The Craft of Acting

After I decided to devote my life to craft of performance art and all of it's subsidiaries, including fashion, dance, writing, and acting, I wanted to go at it full esteem ahead. I have trusted my gut so far, and I hope it all works out. But for today's message of hope, I just wanted to talk a little bit about what I learned about the craft of acting and how it can be used and can affect all of us in our everyday lives. The art of film has come to be known as all of the other art forms put together. I would agree. The first goal of an actor is to entertain. This is always the first goal, no matter what anybody says you watch television, and go to the movies and to the theater to be entertained. But if you can go beyond that as an actor, then what a special treat it is to go beyond that and find something deeper. Because if you can go beyond the entertainment, and get to the inspiration part then you have hit a gold mine. But if you can get to the almighty holy grail of art, the truth or a moment of truth, then you have really set a standard to be broken. My mentor Martin Donovan would always get us up in front of the camera and keep going after you and after you until you would or could finally come to some of moment truth before he would let you sit down. You could always see it in class, and you would say oh yep there is the perfect time to stop, and you would hear him say "and cut." It was such experience to be trained by the man who has helped and been involved in the actor's lab of training the greats such as Daniel Day - Lewis, Will Smith, Jude Law, Colin Firth, and Mark Walhberg. Martin has always been known as ahead of his time, but if I knew all of this before I started working with him at the Playhouse in West LA I probably would have bowed out sooner rather than later. I have never had to bow out with Martin because after having spent so much time training with him, he has become a friend and someone who could open a lot of doors for me in this business with our show that we have been working on for so long. Anyway, back to the message of hope, I will just share this quote from the great and most astoundingly beautiful actress Audrey Hepburn: "I am proud to have been in a business that gives pleasure, creates beauty, and awakens our conscience, arouses compassion, and perhaps most importantly, gives millions a respite from our so violent world." This sums up exactly what I mean to say; to go to the theater and to be able to finally get a rest from this world and all of it's daily ups and downs is why I go to the movies and is why I am devoting my life to them, and other types of performance art. It is the hope and the faith and the inspiration that films can give to someone to live another day, to keep going, and to not ever give up on one's dreams ever. The great Michael Chekhov said this: "They are perilously prone to forget that the real task of the creative artist is not merely to copy the outer appearance of life but to interpret life in all its facets and profoundness, to show what is behind the phenomena of life, to let the spectator look beyond life's surfaces and meanings. For is not the artist, the actor in the truest sense, a being who is endowed with the ability to see and experience things which are obscure to the average person? And is not his real mission, his joyous instinct, to convey to the spectator, as a kind of revelation, his own very impressions of things as he sees them and feels them?" Martin has taught me in the ways of Chekhov and Meisner, the ways to let go and just be in the moment. The real truth of acting, and this is where life and art I believe imitate each other and meet is that if you try too hard you are going to fail. I mean that in good way. I am not saying that you should not try, I am saying that just like from the New Testament of the Bible that the whole point of life is to lose yourself to find yourself. To give up and succumb to the moment, and to act and live in the moment in the now, is one of those wondrous things of this world. To have that relaxed concentration that you must have as an artist, actor, and performer, whether in acting or dancing, or theater acting is the key. The key is to just let go and go with the flow and the atmosphere of whatever this or that moment might have. To feel it, to just let go, and let your instinct or subconscious take over is when it really gets fun. I could get into the pure freedom of egotism that the subconscious depths have, but that is for another time. Just remember that the meaning of life, is the same as the artist's meaning: the search for truth. Once we find that truth and that love, hold onto it because it could slip away, but the key is to just keep pushing forward and holding onto that truth because tomorrow the sun will rise, who knows what it could bring?