Whether comedy or tragedy, this vulnerability of the prescribed is not limited to any particular content or development. For this reason, the figure of the actor is a good subject of study in the laboratory of being.
Bodies on stage
But at the same time, the creative event insists on acting on the porosity of his skin; it must be torn up ecstatically, become permeable. The body has been turned on; it ripples, begins to duplicate itself – and there's no wise wizard in sight. The body can only throw its own weight around; the body itself has meaning and acts on its own authority.18 Normally a slave, a lowly apprentice, the body now takes over control.
No matter how nicely spoken to, despite all the flattery, it can remain clumsy and wooden. 17 On the transvaluation of the ideal relationship between body and mind in Nietzsche's philosophy, see Volker Gerhardt, “Die 'große Vernunft' des Leibes. 18 On body weight, see Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter and Jean-Luc Nancy, Corpus.
Even in a happening, a happening is what is supposed to happen, and its elements are all the playthings of the actor's intention.
Innocence of becoming
No, there is something simply attractive about the way he does it, the way he simply walks. But the innocence of the layman, who does not even realize that he is being watched, is easily lost when he has to play for any reason. Because just walking around the stage as if you were that stagehand, with all eyes on you inquisitively, that innocence of the artist must be set higher.
The core of the problem – as far as professional acting is concerned – lies in the personal, conscious participation in walking, standing, talking and so on. Not only do the demands of acting and the gaze of the Others make your body self-conscious, suddenly making it feel like a block of wood, but the body itself also begins to play out its own particular blockades, the weak points that everyone likes to hide to themselves. The memory of the body just works and reacts automatically, as men and women just are, as they simply act and react.21 This is not to say that the theater does not work with the idiosyncrasies of the individual actors, with their differences, their contradictions. and their resistance.
But in this interpretation of the actor's art, they do not derive from the exposition of a private sphere that cannot be invaded, but from a way of playing.
Language and speaking
They are absorbed by their action, how to "do it", how to "form" the next sentence, the next word. In this way, the actor manipulates, illustrates and illuminates, but he does not listen, so he cannot respond. An untrained voice that does not know about breathing and rhythm, that comes from the wrong place and does not project, will hardly be able to use all its conditions and will soon give up.
When the vocal cords are strained and overworked, it hurts - both the speaker and the listener, whether because, for example, the actor's voice is in his throat and cannot resonate in his body, or because of reckless, inflationary use of language. The actor must put the language in the center and at the same time dedicate his entire tangible body to the language. This is the web that every good actor spins, even in what he doesn't say, even in the unspeakable.
It is speech that resonates with the actor – back and forth between presence and absence.
Digesting speech
It is speech that speaks.23 No philosophical knowledge is necessary to understand this, only experience. The text must be stored internally so that it can be retrieved at will from this internal archive. It is often misunderstood as a mechanical act of repetition, boring rote learning that so many people remember doing in school.
But once a text has been recorded and remembered with the physical body, affect, logic and logos are merged and can be released to play at any time. The text can be repeated at will as if reinvented, as if it had just been found, which pleases everyone. And it can be repeated not just once, but over and over again, without ever becoming routine or mechanical.
And the more poetic a text it is, the richer it becomes through repetition, since more can be found and understood in it and thus played with all the more.
Counterwords
This is the view of the muse, the turn, the twist and the beauty of performance art. In the light of the aesthetics of modern theater, again almost dogmatic in a perverse turn, we can translate Lucille's exclamation "Long live the king!". Long live beauty" is a call to beauty that appears suddenly, in a moment of extreme vulnerability and porosity.
The Other, the others
It may have its roots in the "discerning eyes" associated with Dionysus,29 which inspire and are the source of an endless reservoir of creativity. He is open to the future and is not afraid of it, and therefore is not a slave to the prejudices that blind us and mislead us and condemn Others without seeing what they can do. And if Medusa does indeed stare back—which is known to happen even in the most beautiful temples of the Muses—the gaze is turned away in time, or she gives in to the test.
In the kairos of the moment, the homo lude's gaze locks onto the stage in the shared eros of the muses' creativity. It is the originality of the relationship that must be conquered", so that the play can be a success, a joyful event. Isn't a prerequisite for ensemble art a consideration of the exposed defenselessness of the one or the others and respect for the face of the other? 32.
This happens not only during rehearsals, when the play is put together, but also in every staging of the play.
Affect versus thought
He ridicules a way of thinking that abstracts from the physical, from the world of the senses, even though he gives advice like this: 'To lead the women, you must learn the special feeling. Today we can replace the rationalistic image of thinking with an intellectual41 image that believes it can make a rigorous distinction between the content and the performance of the action. It emphasizes the purity of a true or false content, independent of the situation, context, tonality and gesture inherent in a sentence.
But from the point of view of the collegium of logic it is, of course, a threat, an anomaly that is both parasitic and arbitrary. This space of difference, this desired, hidden space of the incalculable, is the place of the treasure of the actor's performative art. It is a wonderful example of the art of performative speech, which is why it confuses the poor boy.
A look into the face of the Other and the answer has to do with responsibility.
Thinking and acting
Can't we take a new turn here and 'dream' ourselves, even claiming that within acting, thinking and emotionality are intertwined in a fertile, intimate dynamic? It is performers who can spotlight “transparency personified”46 so that in the end it is not them, but “the audience who go home as actors – that is, affirmed as players in their own way; that only in this transparency [actors] could they realize that this is what they themselves embody.”47. The knowledge and ability we draw from it provide basic tools for both thinking and acting.
Doesn't the event of thought and the event of action—in which past, present, and future happily converge—necessarily break every perception based on constative perception? When thought and action become an event, there is always a connection with the invisible, the inaudible, the non-thought. They want to be a thorn in the flesh, a thorn of attention, penetrating the crust to make it permeable, opening eyes and ears and tearing the skin.
In the fairy tale, Snow White is kissed awake in the kairos of time after a hundred years' sleep and many senseless deaths in the hedge of thorns.
Repetition
In the artistic code of theater, contrary to our common understanding, repetition does not always mean the same thing. Acting in the theater is not a technical reproduction that can be played at the push of a button. In doing so, he cheats the audience of watching live, which is probably what, in our media-saturated world, is what still draws people to the theater; assuming that they are not satisfied with mere representation on the stage and in the auditorium, but that they derive their satisfaction in the theater from the infinite openness of all living things.
Every single performance is stored in the actor's memory as a result of the rehearsal process – all directions, all right and wrong turns, thoughts, feelings, texts, contexts, performances, entrances, exits – the whole fabric of scenes and dialogues. The actor may be chained to the chronology of the plot and to a particular setting, but in the kairos of time – in the present, past and future – he can again find, recognise, develop and remember new and increasingly complex meanings in the play and its performative form. His action in the present must always be connected to what has been and what will be, regardless of whether he succeeds or fails.
The only thing common to everyone in the audience, that can make an audience one, is the fear of death, everyone has it.
