The Archetype You Perform Is Not Always the One You Embody
A personal exploration of costume, scent and the freedom to meet a changing moment.
Through stage acting and open mics, I’ve enjoyed discovering who arrives when I put on a costume.
Sometimes the character emerges through what I’m wearing. There is something spontaneous about letting the outfit suggest an expression, then following it.
And whether dressing like a sorcerer and inviting my audience into a dark, mystical and sometimes comedic ritual or a heartfelt lover-boy ready to serenade them with song and poetry. It can be powerfully supported by the clothes I choose to wear.
I’ve used scent before going on stage in a similar way: letting the feeling of the fragrance speak through me and allowing a character to take shape.
That experience makes me curious about the relationship between performance and embodiment. Performance can be a place of discovery. A deliberately chosen expression can give something real an opportunity to emerge.
The question becomes interesting when the scene changes.
How much freedom do I have to change with it?
That question has most often led me to going on stage with no plan, an openness to the feelings within me and what I feel from an audience.
What does embodying an archetype mean?
For me, embodying an archetype means giving its qualities expression through feeling, behaviour and relationship. It includes access to those qualities across different circumstances, and the freedom to move between expressions as the moment changes..
Archetypes offer ways to explore different qualities of expression: how I direct, receive, support, desire, play and relate.
Sometimes the feeling gives me the direction.
I may feel compassion and move towards support and service. I may feel desire and act with will. I may feel pleasurable tension and explore mystique and allure.
At other times, I begin with something outside myself—a costume, a colour, a scent—and discover what it brings forward.
Both movements interest me. A feeling can find its expression through what I wear. What I wear can also invite a feeling to explore.
I’ve enjoyed this in everyday life as well as on stage. Sometimes I choose colours that represent how I’m feeling. Sometimes I have chosen them for a mood I wanted to enter: while selling something, going on a date, attending a job interview (though it has been a long time since doing that).
Sometimes dressing is simply an opportunity to play.
There is pleasure in giving different parts of myself room to appear and express.
What I wear, what I notice
Wearing black, I’ve felt denser, as though I were taking more on. Over time, I felt as though I were holding more, while my surroundings affected me less. I've often felt more power and grounded wearing darker colours, more attractive and powerful. I love my darker expressions and find it quite hilarious to wear dark if I am in a light mood also. I notice the look of confusion when I appear one way and act another.
Wearing white, I’ve felt a quality I would describe as purity. I’ve also noticed differences in how people experienced me and how they treated me. I've lived in a number of spiritual communities over the years and found it carried a lot of meaning for people when wearing white. Often I was approached with more brightness and joy on these occasions.
These are personal observations, shaped by the situations in which they happened. They leave me curious about the relationship between what I wear, how I feel, how I behave and what others respond to.
I’ve experienced something similar with perfume. My expression, and the responses I notice around me, often seem to echo the qualities I associate with each archetype. The darker archetypal perfumes have a way of turning people on, while the lighter ones generally have people feeling freer to communicate their hearts, enter into a feeling of safety and trust. Wearing all of them together has actually a wonderful effect, there is intrigue and heartfelt interaction aplenty.
Scent is particularly interesting to me because I can let the feeling of it participate in the moment. Before going on stage, that has meant allowing it to help shape a character. In everyday life, it becomes another way to explore how I enter an encounter.
The clothing, the fragrance and the person wearing them all arrive together.
It's also interesting to me that the clothes and scents I wear can carry memories and in a sense, energies of the past. I will look at that more closely in another blog post.
Entering with intention
I also notice the environments I’m entering, the people I’ll be interacting with, and the effect I’d like to have there.
Sometimes I consciously choose an archetype to embody. I arrive with an intention and explore how to express it.
Dark Masculine when I feel to be penetrative with my energy in a space, Dark Feminine when I feel to draw people in my direction on the dancefloor. Light Masculine keeps me feeling fresh and pure, Light feminine has my heartful expression shining through and somehow all of them have a way of leading me into a cuddle puddle...
Other times, the people and place bring a particular expression out of me. I discover something through the encounter itself, it could be a shadow of an archetype becomes apparent, or that another persons expression activates my own in a way that was unexpected.
