I do not like when it snows…I have seen snow very often, I
do not like it…It creates a false impression of purity all this immaculate
white, like a virgin bragging to be a virgin, a false impression of peace, of
surprising silence like a piece of white velvet thrown on the wounds. I walked
often in the snow, I walked on it since the sky was vaguely glued by the years
devoted to build what was inexistent. I walked often on the white cover on my
wounds.
The sky has changed into a new sky…I looked at my youth and
I forgive myself… I am not anymore this angry boy… I do not want anymore to
assassinate the truth, I want to remake the truth. The truth? The truth of
what? The truth of the lies of our imagination?
The truth of the unfinished phantasms? Forty years are passed since the mirror
with a corner of blue sky*…Forty years?
Am I wise now? I wonder if wisdom leaves some bitterness on
the possible truth. It is probably the reason why some people like snow, snow
covers the bitterness of the truth.
My youth is far from me now, lost in the blurry memories, in
the memory of the lost senses, but I keep for it tenderness full of stupor. The
stupor to see that it is not anymore, that I am somebody else built by life,
designed by others’ vision…
My youth, you have disappeared in the mist of life, in the
path of what we call existence. I have been recreated by the look of the
others, I became another… Am I still capable or creating a new world like I
believe I was? Am I still capable of reinventing myself? Or did I fall in the
impossibility to be myself?
They always want to know talking about my novel*, is this
all truth? Your life? Is it TRUE? TRUE? What does that mean TRUE?
Everything is true…everything is invented…
There is only one truth, the one we want…
You are a tormented soul…a tormented soul? Not at all… Only
a mind searching for the meaning of all this, the lost purpose of the eternity
of life…
My youth was not tormented, on the contrary, my youth was
capable of taming adversity, capable of staying strong and whole.
I miss my youth, I admire my youth…I miss its strength, I
miss its passion, and I miss its vision. Forty years have passed since my
decision to start again, to turn the page, to go conquer a new world…Where all
these years went, they went faster that the years of my youth lost to try to
understand, lost to try to be alive.
Has the meaning of life changed since my youth? It seems
that I do not really understand it anymore…all has to be acquired immediately,
without real sacrifice. We deserve the best right away, the world has replaced
knowledge of humanity by knowledge of pushing buttons… It is all right for
anything, for the people behind a desk, but it is not all right for artists,
for performers, for people who are the Porte parole of being a human being full
of emotions to give to others.
Why are we so afraid to share emotions, to be vulnerable, to
have feelings?
An artist should be delivering to others the human soul, the
feelings and the weaknesses of being one…all this acquired by life experiences
or by acquiring it thru the study of the ones who knew.
Yes, some people have this talent of knowing at birth, they
are the lucky ones, they are the chosen, and they are a gift.
Others have difficult times and dramas and failures and
tragedy to use for their art.
BUT MOST
OF US, THE GREAT MAJORITY IS NOT AS LUCKY.
We have to acquire this, to find equivalents.
Does that mean we have to read Pascal, Shakespeare, Plato,
Nietzsche, Joyce, Faulkner, Sartre, Camus, Arrabal, Chekov, Gogol, Pirandello,
Beckett, Malaparte, Dante, Ovid, Diderot. ?
And Mozart, Brahms, Picasso, Da Vinci, the impressionists,
Beethoven, Rodin etc…
(These names are given as an example, the list should be
five hundreds or five thousands)
Yes, we have to…we have to acquire somewhere the necessary
material and then we will be capable of giving it back to those who came to
live an experience watching us and listening to us.
In 1968, I was performing in Paris Les caprices de Marianne
by Musset… I was the part of Octave and sharing a dressing room with another
young actor who was the character of Celio…we lived a great period of
rehearsals and became friends.
One night before the performance, the sage manager knocked
at our door to tell us that Jean Luis Barrault was in the audience.
I almost fainted, Jean Louis Barrault, the pope of theater
in France, the reference for drama, the dream of each young actor to be invited
to perform with his troupe. I was so nervous that my hand could not apply the
make up necessary to have an acceptable face for a “Jeune premier”, my friend
in the dressing room did not say a word, and was whistling as always before a
performance.
After the performance, we hear a knock at the door of the
dressing room; I open the door and Barrault in front of us. He is very short,
very skinny, very wrinkled.
He enters the room and says:
-
Congratulations, both of you did well, I can see that
both of you worked a lot on your characters, a few things to adjust, a few
things to correct, but good, very good.
-
Monsieur Barrault, please tell us how to improve?
-
You believe there is a recipe? That I can give you in
a few words how to become PERFECT? (The world perfect was almost screamed)
-
Where should we start?
-
Read all Musset, all Chateaubriand, all Alfred De
Vigny, and may be you will understand what it is to be a romantic character…
have a good evening.
He turned his back to us and went
to the door, opened the door and was almost gone, he stopped, turned and said:
“ Yes, both of you did very well,
but one of you has a lot of talent” and he left.
I was so angry by that last line
that I threw a bottle of water against the door and screamed, “Go to hell, old
fart”
My friend in the room, laughed of
a real laugh for a long time, punctuating his laughing by words like “
fantastic, so funny, great, and I really love him”
For the next three weeks in the
dressing room, I was quiet, and brooding, and uneasy… My colleague was
chatting, telling jokes and in a great mood…
By the way his name was Gerard De
Par….
It did not take me long to realize
after that, who was the one with a lot of talent, while I was still performing
in theaters in France, my friend became a big movie star.
But Barrault did not forget me, 2
years later, he hired me as an assistant director for his prestigious company,
I stayed for 3 productions and that is the ONLY experience I had all my life as
an assistant director.
But I tried to understand why he
had more talent than me… or at least capable of using his talent better than
me… after all, I certainly had had a more eventful life than he did…but nobody
in the audience except a handful of people knows our life.
I had more degrees than him, and I
was more cultured than him…so what was it?
I asked him once:
“Gerard, why are you better than
me? Why are you totally Celio and I am approaching Octave?”
“ Bernard, I know that you had a
difficult life and I know that you are very cultured, but when you act instead
of using all your knowledge and your accumulated emotions to become the
character, you sometimes let your knowledge and your emotions dictate your
mood…Use them, do not let them dominate you.”
“ Gerard, before the rehearsals
did you really prepare like Barrault told us?”
“ Oh yes, I read all Musset and
all Chateaubriand and Alfred de Vigny, and I made some research about what it
is to love without being loved and I worked on all the situations of the play
in my real life…that was what Barrault called talent, it is only the use of
accumulated knowledge.”
With years, I lost contact with my
friend but still see him as a vivid image.
Have real experience or/and
acquired knowledge, use it and do not let it dominate you…what a lesson that
was, and even more for a director than a performer.
* This refers to my novel “the shattered sky “, If
you have not read it, we will be happy to send you a copy free of charge.
