On Performing Grief

Around the second anniversary of my father's death, I started trying to breathe through my mouth when I cried. I picked this up in an acting class that is all about applying the Meisner Technique to singing, so noticing and following our emotions is a big part of it. This is also the class where I learned how to stop dissociating through life, which probably deserves its own post because it has been a whole thing.

When you're really feeling your feelings, the singing can just stop working because an ugly cry has hijacked your whole vocal mechanism. Our fantastic teacher, Sakile, talks about performers who can cry while they sing because they just breathe through their mouths and don't try to hold the tears back. "Open your mouth," she invites. "Try again."

Of course, I've never been able to do this during class. My vocal mechanism usually seizes up for other reasons, including but not limited to lack of preparation and sheer terror. But in my non-acting life, I've been practicing the whole mouth-breathing thing, which feels very different from all the ways I've cried before.

The tears are doing their thing, but I'm not sobbing and gasping and breaking blood vessels in my eyes. Not trying to stop the flow seems to be essential. I was suppressing so much for so long, genuinely white-knuckling my way through the day so I wouldn't melt down and inconvenience anyone or scare the shit out of our preschooler. Now I can just cry.

Prior to working with Sakile, I signed up for a solo performance class that, coincidentally, started the day Dad died. I missed the first week for obvious reasons, but I'm sure I wrote my way through the stages of grief as part of that class in a way I never would have on my own steam. I've never been a prolific or consistent journaler. Apparently, the only thing that motivates my writer brain is my actor brain screaming, "Hey! Dumbass! We aren't going to have anything to perform if you don't sit down and write something!"

My relationship with grief changed through all this performance work. I'm not sure what it means to me now. In the past, I thought of grief as something I needed to purge: lance the boil, clean it up, bandage it, and move on. This method would probably meet the approval of Our Lady of the Star Wars and Solo Performance with Memoir Tie-In, Carrie Fisher, who apparently told Meryl Streep to take her broken heart and turn it into art or whatever.

And I've been trying. But a part of me wonders if I'm popping a zit or picking at a scab. Am I getting the infection out so I can heal, or am I reinjuring myself? Is performing grief the same thing as grieving?

I'm worried that this little part of me is always watching, cataloging new heartbreaks and bruises, and viewing them as material instead of experiencing them. "Ah," she says as I weep over the dream coming unknit within me. "This keening is a new sound. How does it feel in your body?"

Maybe it's increased somatic awareness. Maybe it's metacognition. Maybe it's just a different way to intellectualize things. But I'm pretty sure most people don't treat their traumas like unlocking a new dialect or stage combat skill.

"Where is the resonance? Can you recreate it? Remember this. Maybe we can use it someday."