requires a hospitality that receives people as they are, without necessarily seeking to cure, fix, or repair their problems. When you practice mindful availability, you are simply there with your heart flung open” (Kidd, 51). Simple availability and attention to what is happening in the moment are important principles for teaching and practicing the Fitzmaurice Voicework.
Flow, or Being a Conduit. During my first month of Fitzmaurice Voice Teacher training, several of the teachers talked about “flow,” and noticing the experience of transition. Flow can mean a lot of things, but as I consider its relation to helping my students move through an experience of emotion, I realize that emotions naturally flow through us like waves; and in the natural course of things, one experience transitions to the next. When we encounter experiences that are new or frightening, we might instinctively brace against change; but I would like to help my students explore change instead. In order to do that, I must first experience my own sense of internal flow, and then offer my experience of flow to my students in whatever way is appropriate in the moment. In a way, I am endeavoring to be a conduit of all the principles I’ve described, and as a conduit, offer these experiences to my students so that they may make their own discoveries.
All these ideas are well and good, but how, specifically, can I put them into practice? I think teaching the Fitzmaurice Voicework is an art, and like any art I think it will take practice, time, study, patience, risk, failure, and gradual growth. In time, I think I will begin to discover my own authentic way of offering what I have learned to my students, and continuing to grow with them as I continue to grow and change myself. While that is true, I have some ideas about how to begin.
Introduce and reinforce the idea of empowerment. When I realized my emotions could be a source of personal power, it was a huge revelation. I can offer this idea to my students near the beginning of our work together, and reinforce it as that feels appropriate. To me, empowerment means I can use my emotions to move into action. I can express myself; I can live at the forefront of my own experience and move forward through each moment rather than being held captive by what is happening to me. I think a discussion of this idea of emotional experience as a source of power can be a tool for my students to store away in case they decide to use it later.
Cultivate a sense of ensemble. I do this by making the choice to engage openly and honestly at the beginning of each class, and (by example) encouraging my students to do the same. I do this by mixing group games and partner work into our activities. I do this by slowly, gradually, asking my students to engage with each other in ways that require trust. I do this by remembering to lay out ground rules for our activities, and discussing their experiences afterwards. By cultivating a sense of ensemble, I am helping to establish a safe environment where a student who experiences strong emotion will know that their peers and I are there to support them.
Communicate honestly, or “teach what’s in front of me.” During my first month of Teacher Training, Catherine Fitzmaurice reminded us often to “teach what’s in front of us.” I think this means I need to keep my eyes and ears open to what my students are giving me. I can prepare with lesson plans and form goals for myself and the class, but I need to constantly evaluate and re-evaluate those plans based on what the class is telling and showing me. I need to be honest with myself and them about what I perceive. There is a reality that I am “the teacher” and they are “the students,” but there is perhaps a more important reality that we are all human beings with a wide, rich, and equally valid range of experiences, ideas, abilities, and strengths. If I can recognize and cultivate the humanity in my classroom, that will go a long way.
Go for it! In August I participated in a week of training with Shakespeare & Co., a program that brings Shakespeare to high schools in highly accessible ways. One of the things they reminded us was “You Are Enough,” meaning by the time I walk through the door to teach my class, I can trust that I’ve prepared and learned enough to be there. It doesn’t matter that I have a lot more learning and growing left to do; on that day, for that class, in that moment, “I am enough,” and I can trust that the class will be successful.
