Week Four -Empathy

“What is one risk you could take in your practice to creatively cultivate and deepen empathy?”

It seemed only appropriate that my response stemmed from the final question posted at the end of the essay ‘Performing Empathy’. As an actor my art practice exists entirely on the concept of empathy in many different realms of that term. When playing a character, I have to know them, understand them and relinquish a part of myself in order to fully allow myself to be affected by them and attain the ability to tell their story.

Dorit Cypis wrote ‘Empathy requires us to reach within ourselves and recognize our own inner responses so we can better recognize another person’s response.’ I find that this applies so accurately to my own process when exploring a character. A character in a play or a film is an outlet from a writer, as an actor I bring them to life and bring with me a part of the writer also. Cypis’ consideration that the arts ‘invite us to feel, think and imagine from the self outwards’ truly examines my experience in my own art making process as well as when I am in the position of the witness to another persons. My year and a half of training has taught me so much about myself in the way that my craft does in fact require me to reach deep within myself to be able to access incredibly high levels of empathy, understanding and above all an emotional connection.

In my acting studio class last week we were playing an improvisation game in which two people are debating over a matter. What I was given was so incredibly challenging because I, as myself had no empathy for the role I was playing. The premise I was given was to be a person who supported Trump. Even though it was just a small exercise I really had both to find something within myself and my knowledge of human nature and the world as an artist in order to find some kind of understanding of such a person but I also in a way had to relinquish a part of myself and my own beliefs as a person. That, to me feels like the greatest risk I could take as an artist to further incorporate empathy into my work, taking that leap into the unknown.

            Furthermore, the other aspect of empathy that my artwork so strongly represents is that of empathy towards the person that I am standing on stage with. My first year mentor Nataki Garrett told me that to be a great actor I must not be afraid to affect another person. Acting is a contact sport, we constantly work off of one other in order to progress through a scene and in doing so we must be able to give each other what is necessary in order to thrive within our work. Acting itself I would argue to be the most vulnerable art form as we as actors do not have a vessel in which to display our art, we do not put our art onto a canvas or through camera lenses, it is all through our own bodies. We are the vessel and our emotions, pain and messiness are all on display. Thus in training I have found that myself as a person needs to find a deeper empathy towards my colleagues as we perform a task that requires our entire mind, body, heart and soul to be outside of us. As I grow older and continue working I discover that my levels of engagement with others are rising, I find a deeper understanding of other people and a peace within myself regarding that, and that is only one example of what my acting training has given me.


For my final project I wanted to explore and highlight the issue of sexual assault. However in order to  create a project that would target a community that is not my own, I think that I would like to talk to men about it. I envision making a video of men (particularly college aged boys) reading out loud statements from women who have been sexually assaulted. It would be an uncomfortable exercise but incredibly necessary to raise a further awareness of the dehumanization of another person through social injustice.