According to Chekhov, who seems to have invented method acting, the actors task is to become as refined as possible both psychologically and physically. This has as the aim to cultivate the ability to engage all types of human emotions.
The role of the actor is precisely not to be ‘himself’. The work of acting is engagng different values than ones own, and do so with perfect conviction. Clearly it would lead to schyzofrenia if the superior value was not natural to ones constitution; the exploration of the Psyche As Such.
Madness?
Perhaps,but is that really an argument?
Is this society not entirely mad, precisely because it does not believe in connection?
“The suggestion is that the function of the brain and nervous system and sense organs is in the main
eliminative and not productive. Each person is at each moment capable of remembering all that has ever
happened to him and of perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in the universe. The function
of the brain and nervous system is to protect us from being overwhelmed and confused by this mass of
largely useless and irrelevant knowledge, by shutting out most of what we should otherwise perceive or
remember at any moment, and leaving only that very small and special selection which is likely to be
practically useful.” [Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception]
Now I can’t even watch the part about violence properly, it’s unpleasant to hear myself say this. I’ve posted this precisely for this reason.
Here, I play a different type of character altogether, much closer to my true nature, as I am imagining to be in the house of my sister, where I have fallen asleep heavily drunk after some wild night.
We both chose a character and context independently of the other, and we just went and threw our characters at each other without knowing the others starting point.
Pezers story: I wake up in a house shielded from a post apocalyptic wasteland.
He was playing it out, savoring my ignorance… his attitude went on to put proper fright in me. I could no longer emotionally discern myself from my character and became very fearful of his intentions. The only way I could stay in character ( I was of course cognitively fully aware of myself ) was to follow through my anxt, which had become a mortal apprehension. Ive never felt so strongly before that I had to get out of a room. And yet, that decision turns out to have been fatal for my character.
I just realize, this is technically a tragedic plot. What tragedy is about; narratives twisting around each other without revealing themselves, thereby robbing each of their context, and causing a combustion in which we are made to feel the loss, and with that, the value of what was lost. Tragedy is inserting self-valuing logic into its own loss. Those Greeks -
not that this is a Greek tragedy, or even a scene discernible as tragic; the inner monologues are not told. There is no muse, and no choir. But the decision that is made is tragic in the same way as in a Tragedy; misunderstanding of intent, love (last thing I remember I am with my sister) , and mortal danger (pezers perspective).
The bad actor is who becomes his inauthentic role.
The mad actor is who denies his inauthentic role,
The sad actor is who defies his aunthetic role,
The happy actor is who knows the difference,
I take it from your cryptic responses that you were impressed, and still in the trance of it. Thanks, I suppose - straightforwardness is not an ILP virtue.
An authentically direct response has neither place in a reduced self image, nor gesture, in an angst filled existence.
So the modus operant of today’s actors do not differ much of Sartre’s Roquentin in Nausea.
But cryptic or not, this is the most appropriate way to discern a gesture, as psychologically relevant, to prevent total meltdown into nihilism, which some people simply can’t afford.
Okay, well yes it does have that danger. The nausea is an eminent consequence of what is gestured -
Acting in this world is itself an admission to “guilt”.
Hence my privilege, as a philosopher of power -
Acting, besides guilt, is primarily parallel, and inversely functional to the decline of the ideal man, hence the roles have been de-elevated from their secure bastion. Reality consumed by insecurity and confusion needs to re assert the ennui and boredom which has set in. That is why actors and entertainers are the new aristocracy.
Im just entirely unclear who you are addredding – me, Pezer, actors as such in general - since the terms you use are rather grave, Id like to understand.
Clearly, acting is making oneself exposed. I figured I had done a good job here in performing a role, I dont have enough theory about this to understand what youre telling me.
My intention is to say things most generally as I can, so as to your question, forum writing here, should not address any specific person’s thought processes, but include people who read it. That you are the one who brought up this forum, may not mean it was specifically meant for you, but at the same time, you are by no means excluded.
what ‘acting’ consists of, includes the whole gamut of behavior, and is encapsulated within the substantive material between facially represented nuances and gestures, that non visually leaves much to the imagination. That is its charm, while it is also its weakness, since literally its hard to visualize gestures apart from implications and allusions. However, a fair writer can create a good enough illusion, to overcome the weaknesses of alluding to various clues, which come fairly close to the intent and goal of a scene or action on a stage.
Wheather this stage is real or imaginary, the purported reader may need not concern himself with,
either way, the inner theater should be expresses as it were real.
The old idea of masks as used in almost metaphoric ways of expression were absolute guides in alluding to the role of the actor. Looking at the masks, one was immediately reminded of the intended role. In fact, this was the time of complete naive realism, a time, when a viewer need not have to be distracted with guessing who was who, or what the intended nature of a character was.
In fact, living ideas, were characterized as roles, and and hence these ideas represented the ideal world as perceived by the audience.
With the demise of the Greco-Roman world, plays like Everyman, and Pilgrim’s progress, most of this idealism was retained, and plays became instructional tools to accentuate and indemnify a fate based morality.
There is something new here in reality, faith has to ensure that the prescribed values not veer off course from their classical precedents. Roles must not change, even f the masks are off. There is a sense of irreversibility, of a lack of subterfuge in this subtle shift, and there is nothing to indicate any ulterior motive or a hidden reversal, to give the impression that the director wants to play one up on the audience.
