Acting Action by Hugh O'Gorman

Author:Hugh O'Gorman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2021-05-02T00:00:00+00:00

What you see determines what you do. The old cliché about the glass being half full or half empty applies here. Are you someone who generally approaches life as a glass half full or half empty? How you see the world around you determines how you operate in it. If you see the world as a glass half full, you will act accordingly. If you view it as half empty, you will also act accordingly.

Action follows perception. This is perhaps the most underappreciated part of playing action. Sure, you need to know what it is and how to do it, but you must also realize that action is born out of perception. What you see, your point of view, ultimately determines what you do and how you do it. As the seminal American landscape painter Georgia O’Keeffe states in the earlier quote, you need to have time to see like an artist. That is your job.

As an actor you need to see the world, life, people, and human behavior more clearly than Joe Q. Citizen. You need to be able to see into the space between, peer into negative space. Like a Japanese landscape architect designing a Zen garden, you need to see ma. You need to see what others fail to recognize. To see with this heightened clarity, to perceive the world at a higher pitch, you need a different relationship to time. You need to train yourself to slow down—way down. And breathe. Only then can you really begin to see.

The original word for theater in Greek is Teatron. In ancient Greece, Teatron literally meant the “seeing place,” derived from the Greek word theáomai, meaning “I view.” The ancient Greeks believed that the theater had nurturing qualities. This is why they built all their acoustically perfect amphitheaters in spa towns, locations they believed had healing properties. The theater had, and still has, the power to heal. But we first must see before we can be healed. We must see together, in one room, and move through a collective cathartic experience to move our own lives and our society forward.

The Greeks understood the power of public performance. They understood it was not simply entertainment but a dynamic, important, and progressive act of democracy. The theater and its participants were, as Eleanora Duse said, the original shamans of any community. Called to a higher purpose, these shamans, or actors, allowed their imaginations to take over their bodies and transform them in the act of storytelling for the benefit of the greater good. This still holds true today. However, your ability to transform yourself under fictional circumstances, to surrender to your imagination, all depends on your ability to see not only more clearly but also more deeply and carefully than the average human being, to truly perceive what is actually happening in front of you—not an idea of what you want to happen but what is really, concretely happening in front of you.

I’m curious about other people. That’s the essence of my acting.

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