Klarinet Archive - Posting 001409.txt from 2000/12

From: Tony@-----.uk (Tony Pay)
Subj: [kl] Being an Actor
Date: Sun, 31 Dec 2000 06:53:58 -0500

Extract from "Being an Actor", by Simon Callow:

[Callow had described an 'epiphany', experienced in an acting exercise
at drama school, and continues here with a description of a little show
called 'Perikles and the Greek City State' which he co-wrote,
co-directed and acted in, as a class assignment. Doing this he
experienced what he describes as his "great [breakthrough], the one that
transformed all my attitudes..."]

"In all my anxiety over the show, worrying whether it was clear, whether
everybody knew where to come on or go off, I had no time to think about
my performance, no time to wonder about its effect on the group, or on
Christopher [the director of the class], or to ask, 'Was I funny?' or
'Was it clever?' I just did it. Suddenly, for the first time, I was
acting. Not performing, or posturing, or puppeteering. I was *being in
another way*.

"At a stroke the mask that I had screwed on to my face fell away. I was
free, easy, effortless. For the first time since I'd arrived at the
Drama Centre I understood what playing a character was. It was giving
in to another way of thinking. *Giving in* was the essential
experience. 'Leave yourself alone,' they'd been saying to us since the
day we arrived. Now suddenly I was. To my surprise I found that it was
not an entirely unfamiliar sensation. Even at his uptight, armoured
worst, SIMON CALLOW had always been able to forget myself in the
temporary assumption of another identity -- for a line in a funny story,
or for the devastating impersonation of a tutor. It was here, if
anywhere, that any talent for acting that I might possess had resided:
the knack of throwing off self-consciousness and finding, however
briefly, a pool of liberated energy which was nothing to do with how I
presented myself in life. My overawe at the intellectual framework of
the Drama Centre and my emotional constipation had snuffed the little
flame out, and with it, my spontaneity. It had seemed unworthy. when I
saw that it was the same thing, that that was *it* -- the direct flow of
energy transforming the brain, the heart and the body -- I was as one
reborn. It was then, in that moment, that acting became second nature
to me. I was unstoppable. I had the taste of the thing in my mouth.
>From being a spectator, dragging myself up to do exercises that I felt
doomed to fail in, I suddenly couldn't perform enough. I volunteered to
be in everyone else's improvisations and exercises as well as my own.
It wasn't to be seen. It wasn't to impress. It was to *do* it, to
revel in this newly discovered joy, to romp around in the adventure
playground that I myself had become.

"This epiphany fell almost exactly half way through the [Drama Centre]
training. Before and after were as day from night. I wonder what the
staff made of this sudden transformation? It coincided with a second
year production of a Feydeau farce in which I played with great freedom
and flair, so they probably attributed it to that. But it was *post
hoc*, not *propter hoc*. Of course the fact that admirable Greville
Hallam had come as it were from the world outside to do the production
and approached it much as he might have approached a professional
production, assuming that all the usual work of the school had been done
but never using it himself, was an enormous advantage. I was able to
consolidate my breakthrough.

"The point was that through the happy accident of hitting my own centre,
everything I'd been taught in the past eighteen months made sense
because now I had felt it for myself. The circle was now complete. The
intellectual understanding fused with the sensation. Not only was I
doing the right thing, I knew what it was, so I could do it again. And
again. It was mine.

"The ludicrous thing was that the whole eighteen months had been spent
in trying to get me to do precisely what had just happened. I felt like
saying, 'Oh, *that's* what you meant! Why didn't you say so?' They
had, day in and day out. The problem was that I thought the suit of
armour, the mask, SIMON CALLOW, *were* my centre. I had sung songs,
impersonated animals, donned garments, adopted accents; but it was
always something that I imposed on top of what I was, always something I
was DOING TO MYSELF, instead of letting it do me."

Tony
--
_________ Tony Pay
|ony:-) 79 Southmoor Rd Tony@-----.uk
| |ay Oxford OX2 6RE GMN family artist: www.gmn.com
tel/fax 01865 553339

... Error 216: Tagline out of paper

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