Just doing it

“I think, in fact, that in the theatre what matters is not so much to be sincere as to act true. As in music, always in music. Each play leans on a tonality which is right for it. It may be major or minor, but everything must be made to pass through that imperative.

… Tempo is also extremely important. I got in the habit of going, after the first act, and asking the stage manager for the timing. If we had slowed down by three seconds, I had the word passed around to everyone that we must ‘pull ourselves together.’

I have retained this practice.

‘Le Personnage combattant’, which I am acting at the time of writing, lasts for an hour and fifty-four minutes without a break. Every evening we time it. The time taken varies by about 30 seconds, hardly more. But I amuse myself by guessing whether I have been slower or faster. I am rarely wrong.

‘Yes, Monsieur, today you did an hour, fifty-three minutes, thirty-five seconds.’

or again:

‘Today, Monsieur, one hour, fifty-four minutes, four seconds.’

And yet, in detail, the acting changes. One is forced to believe that one’s sensations silently obey some secret rhythm which has to do with breathing.”

Jean-Louis Barrault, Souvenirs pour demain, (Memories for Tomorrow: The Memoirs of Jean-Louis Barrault, transl. Jonathan Griffin, 1974)

Jerzy Grotowski, 1989

“Art is deeply rebellious. Bad artists talk about rebellion, but true artists do the rebellion. They respond to the consecrated order by an act.

Here there is a most dangerous and most important point. One can, in following this route, end up in a sort of rebellion that is not even exclusively verbal but anarchic, which is the refusal of our responsibilities. In the realm of art, this appears under the form of dilettantism: one is not credible in one’s craft; one has no mastery; one has no capacities; one is truly a dilettante in the worst sense of the word – so one is rebelling.

No, none of that. Art as rebellion is to create the fait accompli, which pushes back the limits imposed by society or, in tyrannical systems, imposed by power. But you can’t push back these limits if you are not credible. Your fait accompli is nothing but humbug if it is not fait competent.

Yes! It is blasphemous! But it’s precise.

You know what you are doing, you have worked out your weapons, you have credibility, you have created a fait accompli, which is of such mastery that even your adversaries cannot deny it. If you don’t have this attitude of competence at your disposal in your rebellion, you will lose everything in the battle. Even if you are sincere.

… Real rebellion in art is persistent, mastered, never dilettante. Art has always been the effort to confront oneself with the insufficiency, and by this very fact, art has always been complementary to social reality.

Don’t focus on just one thing as limited as theatre. The theatre is all the phenomena around theatre, the whole culture. We can use the word theatre as much as we can abolish it.”

Jerzy Grotowski, Tu es les fils de quelqu’un (You are somebody’s son), 1989, from The Grotowski Sourcebook.

Drawing as an act of rebellion

“… every sanction of his art grows from the terms of its own creation.

What this means in actual practice emerges from a simple point that the artist himself has made over and over again: he draws. And after he draws, he animates, reproduces, and transforms each drawing. His task is not simply to represent, detail, or delineate the facts of suffering: rather, he draws from such a content as surely as clear water is drawn by patience from a dark well, or as pain is drawn away from the body by healing.

… His method is urgent, but he will not skip a step. Every drawing is a gesture against the ready-made, simultaneous, and quickly consumed facility of photographic imagery.

He reveals how drawing is a hermeneutic advance upon photography’s mode of representation, just as history writing is a hermeneutic advance upon the random details of mere chroniclism.

The most obvious fact of drawing – that it unfolds in time and records that unfolding – acquires a profound significance here as a counter narrative, an alternative speed, another opportunity to examine experience in a context in which violence has obliterated the possibilities of perspective and hence made the view of history unbearable.”

Susan Stewart writing on William Kentridge, a South African artist in The Open Studio: Essays on Art and Aesthetics, 2005.

Actor-Shaman

The actor as shaman embodies the hopes, dreams, doubts, and weaknesses of the audience – becomes a screen on which all of these are projected. But the screen must BE. It must not be blank and must be PRESENT and visible and OPEN TO THE GAZE OF THE “OTHER.”

Our instinct is to hide, either by getting small (physically or in spirit) or by putting up a front, by “acting” – impersonating or declaring.

To do neither is an act of courage that has nothing to do with fearlessness or with arrogance. It’s just to know and be exactly where one is in the present moment.

[updated March 1, 2009]

Actor-Warrior

An actor is a collaborative Warrior.

Is strong enough to stand alone but doesn’t need to in order to do uncompromised, rigorous work.

Is able to craft and make work when things are least in control and most chaotic.

Is able to welcome, embrace and accept diversity and challenge and absorb and integrate it into the work.

Is patient and compassionate while standing on one’s own ground.

Is as ready to receive as to give, always aware that exchange means traffic in both directions.