Listening is an act of discovery. It completely has the power to transform our lives. In our acting, it is the principle that can take us to unexpected places of feeling and experience that can shock us, surprise us, make us fall in love, and express things we never thought were inside us.
Listening’s power in the moment is what makes our experiences as actors so exhilarating and also, at times, scary.
And obviously the rest of the world is catching on to this inherent gift possessed by each of us (actors have just been aware of it for a long, long time). Our ability to listen and tell stories from that place is part of our DNA as human beings.
This year, the TED Prize, a $1 million award given to the TED Talk that most inspires people to bring about positive change, was awarded to a talk that celebrates the art of listening.
Dave Isay, the founder of StoryCorps, which has evolved into the single largest collection of human voices ever recorded, has used the money to create an app to make it possible for people anywhere to digitally archive their interviews with another person contributing to the “collective wisdom of humanity.”
This is what the art of acting—and listening to
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