Working with Chaos

Today’s blog is based on yesterday’s first day of our Sydney Masterclass.

The moment is essentially endless possibility. This sense of infinity reminds us that actually everything around us is chaos and as we stride through life, we impose some methods of control onto it, we attempt to organise chaos into a controlled form and call it ‘society’, ‘art’ or ‘theatre’.

How far should a method of acting, an approach, a technique if you MUST, attempt to bring order to chaos.

To me, the actor lives and thrives in the chaos, attempts to control it, to impose stricture and structure upon it, is one if the great fallacies of acting.

The moment arrives and is disintegrating from the time we realise it is gone. The lines of the script apparently have meaning but their meaning explodes and disintegrates in contact with others.

Actors often attempt to impose order on the chaos of disintegration by controlling what they do in each scene.

It is sensible.

But it’s just not very helpful. To deny that the moment is happening, to attempt to control, is a wasted effort. To attempt to impose order on that which cannot be ordered, is a denial of the moment’s power to shock, surprise and captivate.

And so when the actor attempts to act out the meaning of the author’s words, they deny the endless potential for changing meaning. They deny that their body, their voice, the situation, the partner, the spect-auditor’s own experiences all play a part in the creation of meaning. To attempt to teach audiences a meaning is to reduce the experience. The meaning only exists for one night only and is different every time.

So it is with ‘character work’, the conscious artistic selection of elements the actor feels/believes/thinks might communicate a sense of the ‘other’ to audiences. But each choice is an attempt to control something, to steer a train that is already derailed, a moment that is disintegrating before them.

So it is with ‘actioning the script’ a wonderfully useful approach for the director, the control freak, when the Actor’s moment to moment actions and reactions can be reduced to selectable verbs. If you read this blog or attend my classes, you know I favour these useful little verbs, but you cannot control the moment to moment reaction to any action. So actioning the script is just another attempt to impose control or order onto chaos.

It’s different with visual art, when the maelstrom is finally nailed to the mast for a few precious moments, or creative writing when the mass and infinite realm of possible words is just for a few moments captured. These are both essentially static arts, where a moment must be captured and held in stasis for others to enjoy.

But acting is not like these art forms – at least not on the stage, in the theatre, It’s very different. Acting for film begins as chaos and ends as someone else controlling the outcome, turning the spontaneous into the predictable, making order.

Acting is not imposing order, it is living within it, you are a leaf on the river’s current, floating. To learn to act is to learn to gently steer yourself, not to buy an outboard motor and power yourself against the current.