Shem Brown
Welcome to Longitude Sound Bytes, where we bring innovative insights from around the world directly to you.
Hi, I am Shem Brown, Longitude fellow from Rice University studying English. For this episode, I had an opportunity to speak with Christin Davis, who is the Head of Acting in the Department of Theatre and Dance at The University of Texas at Austin, where she teaches Acting, Movement, and Voice. We started our conversation with Christin telling me about her passion for acting and education.

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Shem
How did you know that you wanted to go into theater and teaching? Were they things you always kind of wanted to do, or did the realization sort of come out later?

Christin Davis
I’d say that as far as pursuing it professionally, it was definitely a realization that came about later. When I entered undergrad at Rice, I was an English major. And I don’t really know that I knew what I was going to do. I think I had an assumption that maybe I’d teach high school English because I have had a really wonderful high school English teacher. And I was like, I love that I’ll do that. And then I kept doing plays, and I was one of the coordinators of the Rice Players. And then I think it was junior year for a variety of reasons occurred to me that, Oh, I couldn’t try to do this as like my job job. And so, there was just a shift in thought for me. And so, I decided to give it a try. And the teaching was also not something that I was really pursuing actively, like, I wasn’t pursuing a path towards academia. I’ve feel like I’ve always been good at following my nose and saying yes to things that are interesting and are working well. And that’s kind of how I found myself where I am now.

Shem
That’s awesome. I think it’s true that English degrees, you can do a lot of things with them. They’re kind of very versatile. Do you have like a favorite play that you were a part of while you were at Rice? Is there one that just like, sticks out to you? Or were they all just your favorites?

Christin
I mean, they were all really wonderful in various ways and various reasons. I think, the one that probably helped me grow the most as an artist, and sort of towards the profession was the production of the Baltimore Waltz that the Rice Players did. I think that was my junior year. It’s a really challenging show, and out of any production that I’ve ever done, like in college and beyond, it’s the one that I wish I could do again, like as a grown person, and as someone who knows, you know, has so many more skills now than I had then. It was a three person show by the playwright, Paula Vogel. And it was directed by Mark Ramont, who was at Rice for just three years. It was really rigorous. And it was really hard work. And I think it was a really successful production. So that’s probably my favorite.

Shem
Is there, and this is sort of an expansion of that question, is there a project in your professional life that has maybe resonated or stuck the most with you?

Christin
Again, everything I’ve done has been a source of growth and joy. A play I did here in Austin, I don’t know, six years ago, or something like that, called the Drowning Girls has definitely been a highlight of my theatre career. Again, another three-person show it takes place in bathtubs. And so, we were like in water for the entire duration of the show. We got to play lots of different characters. And it’s a really stylized way of telling a story. It’s almost like a ghost story. That’s based on historical fact. So that was really exciting and began an ongoing collaboration with me and a small theatre company here called Theatre en Bloc that does a lot of really exciting work in Austin. And then film wise and TV wise, working on the HBO limited series Love and Death, a handful of years ago was certainly a career highlight. It was like, by far the biggest, biggest budget production I’d ever been a part of. I got to be on set for two months, which was the longest I’d ever been involved with a film or TV production. And so that was really, again, a great learning experience and also just really, really fun.

Shem
Yeah. HBO shows are so cool. So, I actually went and I watched Fault Line, the short film, and I really loved it. I was just wondering what was it like for you to work on it with like, you know, being in a short film having it set in Marfa, which, again, like just a wonderful place in Texas. I love it. Everyone loves it. What was the experience like for you?

Christin
That was also a highlight in a different way than the HBO show because it was really such an intimate process. I want to say that was the first time that I had played a mom on screen since becoming a parent and it was my first project after COVID And so it was just a lot. And also, you know, the subject material is really quite heavy. As soon as I read the script, I was saying to someone actually earlier this week, like I got the tingles. And for me, you know, when I say that I’ve been good at following my nose to kind of figure out what’s next in my life. It’s for me, it’s the tingles, like following the tingles. And so as soon as I read that script, I got the tingles. And I was like, Oh, I would love to be able to do this. And then, in the callback process meeting, Lauren Himmelvo, the writer and director, and her daughter, who was the lead in the show, I just really, really, really wanted to be part of it. I was cast in it, and we had a rehearsal process, which you don’t always get to do for on camera work. But it was really, really nice to be able to connect and develop a relationship with Izzy, who played my daughter. So that by the time we got to Marfa, it felt like, there was really a true family feel. You know, I love low budget productions. I did several in Houston before I went to grad school, and I’m a scrappy artist at heart. And so, I love like, the creative problem-solving question about, okay, how do we make this work. And the production was, you know, low budget in that way, but also, so cohesive and so beautiful, and so family oriented. Lauren, the director, her mother-in-law, and her sisters, were there, as it’s called craft services, like the people that provide the food on set, and so cooked these homemade meals every single day. And we would sit down for a family dinner every day, which again, is not usually how things are done, at least on sets that I’ve been on. And so, it’s just really had this wonderfully collaborative feel.

