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IMAGINE-NATION
I used to love dressing up as a kid although it was never in a dress and mummy’s shoes. Kids love being Batman or Robin, Wonder Woman, truck drivers, astronauts and who hasn’t played doctors and nurses?
Imagination is a wonderful thing and there could be many reasons for dressing up. Insecurities may mean a child finds strength in the ‘Wham! Bam! Pow!’ of a Bat-suit or maybe dressing up and playing mummy and daddy means a child is in awe of their parents and want to be more like them. A kid in front of a telly isn’t using much imagination but sit them down with an egg carton, glitter, glue and coloured paper and suddenly they’re stimulating more than one sense. I also think role-play allows us to understand a little more about the world around us and allows us to have more compassion but it seems as we get older we lose our imagination.
Actors must understand more about how people feel because it’s their job to get inside someone’s head, to understand how a killer might think, how a frustrated housewife and mother might be feeling when having an affair, losing a loved one or simply dealing with the mundane of everyday life. So often I’ve had conversation with people where I’ve said, “Imagine being that guy trapped in the car in the Cook’s river last week,” or “Imagine being arrested for ice in Singapore and facing 20 years,” or “Imagine being paid $1.5 million a year to play football?” We often ask people to walk a mile in our shoes yet seem unable to do the same. When I first started work (last century when I had a ‘real’ job working nine-to-five), I would sit on the bus with all the other mugs on their way to the salt mines. There was a lady who would remove her suede shoes (they were brown not blue) and would systematically brush from heel to tip in the same fashion, everyday, while everybody on the bus looked on, transfixed by this daily ritual. I would watch, wondering what she was like at home, curious as to whether she was single or married, and then make up a name and story about her life.
I love the saying, “Put yourself in their place”. Imagine being a Prime Minister, a drag queen, and a vet or at the other end of the scale, diagnosed with cancer, in an abusive relationship or homeless.
We are pretty lucky in this country but we could all have more compassion for other people if we just imagined what it would be like to be in someone else’s shoes – although I can’t imagine being an 81-year-old homophobe, elevated to a position of idol-worship, in charge of millions of insecure hypocrites and several billion dollars while children in third world countries die from hunger and HIV/AIDS.
I wouldn’t want to be in those blood-stained, knock-off Prada shoes.
Mitzi Macintosh
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