What is a friend?

 

-Bernard…Bernard…

In the silence and the darkness of the night their whispers woke me up.

-Bernard Bernard…                                                                                                             

 It was a tough night, full of thoughts but I got up, look around and see in the corner of my bedroom a few people. Who are these people? What do they want? I approach them very slowly, tying to wake up completely.  I am now, very near them, they all have open eyes staring at me, their face still hazy, they repeat hissing…

-Bernard…Bernard

-What …what?

-Bernard…Bernard

-Yes, yes. It is me.

-Listen, listen.  you wanted to know more about your friends, you are thinking of them very often and wonder if you always did the right things.   So, here we came to talk to you.                                                                                                                                        

They must be 6 or seven young people, I think I know who they are because looking at them brings me memories, but unclear memories, just some images not well defined.  Some of them smile, some look concerned.                                                     

One come closer to me and say: 

-You have to believe and trust all the stories and experiences we had in common, do you remember? We gave you what we had all the time, we gave you enough to make you live and even dream and be in the arts, and then you believed in us and in our adventurous life…You were thinking that we can live with just smiling at every new day …You were full of dreams and inventions, you were always ready for any possible new adventure, you were so interested in every aspect of life! You were creative and full of new ideas, you were special.

 I am trembling facing these words, but he goes on:                                                             -Now it seems it is over. What happened to you? Where is the man we knew? Did you change your attitude? Did you change your ways of thinking? Did you change all together? Know that your friends are still here to guide you, to help you, to give you confidence.

 I look at him and words escape me:                                                                                    -You mean I still have friends? Me? I have friends?

 They are now 3 of them talking together:                                                                             -Yes you do… You see dear friend, we did not forget anything, you were part of our life, part of our thoughts, part of our dreams…And you became part of us forever…And we are still here for you. 

Remember: You were not worried about the end of the month and what will be the next chapter of your life, you knew there will be one and you were ready to deal with it…                               

You were not worried about the impossible dream of big success, you just wanted to go to the movies and dream that you were one of the heroes or at least one of the actors…                                                                                                 

Please believe your friends: you still have great days to come, take advantage of them, good years go fast but bad years even faster, they only build your strength…There is no end for dreams and achievements, go for it…                                                                      

I hear my self-saying:                                                                                               - What is life about???

Now all of them answer:                                                                                                       -We go thru earthquakes and volcano’s eruptions and hurricanes, we have many experiences of love found and lost, but friends should still be there, and we should never be broken despite some terrible events in our life. Life goes so fast, so many experiences, so many great moments, so many pains and joys, so many wonderful encounters...And for many of us many questions about the meaning of who we really are and what we do... but friends are still there.                                                                                                                                                        

-Yes, yes... Friends are there.

They all say together:                                                                                                           -Yes, we become older, but listen to your friends and go on with building another life with our help. Listen, you have to hope for a perpetual new life, and we will build it with you. We all go through many difficult moments, but we have to stay always strong enough to dominate them, to stay above it, even to use them to become a full person. It is the best way to find some peace, to find some balance, to BE…   We need always to reinvent ourselves in order to survive and have moments of happiness or joy, we cannot become bitter. And when you are attacked and destroyed by the world, when you are even denied proving yourself, when you become the prey of vultures waiting with joy for your disappearance, real friends will appear near you and hold your hands, and talk to you, and you will again be you with their help.

Suddenly, their faces become very clear. And I could see David, Robert, Joel, Kay, Alfredo, Mark, Roger, Ann, and too many others……They come closer to me and hug me and give me kisses on both cheeks… They are now next to me, my friends who disappeared so suddenly from my life, my friends I miss so much, my friends who are in my heart every day…                

Death and love together... what a mixture!

They all started to fly with big smiles and disappeared…Yes, my very dear friends are gone forever from my life, but they have given me so much, I earned from them about existence, real thinking, love, forgiveness, dedication to my profession, and how to give myself… Thank you for being in my life, thank you for your words, it makes my soul more peaceful.                                    

We have ALWAYS to try to be there for the people we call friends, what does that really mean? When can we call somebody a friend?                                                                                              

 I think I know what friendship means thanks to the ones I made the past 50 years, and I am trying to continue to be a friend to them…Caring for them, helping them when they need me, always being around for them sharing their joy and their moments of happiness and caring for the people they love.             

And when life separates us and put big distances between us, I have to stay in touch to know about their last achievements or their last failure or disappointment… Making them understand that they are not alone, I am and will always be there for them.    