Being in Marfa was so beautiful. You know, the landscape was such a participant in the film. And we had some really wonderful moments of things that we couldn’t really plan for, because, you know, you hope for the sun to set in the right way, but you never really know you’re gonna get the shot. And so, we just had some beautiful moments of nature participating with us and us participating with nature in a way that really came together. And then a couple moments with the trains that we weren’t expecting. Because we didn’t know that schedule, we didn’t know when things were going to come by. And we just happened two days in a row to get these moments where the train came by, that we weren’t expecting. So like, but the shots towards the end, where the trains going in between us that we just happened to catch that. That moment was really special.

Shem
That was so cool. I was like, how did they know that this would happen? I was like, this is just so serendipitous, it feels like.

Christin
The train was serendipitous. Yeah, I can’t remember if we had a rough idea of maybe it was gonna happen or not. But I remember us being like, we hear the train, like drive!… and you either get those or you don’t get those, and we got it, which was really, really great.

Shem
Are there any sort of like processes of other creatives in your field that you’ve admired or learned from, like approaches to, you know, people’s art, you know, style of learning any of that?

Christin
Yeah, let me think about that for a minute. I love that question. You know, I’m very process oriented, as opposed to product oriented. And I think that’s why I’m in this field actually. Because for me, it’s the process of, first of all, my place in the process and my place in being part of a collaboration that is working to make something larger than the individual pieces. And so, my rehearsal process, my developmental process, and my teaching process is all very process oriented, as opposed to we’re trying to get to this place. I feel like a lot of my approach in that way, comes from a lot of the learning that I had at Rice. I was telling my students the other day, we were having all these discussions around AI and Chat GBT. And I believe me, I understand that like, there’s a lot of value and a lot of unknown and a lot that’s worth exploring in that world. And then there’s the English major part of me that has this argument, which is like, language is consciousness, or consciousness is language, or there’s a really reciprocal and symbiotic relationship there. Like as I figure out how I use the language to communicate my consciousness, I am also developing myself as a conscious creature, and so I can’t separate those. And so, I get really worried for like outsourcing my imagination and my ability to create myself in that way to an external source. And so, I feel like that was a really big piece of learning, I took from my studies in English that has made its way into my process as like a theatre artist and actor. That combined with I did a lot of religious studies classes at Rice. And, you know, I thought about, oh, maybe I’ll pursue English at the graduate level and teach English at the college level, or maybe I’ll, you know, travel the world and become a religious studies scholar. But for me, I always needed it, to come into my brain and then come out through my body in space. And I feel like that’s what being an actor has allowed for me to do is to synthesize those two really important pieces of learning, and then bring it into space with other people. And so, a lot of my influences are actually thinkers and philosophers, you know, spiritual writers, who are always exploring how creativity is a big part of what makes us human, and how we can harness that for the good. So right now, I’m really influenced by the writer, Adrian Marie Brown. I’ve been a big fan of Julia Cameron for a long time. And then as far as the people who are actually theater makers and artists. I don’t know I don’t really read like, I don’t read a lot about famous people or stuff like that, you know, but I love. I love new work. And I love helping people create new work. And helping writers and directors understand the actor’s process in helping to develop new work. from that vantage point of like, well, this is how like, my consciousness works as an actor. This is how my impulse works as an actor, and how then it comes through language into a script, since theater is mostly still a language based medium.

Shem
That’s, that’s really great. I think it’s, it’s actually great that you don’t, you don’t have to be like, I only read theoretical stuff about plays. So I love that. My next question was going to be about your process when approaching a new role, but I want to skip over it for a moment and go to this next one, which is about whether you’ve created any sort of like habit regarding mindfulness, privacy or solitude in regards to the increased speed of information, and the sense of like, artificial urgency, which you talked about a little with Chat GPT and other AI tools.

