ACTING…ACTING????? Really?????

 

Recently I was watching a French movie on NETFLIX, and I had the impression that I knew one of the actors…. His face was familiar, he looked older, but I knew that face…  I made some research and found that this actor was one of my friends in the sixties in Paris when I was an actor … So many memories invaded me (yes, I know as always) and came to my mind, many comments I received recently about my present life and the facts that in the past 2 years I have appeared in 8 movies and commercials… Of course, small roles…

_ Bernard you are acting now?

_ Bernard, I did not know that about your life, you can act????

_ Bernard, YOU MAKE ME LAUGH, YOU ALWAYS INVENT NEW THINGS TO CONTINUE TO BE!!!!

 Yes, I am at the end of my life re-living my young age, and yes, I was an actor for more than 20 years…And now, I am returning to my beginning as an artist…My professional debuts as an actor were in the very early sixties after having performed as a student at the university of Nanterre… At the time, I was living very difficult times (you can read my first posting called THE BEGINNING) and I had no idea of how to free my heart, my soul, my ME, to free myself of all these accumulated pains, I was just looking for danger and trying to change my fate by taking risks, by doing something which will show the world that I existed, that I was somebody.

Acting saved me. I was able to deliver my poor soul and find bandages for my pains through acting…I became involved in theater, in movies, in television, and was also part of the lucky ones making money dubbing foreign movies, movies with Al Pacino, Dustin Hoffman, Robert De Niro, Malcom McDowell...

Yes, acting saved me from a possible dramatic end because I learned very fast that to act is to free yourself… to be totally yourself…

Thanks to acting we can accept who we are and become real … Why? Because we are protected by the character we are portraying and we can let go of all our traumas, all our missteps, all our pains… In everyday life we must act to answer obligations, rules and demands from others…But on stage or in a movie we do not need to act …We can be ourselves and use all our experiences, all our memories to incarnate a character…Yes, of course, some of the techniques are different if it is the stage or a movie, but the basics are the same, LET ME GO INTO DETAILS…

 We need to know what we project to balance our performance and in what direction we need to work…as actors, singers, performers.

A long time ago, in Greece they were celebrating 2 cults,

1)the cult of Apollo                                                                                                            2)the cult of Dionysus

 1) Apollo was the god of beauty and order, a beauty well-orchestrated, the Greek beauty as we know it, the cult was an impressive celebration of parade, defiles, dance, music, always in the same order, always beautiful but always the same and year after year predictable and finally it became boring.

      2)Dionysus was the god of festivity, imagination and creativity and the cult too often degenerated in a bacchanal and an orgy, and pure beauty had very little to do with it, it was always different and always interesting but too often finishing in excess.

 Then somebody had the idea to mix both cults: the beauty and order of Apollo and the creativity and imagination of Dionysus: THE GRAND GREEK TRAGEDY WAS BORN.

 All masterpieces today try to achieve the association of both, the beauty and order of Apollo and the imagination, creativity, and dreams of Dionysus.

I will say that as human beings we have both influences, but one in our personality is largely dominating the other. Our first obligation is to try to understand which god dominates in our personality and then to try to develop the other and achieve perfect balance.

All masterpieces want to achieve a balance but still have strong tendencies; it is for example obvious that the music of Massenet is more Apollonian that Bizet, that Leoncavallo is more Dionysian than Verdi. The Verismo operas are by far the most Dionysiac pieces of the grand repertoire, but always keep in mind that we are talking about masterpieces, so they have both.

The goal I repeat is to know who we are and to work in certain directions to achieve the balance.

If we have a Dionysian tendency and work with a Dionysian attitude, very often our work will be interesting but too unpredictable and often we will be what we call in our language of performers TOO MUCH AND OVERACTING.

If we have an Apollonian tendency and work with an Apollonian attitude, we will be very tamed, very organized, but too often what we call in our language of performers BORING.

 To achieve a BALANCED PERFORMANCE (we all want to believe we are Dionysian, we must deny the fact that being Dionysian is more attractive to our senses). We need the look of others on us and what we project on them as performers to have a real image of who we are.

It is certain that we have some signs in our everyday life.

Are we obsessed with perfection, order, and details? Obsessed with organization, desire to be in control of ourselves and others all the time, have a knowledge of every single details of how to approach this or that, we are APPOLONIANS.

Or are we always looking for something, changing plans all the time, have no real knowledge of time and order, inventing the next step all the time, not in control of our emotions and perpetually in struggle, we are DYONISIANS.

You understand that 2 Dionysian living together cannot achieve a balance and have may be a life full of surprises and creativity, but a perpetual struggle and fighting and FINALLY UNBALANCING AND EXHAUSTING.

You understand that 2 Apollonian living together have a quieter life, well organized well thought off, with security and safety but often it is not fulfilling, and they yawn a lot.

 REMEMBER THAT MOST OF THE TIME WE DO NOT KNOW WHAT WE PROJECT. How many times do we hear: People believe I am this but in reality, I am that… wrong, on stage we are what people perceive of us NOT WHAT WE BELIEVE WE ARE.

 FOR THE DYONISIAN SIDE: We should not be afraid to share emotions, to be vulnerable, to have feelings and ACTING gives us this possibility… We must use our own experiences, our own emotions, THE REAL ONES OF OUR LIFE AND NOT AN IMITATION to become the character…I call that equivalent…For example, if in a scene I must be devastated by the death of a loved one. I must bring back to my mind the memory of a person I loved who died and I must re-live all these moments…If I do not have in my past this experience, what is the most devastating memory I have??? So, let us bring that up…AND EACH MOMENT, EACH action should be nourished with personal memory, we must search constantly in our personal pains, our personal failures, our difficult memories but also our joys, moments of happiness and great pleasures…and re-live them on stage as equivalents for the character we are performing…AND REMEMBER YOU ARE PROTECTED BY THE CHARACTER WE ARE PERFORMING……

 FOR THE APOLLINIAN SIDE: Work more on the structure of the character and ask ourselves many questions (age of my character… family … period, religion, relation between characters, where are we, what time is it...)What should I look like (make up, costume, gestures.…)Work on the text (the exact meaning of each word, the exact situations… punctuation, silence)Read the entire play or libretto or scenario…not only my scenes… what does the music mean.

 ACTING…ACTING????? Really?????

ACTING???? No!!!! Finding a balance in my life…Yes, at the end of a performance, we are very tired, but so relieved, finally I was permitted to let my emotions go…I feel lighter, I feel total, I feel FREE FINALLY.

An actor, an artist, should be delivering to others the human soul and the weakness of being one…all this acquired by life experiences or by acquiring it thru the stories of the ones we know…

Yes, some people have the incredible talent of knowing at birth! They are the lucky ones; the chosen ones and they are a gift.

We must be looking for equivalents in our memory and passed experiences, and if not, we must try to acquire these equivalents by studying; Yes, we must study, Pascal. Shakespeare, Plato, Nietzsche, Joyce, Faulkner, Sartre, Camus, Arrabal, Chekov, Gogol, Pirandello, Beckett, Malaparte, Dante, Ovid, Diderot, AND Mozart, Picasso, da Vinci, The impressionists, Beethoven, Rodin … These names are given as an example, the list should be five hundred or five thousand….

 GOOD WORK TO ALL OF US….