A few years ago I sat in a workshop with a man named Jean-Louis Rodrigue. If you’ve seen Margot Robbie move through Barbie, or Christian Bale disappear into a role, you’ve seen his work. He’s one of the great movement coaches, a master of the Alexander Technique, and his whole life is built on a single idea. The truth doesn’t live in your head. It lives in your body, and you have to go back down into it to find it.
I did not know, that morning, what going back down into my body was going to look like.
He had us breathing first. Then he had us down on the theater floor, moving like animals. Lions. Peacocks. We were a whole kingdom of grown professionals crawling across the boards, for God’s sake, and I was both an elephant and a toucan for a while there.
Somewhere between the crawling and the breathing, my mind gave up managing how I looked and went quiet.
That’s when my body took over.
I stopped performing as an animal and started fully embodying myself. I let myself take the deep breaths Jean-Louis was asking us for. I could feel my age through my knees and the nerves in my throat wondering if everyone was laughing at me (even though they were in their own animal on their square of carpet).
But then, after a few minutes of this, the worry passed. I stopped performing. I let myself just be there. In my body. Fully.
Then Jean-Louis silenced the room. He let us take a moment to get still.
And inside that stillness, I heard a soft whisper.
