The Great Acting Blog: "Life Through The Dramatic Prism"

"There are musicians who practice all the time but we actors are not able to do that. We don't have an instrument, except if you say we are our own instrument, and yet I always try to continue searching and working for the moment where you have to deliver". - Michel Piccoli

 

Mostly I fail. Mostly I don't accomplish  the thing I set out to accomplish. Or more accurately, I rarely accomplish my objectives in the time-frame I expected to. What generally happens, is I make an attempt, and fail, but within that failure, I learn what about myself I need to improve such that I am capable of accomplishing the thing I just failed at. And having made those improvements, I have another crack at it. Again here, we learn that life is like the rehearsal room, or put the other way round, we may see that the rehearsal room is a microcosm of life: at the start of rehearsals we are barely able to walk across the room, the director is an important crutch, but by the end we are strong and independent and long to get out infront of an audience, and in between, there were all those embarassing failed attempts at doing the scene, accompanied by the awkwardness and the gross feelings of falsity. But in the end we do get there. Similarly then, to life outside the rehearsal room, each failure should be an invitation to improve, not an excuse for lamentation. This is not always easy, especially for us actors because we are, in the main, tragic-romantics who love to throw are arms in the air and curse the cruelty of fate, our work is generally about dealing with overwrought emotions and situations – cool reason can sometimes appear to be our enemy, but we must recognise it's necessity, if we are to function as reasonable citizens.

So how to remain cool then, amid the frustrations of our trade. While we are working, all is well with the world, we seem to cruise along. It is while we are not working that we feel under pressure; the waiting all year for a job then two come along at the same time so one must be declined, the feeling of a lack of control over our destiny, the unjust slight by a director in an audition, the running out of ideas, the sense that time is passing....We have to pay bills and live life like everyone else, but we must also keep ourselves “ready for the moment to deliver”, which could come tomorrow or never.

Well, one way of staying cool, is by trying to see these as they really are, and not through the dramatic prism. We need to recognise that a bad day is just a bad day, a bump in the road is a just a bump in the road, it's not an earthquake. However, the fear of such reasoned living, is that we may lose contact with our dramatic channels – those parts of ourselves ordinary citizens shut down as they settle into their cosy routine, but which are the very source of the actor's work, and therefore must be kept alive. So then, it is a trade off; we become actors because don't want routine and are in love with the imaginary, and if we are to spend the time needed to continually increase the intensities of our imaginations (which is necessary to produce work over a long period of time), then we will be pre-occupied by our work for what may seem, to outsiders, as a disproportionately high percentage of our lives – ie – when we are not actually working, we will be thinking about our work. Seeing life through a dramatic prism then, is difficult to avoid in a life spent immersed in drama. Perhaps the best we can hope for, is to possess the self-awareness and strength to remove the prism when it may become harmful to accomplishing our objectives.