TRAVEL DIARY

A weblog regularly updated by Jodi Rose.

Friday, July 29, 2005

4:21 PM
Posted by jodi rose

comments from an article by sebastian smee in the weekend before last Australian review section, and a review of a book on actors and their methods.

process - artist - statements

art should be obstinately singular and indepenent
art needs to be cogent, beautiful, confronting or convincing on its own terms
It is extremely important that art be unjustifiable
Ars Gratia Artis Art for Art's sake

You can talk about the internal, mystical, psychological, alchemical aspects, but acting is very practical. It's about doors, shoes, walking, turning. Being heard, being fat, being skinny, being naked.

You feel the relationship between their real life and their performances just flows back and forth in a series of circles and loops.

Every sigh, every shuffle, every look, every gesture; they've not only done them before while acting, they're part of the way they live.
You sense she needs to act and that acting is a craving.
She has the capacity for intelligent anxiousness that makes anything she does compelling and she works meticulously with an almost grim purpose.

Any australian actor will tell you that all too often their life is a joyless one of small-time heartbreaks and quiet desperation, rumour and grievance, much of it spent disguising their depression. And that's when times are good.

Some actors mimic others, while others get inside the 'skin' of the character, which can sometimes awkwardly spill over into private life. Some find a character wholly within themselves. Some stay themselves. Some work from the outside in, others from the inside out. Some find the character immediately, some never find it.

Acting in Australia is about 'grasping, pecking in the dirt, hacking through the bushes, juggling, chasing rainbows, searching for light, a million sparkles.'

each had a belief structure, a kind of personal culture impressed with the marks of family, lover, failures and success, insecurities and pride.

davis has the great actor's ability to alter instantly, she can rewire the brain in a second. acting does things to the brains chemistry and that the natural state of mind for an actor is that of someone on stage trying to show outwardly what he doesn't feel inwardly.

what do actors do? they take fragments from many sources and piece them together into a matrix or a mandala, rather than adhering to any formal method or process.

all these working ideas become like a series of concentric circles - disciplined patterns and weaves - within a square during the actor's working life, occasionally intersecting, sometimes colliding.

Their impulses and fancies, their talent, is guided and forged by discipline and by methodological fragments. struggling as everyone does in trying to find an explanation for what it is actors do, which is to live truthfully under imaginary circumstances.

For some it's cathartic. Judy Davis once told me that for her, acting had been a confronting process of accepting the fact that finally you can't hide 'these pieces of yourself'; to continue to act, you have to be prepared for everything that's possible to be revealed.