Susperia and Performance (Patreon)

I saw the 2018 version of Suspiria and now I’m obsessed. It’s got so many things I love; it was surreal but also had a plot I could more or less follow, visceral visuals, beautiful gore, lots of women and ambivalent feelings about their power and sexuality. As a well known spooky lady, the fact that I liked this movie was not a surprise.

What *was* a bit of a surprise was that watching it made me think “Aw, sometimes I miss theatre school."

That’s kind of a weird thing to think while watching a horror movie about a dance company that’s secretly a chthonic witch coven, but the dance scenes really captured that part of theatre that I loved; sometimes it feels like making magic. Not the flash and dazzle sparkle kind of magic. The kind of magic that’s dark and scary, tapped into the collective unconscious and some great, unknowable, force.

To steal a phrase from Yogi Berra “You can’t think and act at the same time.” Which is to say that a performance is only good if you get lost in it. You can’t give a good performance if you’re thinking “What’s my last line? When do I put this thing down? How do I get from this part of the stage to that part?” The whole point of rehearsal is that you drill those things into your body so  you don’t have to think about those things while you’re performing. 

That’s why so many actors can’t handle the unexpected. They’re trying to perform and their actor brain says “I didn’t rehearse picking up my scarf! I will pretend that the scarf no longer exists.” And then your whole audience spends that scene staring at the scarf on the floor and wondering why it’s  just lying there and how long it will be there before someone steps on it. (Not long.)  

There are performers who can give a good performance *and* pick up a scarf but I can’t tell if that’s a talent you’re born with or a skill you develop. If it is a skill, it’s not one they know how to teach in an acting school.

Performing is a kind of self hypnosis but no one ever puts it that way. Instead they have a wide variety of warm ups and exercises that are all aimed at “turning off your brain.” They are all ways to make you feel and move more than you think about what you’re doing, why you’re doing it and, worst, what other people think of what you’re doing. And when these things work, they  feel *powerful.* They feel like making magic. They feel like tapping into something primal, something eternal, something at once earthly and divine. At its best performance is an altered state. One that I’m willing to bet is, chemically, no different from religious ecstasy. That’s one of the things that Susperia managed to capture. And that’s what really made me fall in love with it.



But seriously if you can’t handle gore DON’T FUCKING WATCH IT.