But this is the Middle Ages, dark at first, so the changes in the scenery do not need to place spotlight
anywhere, since an overall scene includes usually a chorus of characters within which a lead can easily blend. A tinge of light are down or a haze of illumination at twilight, do not yet indicate a need for the kind of hysterics, which the absence of complete clarity can supply.
This comes later, much later. Actors come under the microscope, only after the demise of the Ancien Regime, where the characters start to feel compelled to stand out, as to allay the suspicion that the old established roles of privilege have not yet lost IT all together, since the social divide between the old and the new needed to be managed s,only, ever so slowly, supince only the modern theatre would be able to induce a faux schizophrenia, without a complete rejection by critics and audience alike.
Modern theatre can literally tear off the masks, suddenly and brutally, but the waiter is compelled to
Reside into some kind of apologetic reassessment, otherwise, he would suffer like they, he did in characters in search of an author, and such becomes tenuous if not found. The dramatics personae then, if he cannot ground skepticism or self doubt, must go the way of a hidden, but invented illness, for if he can’t he would loose his reason.
Sand reason, the only thing is an expose of a manufactured illness, and give it the reality, which is based not on a fear of reality and resulting institutional is more. But on a preceotion of a real, unimagined illness. Many writers have suffered this role, but re applying a mask best suited for this purpose. There are so many, Strindberg stands out,
and Nietzche is very convincing in that he did not seek the protecting concepts surrounding his reserved dark depths, he knew he would fall into , where staring eyes like daggers, could not possibly look into. He, only he could look back, and by this time it did not matter, whether he was forming an interior monologue or not, since he could assign various characters grounded on his various internal masks.
Reality has lost the need for masks, because the actor was known to possess them as separate from his face, everyone knew that all the world is a stage, and everyone acts. The only difference between the
make believe of theatre, for which there is a paid ticket for admission is, that it defies what viewers take for reality. This is a big change, and it’s no longer even Everyman, it is really geared toward one man, only one, who sits there without little participation, and sees if he can relate to this word, hidden in the sense that it is based on the hope of some kind of escape from the modern world of reality, which was a few hundred years ago would have been characterized as fantasy.
The fantastic visuals of the modern world are no longer fantastic, they are real, true real, and it is not for that he goes to escape, it is the young ones, who have never known to live in a world, where masks were presumed to be real. In this world of irreversable nakedness, there is very little need of masks, where it can be said to let it all hang out, the ideals pursuant with the origin of the species, the birth of that tragedy which was meant to fall, is not directed toward Everyman, but the individual, the individual in search of his ground, which has become his author.
He has lost his author, now what defines him is the next credible place, what is his ground, his reason to be here, rather than there.
The confusion and the ad-hoc application of the many hats he wears, by necessity, gives a poor defense of his confusion, but everything is compensated by science, in the exact opposite way, that is, science and affiliated reason dictated specialization, and the effect of lack of communication among them.
Science gives credible defense against the threat of a dissociation of understandable language between them, therefore relevancy is always the favorite topic in a hypothesis, that irrelevant or not, it may prove to be, along the line.
It seemed humanity has given up on looking at defensive postures as suspect, whereas those who can at least begin the need to have some credible ground, begin to suspect the vacuousness of such shifts. What happens next is the requirement that an abandonment take place, even for A Ground.
Actors can , go one step further, in those famous retreats of yesteryear, in re-presenting the idolatry of the ideals by which authority has claimed manifold control of their souls, they need not, because, as in Riquentin, in full view of mockery of going through the motions, and gestures, he wills it thus, because otherwise he would be frozen, in a role, without understanding his need for antifreeze, he must not care then what he looks like underneath the mask, because he is cimpensating with a gesture all can understand.
The gesture consists of a defiant attitude, of staying with it, by all means necessary, and only the best actors can portray defiance without giving the impression that it’s source is hostility, or madness, at the world.
Actors like this have no ulterior motive or a reversed psychological motive, because they reduce themselves again and again into the simplest Everyman. The ideal is preserved, but delicately balanced between the earliest tragedy, and the most far flung absurdity. The balance is so delicate, however, that the nimblest of angels could not, would not want to dance it on the head of a needle.
This gives me the power to place myself in its context.
The Psychological Gesture as developed by Michael Chekhov is meant to overcome even the mask that is the ego itself - to become nature itself.
Gestures arent precalculated - one has a certain array of methods to dissolve the identity into pure motion, - Chekhovs prime axiom is that one must be physically and psychologically flexible and ‘toned’, known to oneself in nuanced ways to be able to act as in a psychological gesture - to mimic life, and as life is mimicry of itself, to become life and no longer artificial identity - and this is dangerous, as all pathoses are available.
It is Bergsonian in a sense. The same time and also French - perhaps they were friends, it would not surprise. Elan Vital as well as the irreducible future are instrumental.
To become character and fate, daemon entirely. Hereclitean fire and flux.
Still I attain only a preliminary state, whereas my friend who plays Zarathustra compels me deeper into emotion each time I watch it.
If he is a friend who plans on another performance, my recommendation would be, akin to your suggestion for Sauwelios’ writing style in his World Address, that he slow down a bit and let the words breathe, sink into the audience’s understanding, rather than rapid firing them successively.