The Pleasure to Pretend

The actor wears a neutral mask.

The actor must pretend to be water.

Prof: "You see these actors on the stage pretending to be water. They pretend to be a lake. Bon. Which lakes are clear and which are dirty? Which lake would you swim in? This student has a clear and beautiful lake, but this one absoloutely horrible. I would never go in that lake. Dirty water. Spiders. Plastic bags. To go in this lake, I would be dead."

Questions from the exercise:
How does embodying movement change the way that an actor plays with the space and their text? How does the change in the impulse to movement shift the way the actor plays?

_____
You have to embody the lake.
So you do the exercise.
The professor says it is terrible.
He lets you try again.

Oh god this again. "be a lake" "be water" what a load of hippie bullshit. Like I'm in a meeting of transcendentalist vegans in Berkeley California.

And then something happens to you. You stop thinking about how to do the exercise and you become aware of the room. You imagine for a moment the size of a lake, its immensity. Your body stops moving so much and feels somehow supported by this imagined size and immensity.

Your mask is removed. You are told to rise to your feet while maintaining this quality, and speak a text.

So you rise, you speak, and this size it stays with you. And you feel free.
__________

Prof: "He was beautiful, wasn't he? He had a good face. All the time on the stage you look like an idiot. An American optimist with a big idiot smile, with the American flag in the background. Absoloutely horrible. But now you are on the stage and you are open. Much better to see you this way than to see the horrible American who thinks that everything will be ok."