Christin
Yeah, that’s one thing that I feel like, I am hoping that I really offer my students as well. I’m always in practice in trying to understand what the best sort of practice for an actor, or this sort of artist is. You know, if you’re a violinist or a painter, the things that you can do to practice your craft are pretty apparent. There’s also a lot of stuff that we that is not maybe as apparent, but you know, you know what it is to practice scales as a violinist. And as an actor, it can be harder for especially young actors to understand well, how do I if I’m not working, how do I practice. And so, I do spend a lot of time thinking about questions like this, but yes, for myself, as I’ve got two young kids now, and I’m married, and so there’s like, my life is very full. And I am not always at the center of it. And so, I try to wake up early enough every day, so that I get to sit by myself with coffee, and a book of some sort that feels like it’s feeding me and nourishing me sort of on the levels that I was talking about earlier. And if I get those in, then usually I feel like it’s a pretty good start to my day as far as being able to be present and centered and responsive to whatever comes my way. And that’s great practice just for me as a human. That’s also really translatable to my work as an actor or as a teacher in the classroom. But anything also, that just helps me feel in creative flow. So if I like have time to sit down and play the piano, once or twice a week, working in my yard helps me feel just connected to the flow of stuff around me and through me, as opposed to feeling like I’m the person who does this in isolation. You know, to me, the most satisfying and interesting and magical part of being an actor is the relating and the not knowing what’s going to happen between two people who are encountering each other in a space and so any practice I have that keeps me kind of open to possibility is something that I find useful.

Shem
I liked what you said about even just going out and working in the garden like feeling tied back you know, to the earth to what’s going on, rather than sort of an almost robotic like, Okay, I have this and then this, and then those are the things I’m doing next. It feels very organic, at least to me, that’s what I’m hearing. Yeah, but just circle back on your process, you know, sort of when approaching a new role or project, do you have like a sort of more formalized way? Or is it just to kind of see where it takes you?

Christin
A little bit of both. I have a lot of different ways of approaching material that I know works kind of given the situation. Let’s say it’s not an audition, but it’s like, something I know, I’m going to work on. First and foremost, I let the language work on me, and affect me how it’s ever it’s going to affect me. And then sometimes I’ll make notes about thatn or sometimes I’ll just, you know, take stock of sort of how that affects my body. Do you know the writer Helene Cixous? She has this really amazing essay called Coming to Writing. I read it when I lived in London and did a semester studying abroad there. And to me was, it’s something that helps me translate how my work studying English was actually my work as an actor. It’s very much about how writing can be an expression of the body, and then the body can be an expression of writing. And so that’s one reason I feel like acting to me ultimately made more sense than, you know, going into academia for English is because I need it to come through my body and into space. And so, I let the language work on me, whether it makes me feel a certain way or makes like, my body needs to move in a certain way. Then sometimes if I feel like I know who this person is, I don’t have to do a whole lot of brain work. And I might just go right to like imagining. Something I did for Fault Line actually, which I don’t, I think I had done this before but I spent a lot of time doing it because that a really long drive out to Marfa was, I created memories as my character around my husband, you know, who in the film has died. And so I spent the car trip just remembering our relationship. And that gave me a lot to work with once I was on set, which was really interesting. I had never done that in such an intense way before. And then I don’t know if you’re familiar with Stanislavski, who was sort of, you know, founder of modern acting, in some ways, he has a way of looking at a script or just some useful questions to ask. The question that I spend the most time on, once I’m in the rehearsal room working is this question of how do I want my partner like whoever I’m in the scene with, like, how do I want them to respond to what I’m saying? And, and this is what I teach. What that does, as the actor is that it makes it not about me, right? It makes it not about like, Oh, I’m feeling this or like, this is how this character is. But rather, I’m using the language to do something because there’s something that I really want from the person that I’m talking to whether or not I’m conscious of it. So that’s a really fundamental part of my process.

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Shem
We hope you enjoyed our episode. What stood out for me from this conversation was what Christin said about acting coming through the body, into space—letting the language work on her. I just thought that was a very thoughtful, beautiful way of putting it, that idea.

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