Too often, almost every day, life puts us away from the duties we have to the people we call friends, and we go into the terrible mood of ignoring their existence. We cannot do that, let us stop to be selfish, friends need us, need to know we are near them in spirit and ready for action to help them…                                      

How can we call somebody a friend if we never try to connect with him/her.

Unfortunately, in this new world it seems that the more we go the least I know… 

Sometimes I am lost in this new way of functioning, this new way of THINKING, and very often I do not know what to do for friends.                                                         

This new world is a challenge for many of us, we have been living an eternity in other ways of thinking..                                                                                                 

But we have to accept and to recognize that the world and society are in perpetual movement, and it should be our duty to adapt to the new rules.                                                                                                                                                                                 

We have to keep present in us, all the time, the notion of what it is to be a friend, to care for some people, to be there for them and today try to follow the new rules and the imposed obligations.

I have been lucky enough to be in theater, to live again and again incredible strong moments, to purge my soul, my body, my mind, my fears of deeply buried devastating emotions. I loved the theater because it is almost the only time where I could be myself with no shame, no barriers, no calculation no selfish intentions.

Now the theater is gone from my life and sometimes it is frightening to know that I will wake up in a new world.           But can we really always live in a fantasy? How can I deal with the demands of the ones who believe I am the same person that the days before?                                                                              My friends know, my friends care about my thoughts and my feelings as much as I care about them

And my friends who are now in another dimension still protect me because they are present in my mind and feelings

forever.                                                                                                            

 

 
It is crying in my heart
 like it rains on the town.

Il pleure dans mon cœur
Comme il pleut sur la ville.
Quelle est cette langueur                                                                                              Qui pénètre mon cœur ?                                                                                                                                                  Verlaine                                                                                                                                                                                                                   

Where are my dear Verlaine and my idol Rimbaud...   
Yes, it is raining in my heart too…. I miss to be in a theater; I miss the smell of the old sets, I miss the darkness, I miss the ghosts of all the great singers, I miss the silent laughs and the lo

ries. It was the only place where we all could be ourselves, protected by the anonymity, the character, the disguise...We could live an entire destiny in a few hours, and travel through many adventures, many lives thanks to the words and the music of others...

Then for me it stopped abruptly… and these days, with the pandemic we all live a life that we had not imagined possible, and we try to invent solutions or at least new ways to CONTINUE TO BE…How can we try to find new depth in ourselves since for most of us we are almost isolated? Is there a better possible improvement that to try new things created by new encounters, new contacts, new ways of thinking brought by others? Be aware of what others do, bring, create, and grow from it, to progress, to mature... THAT WAS A GREAT CHOICE OF LIFE BUT TODAY WE ARE FORBIDDEN TO DO THAT, we spend most of our time alone or on the phone, facetime, zoom, and we are just confined to social medias where we believe we are free to say anything we want about anybody. Everybody believes he can say anything but at the same time all ideas are denied as extreme…                                                                          To have different opinions and to exchange ideas is not permitted; just extreme ideas TRY to justify themselves…                                                                                                                                                                              We are becoming people like the careerists, the social climbers, the go-getter of the Bourgeois class in the 19 century Paris, acting from a Balzac novel and believing they could just destroy reputations .........Revolting.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           

People have no shame? The most surprising is that I am still asking this question, I had the answer a very long time ago...Shame is an invention of religion, it is not part of our basic psyche, we do not know shame, some are just afraid to be caught or exposed or shown, so they are ashamed.... Makes me laugh NO it makes me grin...

What happened to the flowers of the escaping time? What happened to the people of the passing time? Time sometimes seems to destroy everything, even friendship. Will we ever learn where these friends of the past are, or even who they became? Some disappear from our life and we miss them… BUT these days we need all the support possible, all the friends of the past should resurrect and be with us, and we should not accept so fast and so lightly the judgements of the extreme ones.                                                                                                                                         When will we stop dismissing the ones of our beginnings because of the acquired success and sometimes because of opinions on Social medias…                                                                                                                                                                    It is now time to refuse to dismiss the past and on the contrary we should continue to learn from it!                                    

