Klarinet Archive - Posting 001418.txt from 2000/12

From: Neil Leupold <leupold_1@-----.com>
Subj: Re: [kl] Being an Actor
Date: Sun, 31 Dec 2000 13:18:00 -0500

Interestingly, he would never have had that epiphany had he not spent the
prior period of time thinking about it first. Without the period of intel-
lectualization, obesessing on the minutiae, picking at, analyzing, search-
ing for the effortlessness of the flow that he ultimately discovered, there
would have been nothing of which to suddenly "make sense."

-- Neil

--- Tony Pay <Tony@-----.uk> wrote:
> 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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