Safety and Control…

Welcome to the start of a new year and a new audition season! As stress starts to increase these next few months, I’ve found myself thinking about when we reach for safety and control in performance.

Both are necessary aspects of our artistic practice. Safety enables us to dive deeply into the story as well as come home to ourselves. Control is when and how deeply we dive in and out of character. Both build trust in our work environments, our coworkers, and in our craft.

Now, safety and control are relative. What makes one person feel safe as a performer, may make someone else feel completely unsafe. What makes one person feel in control at auditions, may make someone else feel out of control.

Rather than state the definition of safety and control, I’d love to for us to arrive at our own understanding them, especially in their felt sense. Why? Because similar to how we embody our characters, we experience safety and control. They aren’t just thoughts or concepts, they are also felt in the body.

So what words, phrases, sensations evoke safety for us? If it were a sound and a gesture, what would that be? We might even want to get up and move around with this exploration.

Some may describe it as stability, comfort, and peace. Others may say connected and creative. When we have agency and bodily autonomy. I’ve heard it described as a deepening of the breath, a release of the shoulders, a deep belly laugh. Safety for me is like a really good cup of soup, makes me feel warm, at ease, and nourished.

What about control? What words, phrases, sensations come to mind? What is control’s gesture and sound?

Maybe we say it’s having influence and skill. Or agency, willpower, and good boundaries. When we have discipline and focus. I’ve heard it described like a long exhale on an “s” or a broadening of the chest. Control for me is a power pose or a ballerina. Both move deliberately and take up space, commanding attention.

And there’s some overlap here; safety and control are not mutually exclusive. When we feel safe, we often feel in control. We have a greater sense of our own agency, are able to maintain our boundaries, take up space. Also our need for control lessens when we feel safe. It becomes more of a given circumstance, rather than something we have to actively seek out or do.

Why is this important? Well, stress disconnects us. Whether it be when we can’t slow down our thoughts or heart rate, when our body starts shaking, when we forget our lines… stress can make us feel out of control and when we feel out of control, that is when things can get unsafe.

Here’s the catch: A lot of us artists are not seeking “safety” in our work. Especially if we only define safety as feeling comfortable and relaxed. We don’t want to feel comfortable; we want to stretch our artistic limits. We want to grow. Because of this, we often prioritize control over safety in performance.

And because we prioritize control, it’s the first thing we reach for when stress rises. We command our bodies to stop shaking, we manipulate our breath to slow down, we shame ourselves for not remembering our lines… And this is reinforced by our culture, one that values willpower, raising the stakes, and pushing through. 

We run into difficulty though if we always go for control over safety. At best, then we miss out on the creativity and connection that safety inherently inspires. And at worst, we begin to mistake control for safety. This is the shadow side.

Because stress can narrow our focus, we can become fixed on one option, that this will be the thing to make us feel “safe,” to save our work or our audition. And we’ll exert control in order to get that “safe” result, whether that be by controlling ourselves, our bodies, or even others or our environment. This shadow side is where we confuse the need for control as seeking safety. Because remember, true safety relieves us of that need.

So where does safety come in?

First off, let’s learn how to tell them apart. We’ve already started to do this with the questions above. The next step is to do this in times of stress. When the stress increases, we can ask ourselves: “would safety or control help right now?” This question can open us back up to possibilities, especially if we find ourselves attached to that one option or result.

It’s not about never using control or always seeking safety, it is truly about learning what works for us and when. Adding intentions to our tools can also provide insight. So the next time we use a tool, can we work with the intention of safety or the intention of control? What if we try one then the other? What can we learn about ourselves here?

Next, we can expand our definition of safety to include discomfort. When we only take safety to mean relaxation, we miss out on the connection, strength, and creativity that can come from being in our growth. Like when we work on a skillset, take a class, or do something new and exciting like a challenging role or show. When we anchor to safety even during discomfort, we can feel more grounded, capable, and actually widen our tolerance for stress (very useful during the upcoming audition season).

Lastly, using tools and practices, we can build relative safety into our work flows. We can find safety in the act of storytelling, in its structure rather than its content. This is where control and safety work together, via our technique, our warmups, training, closure exercises. We can do this individually and collaboratively.

When we cultivate safer working practices, we dive deeper into the story. Now we, can’t always control our work spaces, like audition rooms, but we can control our habits, rituals, prep and recovery. When we encourage control with safety, we give ourselves more options and creative possibilities, all of which strengthens our craft.