Some of us have the great talent to become a reference to their own truth...They do not know more than anybody, but they are succeeding in making believe that they KNOW...they talk well, they are full of self-importance, they pontificate about the most banal things, they make the obvious become a vision, and since we live in a culture with no culture, MANY are looking for their opinions and follow their ideas…

We should constantly  keep in mind where we come from, who we were, where we went, and what we became, and we cannot fall in the trap of ignoring the ones who were important in our life at one point.
It seems that too many people disappear from our life after a few years, and we miss them most of the time because we believed they were friends... unfortunately some disappeared because they became famous or important or self-important…what a pity to have this kind of attitude, it is really sad, disappointing or even painful to see that human beings can be so low, so ungrateful ...they believe they have reached a level where they no longer need our friendship, they want to ignore the possibility of being thankful for all we did.                                                                                                                                                  How can people forget where they come from, they should learn that to succeed is to be faithful to your friends and not to shut out everything else.

 I do not think I ever forgot my friends or even ignore them because I was lucky and sometimes achieved more than others; I will always continue to be there for them…

We must be loyal in friendship, and even sometimes willing to take risks to help the ones in trouble when times are tough. And these days, times are very difficult for all, so let us be there for them.

It is raining in my heart and It is dark out, I go to the window, nobody in the street...  The pandemic is punishing us, did we really deserve it? What have we done? Where are the dreams of 10,20, 30 years ago of an equal society? we have been struggling for more power, more influence, more knowledge, and more life ...and now we are struggling for  survival and peace of the mind….  Yes, it can be very sad to realize that. 

 I remember when arriving in a rehearsal room to direct a play or an opera…...I was full of joy, desire, apprehension...I felt confident and I had fears, I had to try not to run the other way...                                           Often when I was acting and before the performance arriving to the theater... I was  asking myself: But why do I have to be here, may be a strike of the stage hands will prevent us to perform, may be the theater will be on fire, may be a few colleagues will be sick and we will not have to do it...and then ...THEN...I enter the stage as Mercutio, or Le Cid and I forget everything , I am totally in control or even better I am not me anymore, I just live, full of passion, overjoyed by being another, feeling how much in the audience they listen to me-finally-, how much I can make them cry or laugh, I am the master of the universe...                                                                                                                                                                                         I was always the first one in the rehearsal room...And then talking to the cast: “today we will go thru the score, thru the text and the music…” I had to be careful not to become a teacher in a classroom, not to drawn them with information about the style, the period, the story…   I had to be careful NOT to overwhelm them with what I believed was useful...I had to remember what my great teachers told me...To direct is to put in the right direction , not to micromanage every thought, every move , every gesture...it is to guide artists in the direction of the frame and the picture you have in my mind...Tania Balachova telling me, I was 22   : “You want to be a great director ? Remember the most important...DO NOT impose, make them discover, make them understand the situation, make them understand the emotions, make them understand the relation between characters, make them find in themselves the equivalents, BUT DO NOT IMPOSE, do not make them imitate a feeling, do not feed them like newborn...do not impose mechanical gestures on them.”

YES, IT WAS A GREAT TIME, YES IT WAS BEING ALIVE, YES, I WAS LUCKY TO HAVE THIS LIFE FOR SO MANY YEARS… And now, it is all disappearing, the world is just fighting away, it seems that we are at the end of a culture, yes, the pandemic will at one point BE away and what we call normal life will be back again…But what life will it be?  The pandemic is the culminating and the final point of a sad evolution of what we have known for many generations in the arts and in the everyday life, WILL THE NEW CULTURE BE AS FULFILLING???? I HOPE SO… I DREAM OF IT… BUT….

It is crying in my heart like it rains on the town.

TRAVELS…

 

In the early sixties, living in Paris, just arriving from Tunis, I decided that it was time to grow and to travel all over the world… I was at the time a student in Literature at the university of Nanterre, but not obliged to follow all the courses, just to go to exams from time to time and give to the professors some research about famous authors… I was already very knowledgeable (sorry for the bragging) and had read for more than 10 years (yes since the age of 10) all the giants of literature (French, Italian, English, German, American etc.…).                                    

I must have read thousands of novels, philosophical essays, poems, plays …for example Descartes, Pascal, Rousseau, Racine, Moliere, Voltaire, Sartre, Camus, Dostoyevsky, Gogol, Faulkner, Hemingway, Malaparte, Malraux, Arrabal, Chekov, Rainer Maria Rilke, Berthold Brecht, Schiller, Goethe, Dante, Moravia. 

