Monday, July 10, 2006
T.A.T Continued
...that is, The Actors Timeline....whereon we have been through, roughly, two stages:
The Age of Being and The Age of Discovery! Time now for the rough equivalent of The Dark Ages: the Actors' Adolescence: the verb is :To HIDE!
Yes, we know we are glorious, but then our bodies have to do all sorts of growing and changing , odd and troublesome juices have to flow whether we want them to or not, and so, all the most annoying and disturbing feelings begin to make themselves loudly, insistently known in us. As a result, we exist behind a self-made cloud of mystery, and we hide. Our hair is too long, our faces covered in strange things, clothes never feel right, and we are too damned EVERYTHING...even the best actor at this stage does everything WRONG, it's simply the way our lives are meant to feel...and so we SEARCH, WRITE, CRY, SWEAT FAR TOO MUCH AND GENERALLY are ugly a lot. No wonder we need and want to hide away from our fellows, all of whom seem to be the very worst judgemental audiences of critics...even if they are not, we think they are...we hate them and we just know they hate us. How we ever survive this stage of the ACTOR TIMELINE is a miracle!!!
But theater and the profession of acting is nothing if not filled with miracles, and so we do survive...in fact,damn! We even come out better than before, and all because we simply kept living and did not fling ourselves into the nearest rivers to drown like unwanted cats! Good for us! Some of us even find ways to let our fabulousness shine through anyway at this stage and we book TV series, usually on the WB network , and though the acting work is execreble, our stars shine brightly nonetheless. This stage could destroy us, if we are not serious about our work and determine to continue studying and growing. If we do, we move on to the next stage in the TimeLine: to SHOW!
This is when we begin to realize that those people out there, the ones we call audience, are important, really important.
And we want them to know, consequently, how important WE are, so all of our considerable energies are thrust outward and we do the classic "Career Hustle". This is a dance as old as the first actor ever, bred deep in the bones of those meant to perform on the worlds' stages....every single young actor asks: "HOW DO I DO IT? HOW DO I MAKE A CAREER?" And every single actor finds his or her own way: there is no certain path...there is no magic key...there is no one way...miraculously, like everything else in this crazy profession, it simply happens, by sheer dint of will and ambition and creativity and stick-to-it-tiveness, or it does not...one either has, finally , the heart for this stage of the TimeLine or one does not...but for a period of about 10 years or so, as a career is built from the ground up (and the young actor usually has to sweep that ground himself as part of his "dues paying"), nothing matters but "the work", the career is paramount....one plans one's vacations around the slightest agent call..one returns home early from flights to Mars to attend a callback for anything...a family funeral is blithely unattended if it gets in the way of even one important audition...because all that matters at this point of the Actor Time Line is: SHOW WHAT YOU HAVE AS MUCH AS YOU POSSIBLY CAN! SHOW IT! SHOW IT! SHOW IT! DON't QUESTION IT...JUST SHOW IT!
This is the stage on the Time Line roughly equivalent to the Late 19th-Early 20th Century, when wars were fought, national principles defended, blood shed, all in the name of territorial hedgemony.....staking one's claim on the world, no matter what it took to do so. SHOW TIME!
...more to come...because this is where the Actors Time Line begins to get really interesting!
The Age of Being and The Age of Discovery! Time now for the rough equivalent of The Dark Ages: the Actors' Adolescence: the verb is :To HIDE!
Yes, we know we are glorious, but then our bodies have to do all sorts of growing and changing , odd and troublesome juices have to flow whether we want them to or not, and so, all the most annoying and disturbing feelings begin to make themselves loudly, insistently known in us. As a result, we exist behind a self-made cloud of mystery, and we hide. Our hair is too long, our faces covered in strange things, clothes never feel right, and we are too damned EVERYTHING...even the best actor at this stage does everything WRONG, it's simply the way our lives are meant to feel...and so we SEARCH, WRITE, CRY, SWEAT FAR TOO MUCH AND GENERALLY are ugly a lot. No wonder we need and want to hide away from our fellows, all of whom seem to be the very worst judgemental audiences of critics...even if they are not, we think they are...we hate them and we just know they hate us. How we ever survive this stage of the ACTOR TIMELINE is a miracle!!!
But theater and the profession of acting is nothing if not filled with miracles, and so we do survive...in fact,damn! We even come out better than before, and all because we simply kept living and did not fling ourselves into the nearest rivers to drown like unwanted cats! Good for us! Some of us even find ways to let our fabulousness shine through anyway at this stage and we book TV series, usually on the WB network , and though the acting work is execreble, our stars shine brightly nonetheless. This stage could destroy us, if we are not serious about our work and determine to continue studying and growing. If we do, we move on to the next stage in the TimeLine: to SHOW!
This is when we begin to realize that those people out there, the ones we call audience, are important, really important.
And we want them to know, consequently, how important WE are, so all of our considerable energies are thrust outward and we do the classic "Career Hustle". This is a dance as old as the first actor ever, bred deep in the bones of those meant to perform on the worlds' stages....every single young actor asks: "HOW DO I DO IT? HOW DO I MAKE A CAREER?" And every single actor finds his or her own way: there is no certain path...there is no magic key...there is no one way...miraculously, like everything else in this crazy profession, it simply happens, by sheer dint of will and ambition and creativity and stick-to-it-tiveness, or it does not...one either has, finally , the heart for this stage of the TimeLine or one does not...but for a period of about 10 years or so, as a career is built from the ground up (and the young actor usually has to sweep that ground himself as part of his "dues paying"), nothing matters but "the work", the career is paramount....one plans one's vacations around the slightest agent call..one returns home early from flights to Mars to attend a callback for anything...a family funeral is blithely unattended if it gets in the way of even one important audition...because all that matters at this point of the Actor Time Line is: SHOW WHAT YOU HAVE AS MUCH AS YOU POSSIBLY CAN! SHOW IT! SHOW IT! SHOW IT! DON't QUESTION IT...JUST SHOW IT!
This is the stage on the Time Line roughly equivalent to the Late 19th-Early 20th Century, when wars were fought, national principles defended, blood shed, all in the name of territorial hedgemony.....staking one's claim on the world, no matter what it took to do so. SHOW TIME!
...more to come...because this is where the Actors Time Line begins to get really interesting!
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