Consciousness, Literature and the Arts

Archive

Volume 1 Number 3, December 2000

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The Art of Theatre - Magic or Illusion?

 

By

 

Yvonne Adalian

 

How conscious are we actors of our alchemical gifts? Sometimes we feel like shamen absorbing the woes and joys of our society, offering cathartic ointments for the soul, and sometimes we feel like social cripples dependent on the blood of a life outside our own. I may not be able to define why it is necessary for me to return time and again to the theatre, but I’ve seen too many neophytes get hooked on the experience to put it down to a mere defect of the personality. In my case, I was an agonizingly shy little English girl who suddenly felt at home in her skin for the first time in her short life when she found herself on stage. I found more than myself; in fact, I found a power outside of myself.  (My great-great grandfather had been a bishop. I think I thanked him.)

 

How to explain why actors, all very different one from the other, who willingly discard their everyday choice of personality to don the guise of another, (and as a result of their endeavours form relationships with characters in the play as real as any of those outside the theatre), are so sure that the magic that they trust will occur:  they will find a character; the playwright’s intent will become clear; despite all the blood, sweat and tears of rehearsal, the doubts and fears, the sometimes painful grafting on of technical elements, the play will take on a life of its own - become a tangible creation. A baby that everyone has fathered and that everyone cares about even more than his or her own ego.  From a fragmented vaporous world, a disparate group of actors create a unified reality. How? Do we conjure up the spirits or are they already there in the writing? Or do they not truly take form until we present the baby to the godparents (the preview audience) for blessing, whence it grows in confidence and substance until it can stand on its own two feet?

 

The rehearsal process can be daunting, boring, traumatic, exhausting, but never have I been in a production where everyone involved in the creative process did not care. To be sure there have been degrees of caring depending on the quality of the script, but even when I was called upon to direct a group of Haida Indian High School students on the Queen Charlotte Islands in the wilds of British Columbia, (total virgins to the world of white - man’s theatre,) the same magic occurred.  The show was about them, even if a half crazed white woman was making them hop around like demented rabbits, it was their show, their creation, and they gladly worked overtime, cheering when the show was held over.

 

As an actor, I feel that I weave a web of thoughts, emotions, words and movements, through which the life of the characters I play are all transmitted. This thread encircles the audience and is returned to the stage by the audience with a receipt, an acknowledgement - subtle or extreme. Almost like the call and response in African music. It is this response by an audience that makes live theatre live.  Makes it vibrant, exhilarating.

 

When I was barely five, at preschool in England, I was rehearsed to play the Jackdaw in The Jackdaw of Rheims. No problem.  I learned the lines, the birdlike movements, was happy with the costume and the black cap with beak attached, but in performance after I had stolen the Cardinal’s ring and the chorus repeated in front of the audience the lines that bad jackdaw, he knew no law, I burst into tears! I was exposed! I was bad!  This was different from rehearsal. This was real - I could feel the audience’s disapproval, I was really bad, and I didn’t want to be.  My fellow actors and the audience were as concerned and puzzled as I was by my tears, they were out of character. But the show went on.

 

Many years later, in my late twenties, whilst playing Polly Browne in The Boyfriend, in Canada, I used a current heartbreak to colour my lines in the scene where I hear that my fiancé is a thief. The intensity of my woe elicited an enormous laugh from the audience.  This time I wasn’t puzzled.  The audience’s reaction was dead on and in the spirit of the piece. The more I cried, the harder they laughed.

 

The strength of emotional lives that are created between characters during rehearsal and in performance can be puzzling to a young actor.  The energy generated is tangible. Everyone in the theatre can and should feel it. It has nothing to do with who we are outside of rehearsals - strangers quite often - although, on some level, what we have shared and learned about each other through playing together is never truly discarded, it is simply tucked away somewhere. It has no place in our real lives.  For instance, once the emotion of love is released from its cage, all hell can break loose if the actor is inexperienced. What is loved is the spirit of the character, which is conjured by the actor. But supposing that character lived in the eighteenth century?  We cannot fabricate an entire world offstage to accommodate the reality that we have created onstage.  The attempted transference of this reality to life offstage can be a most disorienting experience. Once I disassociated myself from this Pandora’s box of emotions, I found great freedom in exploration. Within the safety of the playwrights’ lines and actions my spirit was free to experience emotions I might not otherwise have permitted in my various other social roles.

 

In a stylized production of George Ryga’s Captives of the Faceless Drummer, about the kidnappings and murders that occurred in Quebec during the time of the FLQ, I experienced the emotions of a killer.  As part of the chorus I felt the sexual thrill of stabbing a victim with my imaginary knife. (Obviously by this time I didn’t mind being bad!)  With any luck, the audience also has this capacity to transcend itself, to learn more about itself as it enters different states of consciousness.

 

I don’t know how scientists might go about measuring these altered states. Unless they apply Kirlian photography, because undoubtedly the actor’s aura does grow and change colour as different emotions are released. It is possible that at some level the audience is aware of this light show and even can even extend its own energy to meet it. I have been variously told that I had sparkleability or that I shone onstage. One thing I do know is that every actor responds to the energy lent to him or her by good stage lighting. This can become an energy field that positively pulses with intensity. (A fact well known by seasoned actors who may insist that the technician punch up the lights on their entrances.)   In a production of The Dunsmuirs, a few years ago, I had to gain thirty years during a thirty second set change. With three assistants I changed my costume, pinned my hair up and sprayed it with silver, skidded onto the stage hitting the Glo-lit spot, knelt down, and made a passionate prayer for the safety of my men down in the mines. The isolated beam of coloured light that accompanied this speech focused me immediately and my fervour was never forced.   Mood lighting, if it is well done, can be a vital accessory to the mood to be communicated to an audience. As can sound.  And here the artistry and sensitivity of the stage manager (in concert with the director) becomes paramount as s-he blends all these elements into an exquisitely tuned illusory experience.

 

Or is it illusory? What of the ghosts that still walk old theatres? What of the bad luck that invariably accompanies productions of Macbeth? What of the sterile atmosphere of a new auditorium that has not hosted any spirits, as opposed to the rich interior of an old theatre that is thick with lives lived, with creative energies that can impregnate matter. (The Mona Lisa comes to mind. Somehow, as in some paintings, the inspiration or emotion experienced by the artist is frozen in time and transmitted to the beholder who endows it with his/her own energy so that the original creative energy is communicated. Becomes tangible.)

 

It is the alchemy of the group that creates the magic of theatre. From the many, many, different ingredients necessary for a production, including the audience, the most compelling ingredient is the ability to adapt, to blend like chameleons with the creature we have agreed to create and that lives through us night after night.