So, I thought that it was time to close the books and to see the real world to try to understand the purpose of life, what I really wanted to be, to do, to experiment…Since I had no financial possibilities, I decided to do all my travelling hitchhiking (yes at the time it was possible, today I will not go hitchhiking to Newark from NY city) …                                                                                                                                  

 I spent years doing it for many months a year. I discover most countries of Africa, Madagascar, and the islands in the Indian ocean, most of the countries of Europe including Eastern Europe, many countries in Asia (Nepal, Afghanistan, India, Mongolia, and others…), and the middle east (Egypt, Israel, Jordan, etc.).

I kept incredible memories of these travels and many, many adventures…I will write a blog about my 2 months spent in the SHEY GOMPA monastery in Nepal…

But today I would like to relate 3 experiences, fulfilling and full of last-minute surprises…

Berlin…

 -Bernard! do you want to come to East Berlin with me?

 -Bruno! Of course, you know I love to travel, when?  

 -We could leave next Monday in the morning, take a train, and arrive in East Berlin at the end of the day, do you have a valid passport?                                           

-Yes, I do but you know that I cannot afford to pay for a train and even less for a voyage.                                                                                                                                

-Do not worry I will take care of the expenses.

We were at the university of Nanterre in 1964, and a short adventure would be welcome to forget all the difficult times of my life…

The following Monday we are in the train and the idea of being in Berlin already seems so attractive and full of possible discoveries… We arrived and the crossing from West berlin to East Berlin was easy, we are now walking in the streets when Bruno says:                                                                                                                          

-Bernard, let us stop in this bar and have a drink, ok?

 - Yes sure….

After drinking a German beer, Bruno asks me to wait for him for one hour, he wants to meet somebody not too far from where we are.                                                

 -Yes sure, I will talk to other people...                                                                                

He leaves the bar and I start to talk in French (since I do not speak German) to another man who must be now at his beer number 12…. FUN!!!!!! 

About 2 hours later, I hear screaming in the street and I believe I am hearing the voice of Bruno!!! I go out of the bar, and I see him running like a madman, screaming my name…

-Bernard!!! Bernard!!!! Run, run, follow me we must go back to West Berlin…        

 -Why? Why?

 -Just run with me!

At this moment, I see running behind him, 3 men, and suddenly they are surrounding us and have a knife in their hands…                                                         

 - Bruno, what the F…is happening! I am scared!!!!                                                       

 - Do not worry, I will take care of it…

I see him approaching one man after the other and very fast disarming them with a Karate move, I had no idea he was that type of creature….                                          

-Now Bernard, run with me...  

-I am, I am ….

We start running, but one of the men, catches my coat, holding it, and stab me on the side of my chest (I still have a scar), Bruno runs to him and with a karate move throws him on the floor…

-Bernard run, run, we are not too far from the west side of Berlin… have your passport in your hand, I will see you there.

I did run and run, hiding the blood on my shirt, arrive at the gate of West berlin with my French passport in my hand, and finally sit on a bench on the west side, waiting for him…He arrives an hour later, smiling, looking like he had accomplished something important.

- Bruno, what happened, who were these people, look I have a cut....                           

-Bernard, the cut will be a memory of how much you help the world.                           

- What do you mean...                                                                                                         

 -Ok, here it is, I have been working for the government for a few years and I was sent to East Berlin to give some papers and some instruction to a few men working for us there… I needed somebody to come with me, to look like two students wanting to visit East Berlin… And I asked you...                                                             

- Are you telling me that you are a spy?                                                                             

- A spy is a big word, but…. You have now a great story to tell…

After this adventure with Bruno, I did not hear about him for many years, and then I discovered that he had become the head of the French team working for the United Nations in NY city…I tried to reach him, without success… I went back to Berlin 35 years later for an opera and could not believe what I had lived there…

Argoun Hackman…

One time I decided to go to Turkey, after all I was told that my ancestors were Turkish Jews who went to Tunisia during the Ottoman Empire… And I saw sometimes in the news the name of Uzan In Istanbul.

