Bad Hair Day

There’s no real way of knowing what might make for a “bad” day on the stage. You might not have had enough sleep. Or too much. Or just the right amount. There may be something going on in your life that screws your concentration. You might get some news right before going on stage, or maybe there’s some someone in the audience you’re particularly eager to impress. Maybe you’ve had a few days off. Or maybe the tides are wrong, or the phase of the moon. Whatever it is, you feel it. And you speak the lines and hit your marks and yet you can feel a part of you is somewhere else, watching you. “Ah, you’re not really here, are you?” says this part. And this part is correct, you’re not here, but you just have to keep going, because people paid to see this, and theatre only goes in one direction.

And you have about as much control over this as the days that you have a bad hair day. You smile, and style, and tell yourself that maybe people aren’t paying too close attention tonight, and you use your best techniques (because that is, after all, all you have to fall back on), and hope.

This is where (at this point, still based on an incomplete reading) Grotowski’s theories and my experiences converge. There is a trance that one must achieve (that is the word that Grotowski uses, and I think it is apt) in order to allow a character to speak, to move, to “live and breathe”. Voudon practitioners, when they achieve union with whatever God they happen to be invoking, call the experience being “ridden”. The God “rides” the priest, the priestess, speaks through him or her to the gathered tribe, the community at large, and offers advice, instruction. Maybe the God stirs up the pot for his own amusement, maybe he tries to help with the crisis of the moment. The village, the community, offers what it has in trade: food, drink, tobacco, women, boys.

Roberto Calasso speaks of encounters with the divine in a similar way, but he uses the term “rape”. A much harsher word, but none the less accurate, bringing as it does the innuendo of the Voudon term to the fore. All encounters with the divine have an aura of compulsion, beginning as they do with the overpowering brightness of the divine and the grudging assent of the ego, and ending in the (to the ego) horrifying dissolving of barriers and complete immersion. “Good fences make good neighbors” says the ego, and the divine sweeps down laughing like a storm and wrecks the fences, tears up the stones, leaves the land disheveled and ravished, the ego reeling from the blow.

In Grotowski, he speaks of a humility, a “holiness” that is not the “doing” of an action, but a removal of barriers of not doing. A subtractive discipline, that allows the character to speak through one by the dissolving of the restrictions on action and voice and movement, that gives the slightest impulse immediate expression. This may be why he speaks of an ascetic aesthetic (to coin a ridiculous phrase). There is a monastic quality to the whole thing that stems from negation. Negation of the “self” in service to the character. Negation of the habitual constrictions of muscle armor and ways of speaking and breathing. When the ego sees these things disappearing, since death, non-existence, above all, is the terror of the ego, it freaks out.

I remember during my days at school, no classes were more fraught with emotional breakdowns and freakouts than the voice and speech classes. Inevitably, as people were forced to confront and attempt to change their speaking patterns and their muscular tensions, someone would completely meltdown. Crying, shaking, hysterical (I must admit to a few breakdowns of my own in that class. In a side note, my voice and speech teacher also inspired a huge crush when I was in school, which I figure is also only appropriate. Transference and all that…).

This would seem to be why acting was so closely aligned to the sacred in Greece, and why the church always frowned upon it. There was something unwholesome about these people, these actors, going into their trance. Something unhealthy about those who were not themselves for a good portion of their day. Almost like prostitution, the way they opened themselves and let the “other” live through them, and all for a few coins. In a world that prizes the hard edged, the clearly defined, the actor seems altogether too… squishy. Too easily penetrated. This may also explain the homosexual panic that many people seem to have when they encounter male actors, as well. And why the actors that we love the most are the movie star celebrities, the ones that play only themselves, over and over and over.

So, basically what I’m saying with all of the above, was that I was off last night. I was thinking about how fucked my life was and I lost my edge. When it’s there, though, that brilliant edge of concentration is really something to feel. It makes the bad hair days worth it, I’m telling you.

Towards a Poor (and miserable) Theatre

On the recommendations of a friend I worked with at Cortland Repertory Theatre this summer, I bought a copy of Jerzy Grotowski’s Towards a Poor Theatre, from which I realized I stole some, if not all of my ideas for my last post. I’ve been reading it with some interest.

So, not one to let close reading or analysis stand in the way of putting my foot in my mouth, here are some initial thoughts.

It sure seems dour. This is theatre of the hairshirt and the flail. He constantly speaks of a “holy theatre” that requires sacrifice and self-immolation (that phrase “self-immolation” may actually be a quote. Can’t be bothered to look it up right now). A digging into the psyche and laying bare of the roots of action and emotion. My God. How many more times do we have to go through this? Perhaps, as so often happens with gurus (and especially acting gurus) there is a slight disconnect between the technique and the practice, but it sure sounds like he is a patriarch daddy-type who practices psychology without a license, putting his actors through the wringer in an effort to wrest great performances out of them. I have had teachers like this and I find them reprehensible. If Grotowski is of that stripe, I have no use for this technique of his. Good DAY, sir!

Well, this may be my own daddy-complex (often wounded by imperfect men and women who have experimented on me in their well-intentioned attempts to “mould” me) complaining. He may have aught to teach me, so I will keep reading, but I read with a skepticism that I did not possess when I was younger.

I have read about the great British actors, Olivier, Gielgud, and Guinness for example, and they had no recourse to such techniques, no need to put themselves through such fresh hell with every performance. The texts were tough enough, the physical demands plenty to engage and leave them worn out and frazzled. Perhaps that is what Grotowski speaks of, that the great Brits did unconsciously. Perhaps what helps to make the greats great is an emptying out. An engagement with the audience, with their fellow actors, and with the material that exhausts the mind and body, leaving a certain purity to shine through.

Regardless, when I was a Christian (or rather, when I was religious-mad), I would have taken to Grotowski’s theories like a drowning man takes to water. I loved the idea of sacrificing myself. I was all about that, and especially for art, love, “God”, or whatever. Now, I look on theories like this one with a certain distaste.

One of the things I love about theatre is that it is fun. Not fun in the sense of “Ha-ha, ho-ho, hee-hee, aren’t we having a wonderful time.” Fun in the sense of play, a concentrated engagement with the subject at hand that allows one to push oneself to the fullest. The way children play. Not forced, not straining and painful and “intense” but fun! I wouldn’t do it if it wasn’t fun.

Now, I know that, in many of the circles I run with, when I’m at work, I tend to be the less-fun guy. When everybody is getting goofy, starting to get slappy, I am the one saying “C’mon, guys, let’s just get through this!” Yeah, I’m that guy. Always have been. So when I say I’m having fun in theatre, to me that means doing the work as best I can, and being totally engaged and trying to become more than I am right now. Always striving. Even the failures and mistakes and wrong turns are part of the fun, for me. Everything else is just sorta distraction.

So perhaps there is something to the Grotowski fellow’s theories. I’ll keep reading and find out, but truthfully, what I’m looking for is something that treats the process, not as pain and suffering, but as play. It can be painful, of course, in much the same way that an athlete is in pain when he pushes himself in training, but pain is not the same as hurt, i.e. aches are not injuries, and hitting the wall and going on is not the same as vomiting up blood. Acting should not be an assault on the psyche of the actor. We’re not strip-mining. We’re panning. The river will bring us what we need.