Presence involves room for both: my intention and the experience unfolding between myself and others...
I might enter a conversation ready to offer direction, then discover that listening would be more useful. I might arrive in a playful mood and find that someone wants to speak about something tender.
Those are ordinary changes. They also raise a useful question:
Can my expression evolve as I learn more about the moment?
Having an intention gives me a starting point. Other people bring intentions, preferences and feelings of their own. What happens between us gives me more information than I had when I arrived.
When an expression becomes an obligation
The distinction I want to explore lives here.
A costume can invite discovery. An image can also become something I feel responsible for maintaining.
If I decide that leadership always looks certain, admitting uncertainty becomes difficult to include. If I associate softness entirely with agreement, a clear preference might seem out of character. If I make mystery central to my appeal, a direct answer might feel like giving something away.
These are examples of how a narrow definition can limit an expression.
The image starts deciding which responses belong.
That gives me a more useful way to examine performance and embodiment than judging how natural something looks. An unfamiliar expression may feel awkward while I explore it. A familiar one may be effortless and still offer me very little room to move.
Ease within an expression and freedom around it are both worth exploring.
Can leadership include reconsideration? Can softness include discernment? Can allure include clear communication?
When I wear black, can I express in the same way as when I wear white? How does that affect my environment differently?
What becomes possible when the archetype has room for those qualities too?
Embodiment includes range
Access to a quality across different circumstances is one element of embodiment.
Another is ease moving between archetypes as relevant circumstances arise.
This is also part of what presence means to me: noticing the moment clearly enough to respond with an expression that fits.
Direction may help a decision take shape. Receptivity may allow new information to change it. Compassion may move towards service. Desire may give an action energy and purpose.
Several of those qualities can belong within the same encounter.
This is the relationship I explore through HGA’s Foundations program and archetype add-ons: developing greater expression within an archetype, alongside greater range between them.
Foundations provides the shared groundwork. Paired with an archetype add-on, it offers a focused pathway for developing fuller expression within that archetype. There is room to explore how its qualities take shape personally, and how they become available across different circumstances.
Working with multiple add-ons extends that exploration across the light and dark, masculine and feminine polarities. Each offers another expression to become familiar with, creating opportunities to practise moving between them with greater ease.
Depth within an archetype and range between polarities support different aspects of embodiment. One invites fuller access to a particular expression. The other expands the responses available as the moment changes.
The exploration becomes richer when I can move among them while staying connected to my own intentions and attentive to the people involved.
There is room to pause, too. Presence can include taking a moment to recognise what I feel and what I want to do with it.
A feeling offers information. I still get to consider its expression.
Compassion might become an offer of help, with room for the other person to say what would be useful. Desire might become an invitation, with room for a freely chosen response.
The encounter remains something we participate in together.
A small exploration
You can explore this through an ordinary moment: getting dressed, choosing a fragrance, or preparing to meet someone.
Begin with a quality you feel curious about.
What would it be like to give that quality a little more room? How might it influence your pace, posture, words or attention?
Then let the encounter contribute something.
Notice what feels enjoyable, what feels unfamiliar, and what changes as you interact. Afterwards, a few questions can help give the experience shape:
What did I intend to express?
What emerged spontaneously?
Where did I feel free to change?
What would I like to explore further?
The value is in becoming more familiar with the choices available.
Leaving room for the next moment
I enjoy costume, colour and scent because they give me ways to explore expression playfully.
They can help me discover a character on stage. They can accompany an intention in everyday life. They can also bring forward something I had yet to name.
Embodiment gives those explorations somewhere to develop. Presence keeps them responsive.
The question I return to is:
Does this expression give me more freedom to meet what is happening?
I can choose how I enter. I can discover what emerges. And as the moment changes, I can make room for another response.
Explore archetype through scent
HGA’s four archetypal perfumes offer a sensory starting point for this kind of exploration.
You can choose a scent that reflects how you feel, or explore one associated with a quality you’re curious to express. Let the experience be personal, and notice what unfolds.
