Let us start with audience. This is a reversal of most actors training. But walk on a stage with no people sitting in an auditorium and then do the same with people and you will feel the 'watcher' effect. This is where acting starts.
I ask the students to sit in a semi circle and place a chair in the middle. The object of the exercise is to walk to the chair in front of people with no impulse to ‘act’. Simple as this may seem, it is very difficult, for some impossible. Next we try to sit in this chair and behave as if we are alone. Again, for honest actors, this is impossible. But after a bit of work on preparation and a visualization exercise the actor enters a zone, (given circumstance) which, whilst not feeling alone, they do feel very emotionally open, vunerable. ‘Acting’ it would seem is infact an evolutionary survival technique, developed as a social tool. I used to think that acting was developed from a need to convey hunt and historical information to primordial hunter gathers. However, this exercise sees its possible root as a social defence mechanism to protect the individual’s psyche.
Therefore, if the act of standing in front of people produces deep emotional and physiological changes it is perhaps here that we should in the scientific age start, because alone we are not actors. Acting and therefore theatre is an act of duality. (Toward A Poor Theatre, Grotowski) Theatre takes place in the minds of the audience and the actors. It is the job of the actor to affect other people’s minds. The real stage is the audiences' collective mind. Now we see the beginnings of a different approach for theatre and a new type of actor. An actor who enters your imagination. Not to control it but to interact with it, to produce a mutual interactive and a cathartic-metanoi experience.
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