The Actor's Art

Here is a text I wrote as a general introduction to one of my acting classes. 2016

The Actor's Art – Tearing the Veil

This is a class about the actor’s art. The velocities of appearance. As in the speed of light. About the terms of engagement with the public. About the difference between being and the deliberateness of action and performance. About the triangulations between your intention, your body, a surrender to public scrutiny, and how that transforms you into a living work of art.

It is about discipline. Control. And the cyclical release of that control. Returning to it in shifting rhythms and astonishing yourself in that discovery. It is about silently saying to the audience, again and again: “Now, I do this—to show you this.” A communion.  A reciprocity with the public’s perception and experience.  A measure taken in every moment, with them and with yourself, to reveal the essential meaning of the art.

This is not the “craft”.  (A word also attributed to witchcraft and casting spells, or building a table or chair).  It is the art of acting.  To become that work of art, so the public may imagine the actions of their daily lives with that same depth of experience and surrender

It’s about a practice that carries over into your life as an artist – so you can become an actor, not merely a player or a character in the narration of a play, or even of your own history. But to transcend all of that. To become the art of living. And to transmit that possibility to the public – with recognition affirmation and love as your primary intention.

The work requires getting to know your body. How it feels. How it moves. How it thinks.  And to begin measuring experientially, the tension and dialogue between the Apollonian and Dionysian, between order and ecstasy – as part of a life fully lived. And to master that discourse within  yourself, in your unique experience.  Sometimes by separating those elements as in a cycle of action –– preparation : execution : recovery ––  or else combining these elements in various velocities, withholdings, and releases, as your intention toward the other might require.

It is for you.  And for them.  The objective is to reveal the art – the art of acting. This is the ground on which the true real narrative of the “play” unfolds 

The playwright should write for actor artists; not merely for craftspeople or for characters.

The play is about consciousness and it’s incarnate value revealed. Not about the psychological motivations of fictional characters. We are not characters. We are living conscious human  beings who each contain a uniqueness and commonality that fiction can never fully express. The theatre is real, not fiction. Its essential quality is presence. Its event, unrepeatable.  Despite all its artifice, it tears the veil—to glimpse, for a moment, the now.

The aim of the play is to show the public that they are more than the character they perform in their own lives. Not to reinforce the prison of that imitation, but to free them from the finality of “character.” To put it in perspective—as a partial reality, a limitation, a means to an end—not the whole of being.

The actor as artist can show them this truth—and live it as well.  You can inspire the public assembly to reconsider their role in life.  not merely to dream, for a time, that they might be someone else—but to transcend character altogether to reveal a deeper truth.   Life as an art. To tear the veil. That is what the actor artist can do. 

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