Acting for me is very much about paradoxes. Most of the time I feel I have the challenge of doing two seemingly conflicting or even contradictory things. Example? Oh, our director Iida San is very good at finding and asking us to do such things, making them sound very normal. Walk with this form, but look casual! Use imagination, feeling and emotion, but don’t get lost in the emotion! You are angry, but with a joyful feeling! You feel joy like children in this funeral scene! Well, I better get used to changing emotion in the blink of an eye. From anger to fear, fear to joy, joy to sadness, sadness to fun, fun to funny and so on. And I need to do all of this while also being aware of the form of my body, my position in space and vis-à-vis other actors, the timing of my movements and the storyline; meanwhile feeling the audience and the other actors, maintaining a state of dreaming or imagination and a wide feeling of connection with whole life. It’s as simple as that.
So basically, I need to activate my body, mind, emotion and spirit simultaneously and effectively in a balanced manner while on stage. This is how the actor becomes alive and creates magic. Does this apply to life outside of stage by any chance? Well absolutely. In fact, my experience so far in this creation process has convinced me that there’s actually no difference between being on stage and off stage. The same rules apply for daily life. If I want to be alive, if I want to be a wholesome and balanced human-being, same principles apply. Of course, this doesn’t mean that I’d be acting all the time. Or maybe yes it does. For acting in this sense for me means being act-ive and a-live. I don’t really see a difference between the two. As Shakespeare’s saying goes “All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players…”.
To be on stage for me requires preparation. Preparing the body and the mind is of equal importance. I release fixed energies from my body. I do this by massaging myself, especially my belly, by “chi no mi chi” and by using ecstasy voice with ecstasy breath. I flex my joints. I open my breath. I activate abdominal breathing. I feel my foot soles by walking slowly. I feel my weight and my connection with the ground. I feel my center. I practice imagination. Imagining the scenes and the dream in which the scenes take place. I repeat my affirmations which help me focus my attention on the reality that I want to create for myself on stage. My intuition tells me that with more and more practice, I will get better at feeling, imagining and focusing my mental energy with full confidence. So it is my hope that the time necessary for preparation will be decreasing as I have more experience in my practices.
Another challenge I have been facing in the rehearsals has been recognizing my patterns (of movement, posture, speech and thought) and dropping them. For the roles require me to use certain forms of movement and speech necessary for the dramaturgy, and often times my existing patterns stick out as an obstacle. Usually the initial reaction of my mind and body is to show resistance, and rationalize this resistance with an excuse. It is at this point that Iida San plays his critical role for me as the Director, and motivates me to break my existing pattern and adopt the form necessary for the role. Interestingly, when I overcome resistance and try to do as he says, I experience the possibility of a new reality for myself and see how unfounded my excuse actually was. Changing the form of my movement, say walking, for example, triggers new thoughts and emotions and opens up doors to new ways of being and experiencing the world. Nevertheless, the resistance is sometimes strong, and it requires practicing many times to be overcome. But in this sense, acting is maybe one of the most effective ways I’ve experienced to recognize my blind spots, my patterns and open the door for change.
Repeating the same scene over and over again initially sounds like a boring process. This might be true when one is still focused on learning the necessary form, formation and timing. For such focus creates tension in the mind and sometimes in the body, and makes it difficult to feel, to use imagination or emotion, and to actually enjoy what I’m doing. But actually, once I embody the necessary form and get used to the formation and the timing enough to be comfortable with them, I can relax and feel more, use imagination and emotion, and enjoy the experience; which also re-opens the space for improvisation or improvised feeling.
We all have our ups and downs. Some days it is naturally easy to perform with little preparation. Some days I need to prepare more, and still perform average. It is part of the process that all of us in this production are going through. One thing I remembered once again during this whole process is not to take it too seriously, or always seriously. It is an undebatable fact that, like with anything else in life, a relaxed state is always superior to a tensed state when it comes to any performance. The challenges make me modest and actually oblige me to accept what I am and what I can do in that moment, knowing that things can change going in any direction anytime. One way that we have inevitably found to cope with challenges and the tension we have about them is to joke about ourselves and the whole process. Sometimes I have to laugh in one scene, and no one knows or cares about the real reason of my laughing. And in this whole process, it is not so difficult to find something real in real time to laugh about, so in a sense, the reality and the dream created on stage mingle with one another, at least emotionally. Emotions cannot be faked, they’re either there or not there regardless of whether you create them with “real” triggers or imagination.
(Engin)
(Engin)
