VOCATION? PROFESSION? ART?

VOCATION

I am around 10 years old, in the summer in Tunis…everybody is asleep in the afternoon, it is too hot to do anything… The summers are long from early June to the end of August...

 Air conditioning does not exist yet, so we keep wet sheets in front of a fan and that is the only way we can breathe and avoid being in a sauna.

Everybody  “fait la sieste”, everybody is asleep, and as always I am not…I do not have too many friends, for a million reasons, and the summer afternoons are very long…

But I have my favorite past time, I have been buying all the magazines about movie stars and the movies; I remember some of the names, “Cinemascope and Cinerama”. I spend hours reading about the actors and the new movies that I will never see since in Tunis we could get very few American movies.

I look at the pictures and I dream…I dream of being John Wayne in a western (we call these movies “film de cowboys et d’indiens”), I look at the pictures of Ava Garner, Marlon Brando, Robert Mitchum, Audrey Hepburn, Susan Hayward, James Dean, Kirk Douglas, Jane Russell, Victor Mature, Burt Lancaster, Marilyn Monroe, Robert Taylor, Cary Grant, and hundreds more.

I cut their pictures from the magazine and sometimes I make them act together inventing new scripts, moving them around, making them fight or fall in love...

I have my own world just imagining stories for the actors and I become all of them, changing my voice if necessary, I could be a bad boy like James Dean or a sheriff like John Wayne, or Marlon Brando seducing a

beautiful woman.

This world of fantasy lasts for 6 years, and then one day I decide to glue them together in a book and they become mute.

But I continue to dream and dream and fantasize.

I imagine that many people had a childhood filled of dreams of becoming somebody…Musicians, Engineers, or Researchers…and try all their life to achieve what they were dreaming…Is this what we call VOCATION?

Are some of us determined by the dreams of childhood? Do we have some genes, some blood stream, and some part of our brain that demands something specific? Why didn’t any of my cousins have that need when they were my age?  Why some people feel from the beginning a call for a profession or a path to follow.

Is it because I was very lonely that I needed to fill my emptiness with the dreams of becoming somebody else?

Is it because I was different from other kids that I needed to create stories and use famous people to make a new world?

Is that VOCATION??????

When I was around 16 years old, we left Tunis and those oppressing hot afternoons and went to Paris… I thought that it was childish and silly so I stopped… I stopped for 6 or 7 years thinking about actors, movies, and theater until my experience with The Theater of the Wooden Sword-read the first posting called THE BEGINNING-

Then it became my profession…

PROFESSION?

Times have changed, yes I know, all older people say the same: it is not what it used to be, everything is different, we were not like that, what is happening, everything goes faster, I cannot deal with it…etc…
I am from a generation which was called the ME generation, the generation of the sixties, the generation of MAY 1968 with all its consequences…Yes, I know my generation was smoking pot, listening to the Beatles, and to be a hippie was a way of life…but we did not believe that we had everything coming to us, we knew that after a few years of the so called “good times”, we would have to change our ways and really make some sacrifices for our profession.

Recently, actually for the past few years, I have been amazed, in shock is a better word, by the way the people in our PROFESSION behave, work, think, and go on with their life.

LETS GO HAVE DRINKS
Is the leitmotiv I hear all day long from singers, musicians, conductors, directors…Until very recently, we were inviting each other once in a while, rarely, for a special occasion, and most of the time Tenors and Sopranos were drinking tea, the invitation was
LETS GO HAVE A DRINK

Reading books or trying to understand what world culture means and acquiring more everyday has been replaced by facebook, twitter and text messages all day long…Maybe I am missing something, maybe facebook and twitter and…are incredible sources of knowledge. Knowledge of others, knowledge of the private life and every move people make, an insight into human behavior.
I should know that it is extremely important to stay in touch daily with half of the world, it is an unparalleled source of understanding to know where so and so went last Sunday and what movie they saw and with whom..
What am I thinking, I do not realize how important it is to know what dress somebody is wearing, and which shoes they bought last week and with whom they went to dinner.

Sacrifice is a dirty word, all of us deserve everything, are entitled to everything, have more talent than anybody, so we SHOULD BECOME SOMEBODY without too much effort.
Lets go out every night to be in the circle of those who know, and let’s sleep late in the morning but never after 11 am…This is normal, after all I work at night, even if I sing 12 nights a year.
Of course it is a generalization and I am sure that many, many PROFESSIONALS have still the sense of what should be done to enter this career, and to last in it and to prolong it; a life of sacrifice, of perpetual learning, of incessant battle for improvement.
The Profession must be the center of life, an entire life devoted to the theater with demands and obligations and limits and choices to be made constantly….
If we cannot accept that, it is fine, but it becomes a hobby, not a profession…I admire people who have decided to have hobbies like singing, playing the piano, fishing, or cooking… But it is a HOBBY… with no demands, no sacrifices.

PROFESSION: “ A paid occupation, especially one that involves prolonged training and a formal qualification”
That’s the definition given by some dictionaries.
I think the key for artists is “PROLONGED TRAINING”, I would change PROLONGED by INFINITE training.

I often give an example:
Do I admire a painter because he has brushes and colors on a palette? Do I think he is a great artist because he has the tools for his ART? Must I believe that somebody is an ARTIST because he has the tools for his ART?

ART??
Do we respect the Art of a musician because he has an instrument and a music score? Do we have to admire a singer because he knows his music and the words of his role?
So, what defines ART?
I remember 30 years ago, a famous singer who asked me while we were in rehearsals for Carmen, if I wanted to accompany her to a coaching she had that afternoon.
I said yes of course.
I learned that afternoon what ART could mean…in her specific PROFESSION AND VOCATION.
She spent 4 hours on one line of the role…trying every possibility, vocally, musically and dramatically.
She tried every possible way, she reminisced every possible personal event to be the closest possible of the character in this line, again and again; every possibility was legitimate, she was always giving herself completely and always differently.
Her ART was not a lottery or a moment of luck, or a gift from the Gods…Sure, the Gods had given her the incredible voice and the natural talent to express herself…but her ART was the result of a total giving of herself and of her knowledge.

ART, ARTISTIC, words that we all want to honor! But please let’s remember that is not only a gift from the Supreme Being, it is a constant devotion, a perpetual work within ourselves; to become an artist is to enter an order in a religion and to renounce everything else. Difficult choices to make, many sacrifices and very often a very lonely life. To be an Artist is to accept to be different, to be seen as a lost cause by most people, to accept that the search for the hidden truth is never ending.