I was recently teaching at David Lynch’s Master’s of Filmmaking Program in Fairfield, Iowa when someone asked me if I had ever heard of Shadow Work. I hadn’t, but apparently, that’s what I was doing with the graduating class of directing students in getting them to understand how to work with actors.
The groundbreaking therapist, Carl Jung, coined the phrase when he described it as energy patterns (or parts of ourselves), that as children we often disown as we develop. Becoming unconscious of certain parts of ourselves serve as coping mechanisms to move through life.
As adults, these are the parts of ourselves we try to deny and hide. And it’s an interesting conundrum because these are the essential parts we need as actors (and people) to transform. But they’re also so scary to us, so we often don’t expose them.
But if we understood the pure physics of what makes a shadow, maybe it wouldn’t seem so frightening. Simply, when a light source is obstructed by an object placed in front of it, the object throws off a shadow.
But this doesn’t mean there isn’t light. Light is all around the object. As soon as you move the object, the area is once again
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