ACTING- A TOLTEC PERSPECTIVE

For actors and performers one issue must be dealt with at the very outset. What should an actor do as regards getting guidance on his chosen field??? Considering the vast number of acting gurus out there, from Stanislavski to Hagen, this is indeed a fraught question. Which school/guru is best? How do they differ? Who is authentic? Who isn’t? These questions are bound to go through any dedicated actor’s mind. Now what I have learned through long experience, and having gone the usual route of following and struggling with methods and techniques, and trying to understand what the gurus were trying to tell me, is, that there is a bottom line. And that this is that acting is a magical thing, and as such, cannot really be analysed, quantified or made rational and comprehensible to the analytical mind. It is really not theoretical. You cannot think your way to a result with acting. And though it is always useful and interesting to know what other people have said on this subject, and familiarise yourself with the different schools of thought, at the end of the day, when you go on stage, you need to drop all that. Drop it completely. Forget it. Forget completely you know anything. And then you must trust in that power that rules over us, and guides us, to provide whatever it is you need, to make a particular scene or character come to life. TRUST. For when it comes to the theoretical approach, I always feel it a bit like that story ‘The Sorcerer’s Apprentice’. The apprentice tries to appropriate the Sorcerer/Guru’s power, but his literal approach to this, simply gets him into endless complications, for the truth is, he is not the guru/sorcerer. He is, himself. In the story he ends up chopping the mop, which only means he has two mops to chop. And chopping those four. And then eight. And then so on, ad-infinitum. And the moral is you cannot just mimic the Guru’s power. You must go on the same journey as him. Find it for yourself. There are no short cuts. So.

THE RIGHT GUIDANCE!!!!!

I am not an acting guru, and that is why I can give you the right guidance on this. And my guidance is not a theory, or a method. My guidance is simply a description, in order to help you see something more clearly; for if we get clarity, we will make progress. And here it is.

Acting is about double-ness. It is about having a split-focus. It is about being yourself, and not yourself, both at once. We forget, the potential to be a character, exists when we are not a character. And when we are on stage playing a character, we are still ourselves, playing a character! In other words, on entering a scene, you must claim your space, by knowing who you are, i.e. what role you are playing, be self orientated, and self justified, and at the same time, you must be focussed outside yourself, on who the other actors are, what roles they are playing, and what their reasons are for being there, and doing what they do. You must do both these things at once. Split the focus!!!! Put in terms of the Toltec teachings, you must believe without believing! Know a thing is both true and false, at the same time. And this is of course theoretically impossible!!!! Your rational mind will never flatten this out to make it reasonable and understandable, for it simply isn’t reasonable and understandable, and yet, at the same time, it is simplicity itself, for we can be double. We can simply feel it! Now to say acting is about double-ness, may seem tad obvious. We may think, but I knew that! Of course it is about double-ness! But I am putting the focus back on this simple thing, to remind people of the essence of acting. Something that has been rather lost with the ‘progress’ that has been made in acting theory. And in order to show you a new way to work, with becoming a better actor, and how we can do this without resorting to gurus, methods, schools and the like, which, in the end, often hinder rather than help the would be actor. So, having understood that all we really need to do in acting, is split the focus, we can ask ourselves, how can I practice that? Well the answer is the place to practice this is in real life. Day to day life. Nuts and bolts life. We can practice having a split focus, within our normal world. We don’t have to be in an acting class, or be on stage, to do it. So let’s look at life.

1. You pay a bill

2. You meet friends.

3. You go to church.

4. You catch a bus.

5. You do a night class.

Here is ‘real life’ in all its majestic wonderfulness! Now. How can we split the focus in theses areas. In broad terms we can intend to be more aware of the inner and the outer in all these activities. There’s subjective, you doing it. And the objective. the place and the people you do it with/in. We find 2 ways to look at same thing.

Taken singly.

1. (The bill.) Past financial history. Present attitude. Your need to pay, and your attitude to paying.

2. (Friends.) Your perception of yourself. Their perception of you.

3. (Church.) Atmosphere inside church. Atmosphere outside church.

4. (Bus.) Focus on destination or journey.

5. (Night class.) Learning and socialising. How do they feel different.

So a lot of it boils down to inner and outer. What is the inner way to look at tieing your shoelace. And what is the outer way? It is 2 ways of seeing the same thing. Now this is the right guidance for it will yield a result, in that you will become more versed in shifting the focus. You will! However, your rational mind may well reject this saying “But I can’t do that! I can’t hold 2 contradictory positions at once.”

It may, your rational mind, even fight back against this threatening activity,
by making you go to sleep. Feel angry and confused.
Making you lose your pen. Notebook. Or trip over the cat.

Nevertheless. This is the right guidance. To act you do need a split focus, and this exercise in awareness will foster it.

Now, we live in an extremely sophisticated civilisation. Something commented on by Shakespeare in King Lear when Lear says:

“For thou are the thing itself, a bare forked animal.”

Simple attitudes to things and simple solutions are frowned upon and laughed at. And this is a shame for in doing this, man cheats himself out of the sublime joy inherent in this child-like truth of simplicity. Obviousness. Un-pretentiousness. A child knows what acting is. A child needs no theory. Acting is just pretending. And what great fun it is! (“Just pretending darling! Are you crazy? Have you seen my Lear???”)