So, I must go… I took my little bag and started my trip on the roads, two weeks later I took a boat in Brindisi to arrive in Igoumenitsa and then on my way to Istanbul.                                                                                                                             

  I was in Istanbul after a difficult trip (it will be another story), but I was there. Asking the French consulate for help, they were very accommodating to my needs, except for a real lodging...                                                                                               

 So, here I am in a park in Istanbul, and I decided to go have something to drink, found a place, sat, and had a tea... Next to me was a man in his forties, who immediately started to talk to me…He was speaking French and told me that he was teaching at the university in Istanbul. He invited me for lunch, and then told me that he would love to show me Istanbul and all the secret places… I was of course very cautious, but I did not have so many choices…                                      

After an afternoon of discoveries of the hidden Istanbul (another story to be told), he asked me where I was staying, I told him that I had no idea, he invited me to stay with him in his house in the suburbs, the suburb was called Florya…I accepted and here we are in his car driving to Florya…                                                                      

We arrived at his house, a beautiful house, and he showed me my room… I noticed that the walls of his house were all painted with landscapes, lakes, forests and sometimes paintings of himself, all with beautiful colors and details… I asked him who was the painter and he answered that his wife, now dead, did all this…His wife died the year before in an accident, and he was still under the shock of it… He went for hours into details about his life with his defunct wife and the children that he wanted to have but did not…

He added that now he was alone waiting for the next punishment… Late in the evening, he decided that it was time to go to sleep and shake my hands good night.    

I went to my room, and fell asleep almost immediately… I was suddenly awakened by very loud noises… I got up and went where the noises were… I had to walk through debris all over the floor, and I saw Argoun with a pickaxe destroying the walls of his house, choosing the walls with paintings of his wife...                                 

- Argoun what are you doing?                                                                                            

 - My wife betrayed me by dying, I do not want her paintings anymore, they mean death to me… I must destroy them…                                                                               

- But Argoun, you are destroying the entire house.                                                          

– I know what I am doing, leave me alone, I know I am right.

He went on and on, destroying all the walls of the house, I was even afraid that the house could crumble… He stopped after almost 2 hours and went back to his room, inviting me to smoke with him some Shisha … I declined, he looked at me with disdain and disappeared in his room.                                                                               

 It was now morning, I took my bag, and left…I never saw him again...  I stayed in Istanbul another week and learned a lot about different ways of living, but the experience with Argoun was present in my head and will be forever…

Hijo de Dios…Son of God

Spanish and English were the two languages I started to learn very early in my life, in school, university and for my pleasure… I always had an affection and still do for Spain and Spanish people…I decided to travel all over Spain and finally landed in Seville… After many hours of wandering, I stopped in front of a cabaret where they were dancing Flamenco... 

I entered and was immediately overwhelmed by the atmosphere, they were gypsies, dancing, playing guitar, and drinking Manzanilla and Cruzcampo… I sat at a table and watched the incredible dancers while a bunch of tourists was applauding every 10 seconds and clapping. A very old gypsy lady was sitting across the room and was looking at me intensely. I smiled at her, she did not react, and continued to look at me…

After a few minutes, a man brought me a glass of Manzanilla and asked me in French if I spoke Spanish, I answered yes, and he said that la Mama there wanted to talk to me… I went to her… With a gesture, she indicated that I should sit next to her…She asked for my name, my age, where I was from, and if it was my first time here… After 20 minutes of questioning, she got up and disappeared in the back of the room… 

The same guy, named Izan (I am not inventing that), told me that her son disappeared 3 weeks ago, and no news from him…He added that I looked like him so much that it was almost scary, and asked what I was doing in Seville, I answered that I was just travelling here... He said ok and went in the back of the room...

I returned to my table and watched the dancers; it was beautiful and captivating. Time went on, and most of the people were gone, I thought it was time for me to leave, when Izan came back and asked me to stay:

-Now we are going to play and dance for ourselves, not for tourists, la Mama would like you to stay.                                                                                  

 -Thank you, I will stay.

It became a whirlwind of dance and music, I felt so involved and touched …La Mama came back and asked me to sit next to her, she said:                                          

- I want to call you HIJO DE DIOS.                                                                                 

-Yes Mama, please, do as you wish.   

It was now very late in the night, Izan came back and asked me if I wanted to stay there, he said that they had places to sleep in the back, and I would be welcome.

-Hijo de Dios, stay… Added La Mama. 

-I will.

Actually, I stayed there more than a week, helping every night with the tourists, bringing drinks and food to tables, dressed as a gypsy like everybody, under the watch of La Mama, looking at me with affection…Everybody was calling me Hijo de Dios, I had found a new family…

Then one evening, everything stopped, La Mama stood up from her chair, and looked at the entrance door… There was my double, her son, looking incredibly like me or me like him, he ran to his mother and knelt in front of her, she took him in her arms and kissed him…Then she called me and told him:                                          

-This is Hijo de Dios…Hijo de Dios, this is my son, Manuel…

The following day in the morning early, when everybody was still asleep, I left, thinking it is time, all is good now for them…

 

 

 

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….