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Authenticity in acting
Erotic connection happens between people through authenticity. (I define eros in the October 23 post, Actress.) So, authenticity connects the performer and her audience.
People tend to think of acting as inauthenticity: the performer is a character who pretends to be someone else. However, I perform myself. In my writings, which serve as scripts, I speak as myself and about myself and my friends, family, lovers, and experiences, and I speak with an introspective honesty. I read my own language, because it indicates that I am not performing a character through memorized words or through somebody else’s words.
A friend confirmed that my acting expresses authenticity. He connected my acting with a statement made by the actor and director Andre Gregory. In an email my friend wrote:
The actor/director/teacher . . . Andre Gregory of My Dinner with Andre fame . . . said . . . that 100 years ago most people were characters, enjoyed being themselves. The job of the actor then was to be able to portray vastly different characters; today most people are pretending to be someone other than who they are, so the job of the actor is to be nobody-but-herself on stage or film.
Makeup and hair also communicate my authenticity. Rather than wearing stage makeup, I slightly intensify my everyday look. For example, in performance I’ll color my lids with 2 shades of gold, whereas I usually wear no eye shadow. I generally wear my hair long and loose when I perform, exactly as I do every day. In several performances I’ve pulled my hair back, the way that I wear it when I’m in a yoga or dance class.(It always amazes me when hair stylists, whether my own or one who knows me casually and learns that I’ll be performing soon, wants to do my hair for a performance. But I shouldn’t be surprised, because they don’t know that I like my hair as is, no more dramatic or sexy or special than normal, when I perform.)
Enough
R. Crumb, the brilliant comics artist, doesn’t talk about projects he’s currently working on because doing so dissipates a project’s energy. I’m paraphrasing from an interview with him that I heard on National Public Radio earlier this week. The interview focused on Crumb’s newest work, . . . and then the all but inevitable question came. How often do people, whether they are interviewers from the most respected media or individuals within the public attending a reading or an art exhibition, ask artists, writers, or musicians who are in the midst of debuting or speaking about their most recent work, “What’s next? What are you working on now?”
Such questions needn’t offend the artist, but they point to a cultural assumption or projection of inadequacy: Read more
Golden skin
Line 8 of Sexual Advances reads:
I’m thinking of your goldenness
The first time I saw my lover naked, the color of his skin surprised me because it was so purely and creamily golden. Maybe the light, which was shining softly into his bedroom, warmed his skin tone. Maybe I’m still enwrapped–enrapt and wrapped up in–the romantic radiance of our initial lovemaking, and maybe that radiance colors my memories and present observations of him.
Of course, he is golden to me–his heart feels rich and enriches mine–as everyone we love is golden when we spontaneously fill the connection between that person and ourselves, and life in the process, with generosity and with first sight, which allows us to see what is truly in front of us. In Sexual Advances I see with first sight every time, in each of the 1,000 lines, and that liberates my vision from looking for what my lover should be in the future or wasn’t in the past, from problems that fear, running rampant, or just walking along at a steady pace, creates out of speculation, obsession, and impatience. Fear turns gold to mud.
- November 2, 2009
- Filed under: Beauty, Love, Men and women, Pleasure
- Comments 1
