Acting out

Reflections on the Challenge

When you are walking and a car goes past, try to become aware if you are acting at that moment. If you think you are, dramatise whatever you are doing a bit more. If you think you are not acting, then start acting. As you walk, swagger for a while. Examine how your emotions change. If they do not change, try to consciously make them change accordingly.

• Experiences

  As T was walking briskly along the road to get to the station, a car passed and she remembered the challenge. She became aware of her intent, and how that was what she was presenting to the street and any passersby. She started to exaggerate the swing of her hips and shoulders as she walked. This changed the intent, and the focus, which had been outside of her body and away ahead of her, as if she was already at the station. She began to enjoy the ridiculousness of the swaggering and smiled. Remembering to swagger seemed to help her to connect up her thinking, feeling and physical, as though before these parts were acting separately at the behest of what she wanted to happen, and not what was presently happening. She felt more real acting than she did before when she was supposedly not acting, and she remembered the feeling of playing as a child, the game Let's pretend, and then getting into something more real than before.

  

  N said that when he remembered the challenge from cars going past, he found that most of the time he was not acting. When he was more present, and was walking down the street, he then exaggerated his movements and tried to walk with a bit more swagger. Internally, it made him aware that he sometimes walked in a habitual way.

• Responses

  Responding to T, L said he shared her thoughts about acting making people feel more real. It was interesting that this appeared to differ from Gurdjieff's view in the Reading, which suggested that there was something wrong with people who were acting. L said it was possible he was misunderstanding Gurdjieff's view.

Beelzebub’s Tales, Chapter 30 cont.

With acknowledgements to  Harold Good
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• Text

  ... And these contemporary actors there first reproduce this work themselves alone ,,, and when finally their reproduction proceeds without the participation of their own consciousness and feelings and these contemporary actors themselves are completely transformed into what are called ‘living automatons,’ then and then only, with the help of those among them who have not yet become entirely living automatons—for which reason they later acquire the name of ‘stage managers’—they do the same thing under their direction, but already now in the presence of other ordinary beings assembled in these contemporary theaters.

  All the same, it must be admitted that from their theaters and from these contemporary actors of theirs they obtained, of course accidentally, for the processes of their ordinary being-existence one not-bad-result.’

• Discussion

  T said the part about actors becoming "living automatons" because they followed scripts and directions, gave her the impression of parents and children, or teachers. Children could become living automatons because of all the directions and education they had been told, rather than being allowed to be creative with their thinking and imagination.

  J argued that the good actor does not simply become an automaton, but throws himself into his role and imagines how he would act if he himself were that person. The process of acting was more about being influenced and trained. No actor would want to come across as artificial.

  N found the assertion that actors become "living automatons" strange. For example, the Stanislavski method of acting, which was current in Gurdjieff's time, was an interior process in which actors tried to understand and embody the emotions of the characters they were playing. Gurdjieff's statement that there was a "not-bad-result" from the bad form of production was also strange.

  J believed Gurdjieff's idea that actors become "living automatons" was a narrow interpretation and not accurate. Over time, acting had become more personalized and individualized.

• Text

  ... And why these contemporary theaters of theirs with their contemporary actors have become useful for improving the quality of their sleep was due to the following circumstances.

  After the need to actualize being-Partkdolg-duty in themselves had entirely disappeared from the presences of most of them, and every kind of association of unavoidably perceived shocks began to proceed in the process of their waking state only from several already automatized what are called ‘series-of-former-imprints’ consisting of endlessly repeated what are called ‘impressions-experienced-long-ago,’ there then began to disappear in them and still continues to disappear even the instinctive need to perceive every kind of new shock vital for three-brained beings, and which issue either from their inner separate spiritualized being-parts or from corresponding perceptions coming from without for conscious associations, for just those being-associations upon which depends the intensity in the presences of beings of the transformation of every kind of ‘being-energy.’

• Discussion

  J said this suggested previous experiences may have become so entrenched that they have taken over people's reactions, making them less conscious now than they formerly were.

  N said the text may also highlight the difference between real, spiritually aware acting and modern, associative acting, which can come across well but was not the real thing.

• Text

  Well then, when your favorites, existing in such a manner in their ‘daily life,’ go to these contemporary theaters and follow the senseless manipulations of these contemporary actors, and receive ‘shocks’ one after the other from every kind of reminiscence, already previously perceived, of not less senseless and absurd notions, then during this waking state of theirs, they willy-nilly obtain more or less tolerable being-associations, so that when they go home and go to bed they sleep much better than usual.

  Although indeed these contemporary theaters with all that proceeds in them happen to be in this way—but of course only ‘for today’—an excellent means for the better sleep of your favorites, nevertheless the objectively evil consequences of these theaters for beings, and particularly for the rising generation, are incalculable.

  The chief harm for them from these theaters is that they are an additional factor for the complete destruction in them of all possibilities of ever possessing the need, proper to the three-brained beings, called the ‘need-for-real-perceptions.’

• Discussion

  J said that receiving art in a semi-comatose or semi-wakeful state and learning from conscious shocks were not mutually exclusive. Both could play a role in the learning process and he wondered why they were set up in opposition.

  L suggested the function of modern movies or plays was to help people sleep. In contrast, in ancient Greece, the choros and every part of the theatre probably had a symbolic meaning and might have had a purpose to wake people up.

  N said that much of modern theatre had been experimental and that many plays, such as those by Beckett, Pinter and Stoppard, had been trying to wake people up, rather than maintain them in the sleep that they were used to.