July 06, 2009
Let’s talk about the Paradox!
I would like to share with you some thoughts about one of the most fundamental questions discussed within the theory of acting – the actor’s temperature at the time of performing.
Here are some thoughts by Lee Strasberg:
“It is difficult to discuss with exactitude the problem of acting. The object of the discussion – the actor’s performance – is a fluid and feeling process that leaves no lasting record by which the audience can test its recollection. Unlike an El Greco painting, a Monteverdi madrigal, or a Shelley ode, the performance lives and dies anew each night. Our response to the actor’s a total one; does not distinguish easily between the actor as a personality and the role he is playing.
It is difficult to tell where the playwright’s contribution stops and the actor’s begins. The famous French director and actor Jacques Copeau points out the difficulty of formulating anything definitive about the actor’s art when he says:” Those who see only the grimaces and tricks of the actor refuse to see anything creative in his art. Others, aware only of his all too human frailty, relegate him to the dust heap and demand the marionette in his place.”
The difficulty of definition has not prevented a long list of theatre people from attempting it, from Luigi Riccoboni to Stanislavsky. Talma, Iffland, Henry Irving, Coquelin, Salvini, Rachel, Joseph Jefferson, Forbes-Robertson, and many others have had their say. The eighteenth century, through much of which the stage was dominated by individual virtuosos, is particularly rich in the theoretic discussions. Men of all-around genius, among them Voltaire, Lessing, and Goethe, found it natural to participate actively in the drama, considered the theatre culturally important, and wrote about its problems brilliantly and sometimes profoundly. Of all such writings the most widely known is Diderot’s treatise in the form of a dialogue.
The Paradox of Acting itself was not printed until 1830, forty-six years after the death of its author; it is known to be written in the 1770’s, retouched and added to from time to time, and finally reworked about 1778. Because of its polemic brilliance, because it is the view of an “outsider” and, therefore, perhaps easier to assimilate, it has remained to this day the most significant attempt to deal with the problem of acting. Any discussion of acting almost invariably touches on Diderot’s famous paradox: to move the audience the actor must himself remain unmoved.”
With greatest respect to Lee Strasberg
Assen Gadjalov
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