Friday, July 07, 2006
The Actors' Timeline
Y'know, when you were a kid in school, that cardboard thing some teachers bought in a Teacher Store somewhere and they brought it to their classrooms to hang prominently above the blackboard in the front of class? (By the way, do classrooms today still have blackboards, or are all of them totally computerized now, with a screen at each little desk?).....
ANYWAY: remember those TIMELINE OF MAN thingies? A student can see the incremental progress made by the human animal as he or she dribbles his or her way up from the Primordial Ooze, until finally, there we are: inventing television (makes you wonder how far we have actually progressed, doesn't it...i mean with the sit-com being what it is,etc.) ANYWAY: remember the TIMELINE OF MAN?
I propose: THE TIMELINE OF AN ACTOR!
The reasons a person becomes an actor are seemingly quite different from the reasons a person stays an actor throughout his life...I believe the impulse is always the same , but we shall tease that conclusion out later...first: the timeline itself:
The Primordial Ooze of the Baby Actor is that time when we are freshly out of the womb, "trailing clouds of Glory..." as Wordsworth poeticized, and the operative word there is "freshly" , because we have nothing to hold us back from being our best, most natural and fully expressive selves: we glow with life, everything is astonishing to us and therefore our responses to the world around us are thoroughly captivating. Our audiences are rapt, and all we do as baby actors is right: we make them laugh, smile and applaud effortlessly: we are thereby hooked: we like being the center of such delirious attention...we like making people happy. We are pure GIFT at that stage...our Primordial Ooze is effortless, nurturing, simple and wonderful. We would like to stay at that point of the Actor Timeline forever, but alas, we cannot. The verb here: To BE!
We are compelled to, as it were "go on tour" at just about the time we learn to crawl and walk! We discover we can take certain matters into our own hands (or little legs and feet) and go where WE want to go, not just where THEY put us! This feeling pf power, much akin to Man's Discovery of Fire in one of the early Stone Ages, is intoxicating, and along with mobility comes an entire new bag of performing tricks: if they thought we were cute before, wait'll they get a load of us now that we can cutely crawl!!!" So, we go on tour with the fervor of a young actor who has just gotten his Equity Card! Razzmatazz...watch out world...here we come! Ta-DA!!!
We stay committed to performing at this point of the TimeLine because of all the amazing things we're discovering about ourselves. The "audience" is almost incidental at this point, except of course, we need them to feed and clothe us. But we are our own best audience at this stage of the game. No one is more dazzled than we are by what we can do! The verb here: To DISCOVER!
So far, we are only up to what may be the equivalent of The Iron Age ....The Actors TimeLine has eons to go, so keep tuning in....we are a complex and enigmatic breed...this TimeLine may help explain us....later.
ANYWAY: remember those TIMELINE OF MAN thingies? A student can see the incremental progress made by the human animal as he or she dribbles his or her way up from the Primordial Ooze, until finally, there we are: inventing television (makes you wonder how far we have actually progressed, doesn't it...i mean with the sit-com being what it is,etc.) ANYWAY: remember the TIMELINE OF MAN?
I propose: THE TIMELINE OF AN ACTOR!
The reasons a person becomes an actor are seemingly quite different from the reasons a person stays an actor throughout his life...I believe the impulse is always the same , but we shall tease that conclusion out later...first: the timeline itself:
The Primordial Ooze of the Baby Actor is that time when we are freshly out of the womb, "trailing clouds of Glory..." as Wordsworth poeticized, and the operative word there is "freshly" , because we have nothing to hold us back from being our best, most natural and fully expressive selves: we glow with life, everything is astonishing to us and therefore our responses to the world around us are thoroughly captivating. Our audiences are rapt, and all we do as baby actors is right: we make them laugh, smile and applaud effortlessly: we are thereby hooked: we like being the center of such delirious attention...we like making people happy. We are pure GIFT at that stage...our Primordial Ooze is effortless, nurturing, simple and wonderful. We would like to stay at that point of the Actor Timeline forever, but alas, we cannot. The verb here: To BE!
We are compelled to, as it were "go on tour" at just about the time we learn to crawl and walk! We discover we can take certain matters into our own hands (or little legs and feet) and go where WE want to go, not just where THEY put us! This feeling pf power, much akin to Man's Discovery of Fire in one of the early Stone Ages, is intoxicating, and along with mobility comes an entire new bag of performing tricks: if they thought we were cute before, wait'll they get a load of us now that we can cutely crawl!!!" So, we go on tour with the fervor of a young actor who has just gotten his Equity Card! Razzmatazz...watch out world...here we come! Ta-DA!!!
We stay committed to performing at this point of the TimeLine because of all the amazing things we're discovering about ourselves. The "audience" is almost incidental at this point, except of course, we need them to feed and clothe us. But we are our own best audience at this stage of the game. No one is more dazzled than we are by what we can do! The verb here: To DISCOVER!
So far, we are only up to what may be the equivalent of The Iron Age ....The Actors TimeLine has eons to go, so keep tuning in....we are a complex and enigmatic breed...this TimeLine may help explain us....later.
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