243-1 October 26, 2003
What We Are Doing
Acting is a performing art, like music, like dance. The actor, through performance, communicates the drama as a violinist communicates, as a dancer communicates. Through creation of character responding to situation and environment and society in which they are placed, actors interpret and communicate the playwright�s dramatized ideas�just as the musician interprets and communicates Mozart, Beethoven.
The musician�s medium of communication, of creation, is the violin, the piano, the flute. No true violinist would settle for less than the best violin�a Stradivarius if possible. Then through consummate artistry, the violinist seeks to bring forth the depth, the power, the infinite variety of this Stradivarius, this perfect instrument�
The actor�s instrument is the self, the total self. Not only a voice and a body, speech and movement�these are the communicating media. (And they must be developed to expressive capacities as powerful as the opera singer�s, as expressive as the dancer�s.) But communicating what? All that you can bring to the creation of a Hamlet, a Hedda. All that you are, all that you have known, all that you have experienced�the music heard or not heard, people you have known, books read or not, etc. etc.
Out of emptiness comes emptiness.
What do you bring to the art of acting? What do you bring to Hamlet? To Hedda? To the people of Paula Vogel�s plays? (Let this be an entry in next week�s journal. Do some serious thinking: What exactly do you bring to creating Hamlet? Or Hedda? What have you experienced of the deep loss that is shared by the people of The Cherry Orchard or Three Sisters? What have you perceived that you bring to understanding and creating the relationship of the Macbeths? Etc.)
Actors are just like everyone else with one important addition: actors must have the ability to perceive more deeply, to comprehend more fully, than ordinary people. Actors must have keener senses. Actors hear more vividly, see more fully, than others.
This first year of acting study is the building and developing of the actor�s instrument: the Self.
1. A voice that can communicate Macbeth or Masha to the last rows of the balcony
2. A body that reveals through spine, toes, shoulders, etc. etc, every human response to the astonishment of living, which is the basis of all drama.
3. Stored-up experience, riches of vision�the creative substance.
4. Imagination, which builds from the known to the unknown.
It is through the senses that we store up usable experience, experience we can create with. And that is what I want to focus your work on this quarter. (Next quarter we will focus on the creative power of the actor�s imagination.) I am not interested in mere �observation� of human behavior. That can lead just to superficial manipulation. Nor am I interested in your personal emotions. That can lead just to private ego. I am interested in helping artists develop their capacity to experience life deeply, to perceive with human comprehension life being lived around them. And since the art is acting, that means experience and perception in your total humanity, your human totality�through the senses, which is the way humans experience the world and learn and develop and realize. And it�s the way actors communicate.