Why Give a Shit about Pleasure?

Voila. A long rant about pleasure.
This is not a proper blog entry but this is me putting some thoughts together.
So it is a little indulgent, a little blahblahblah.
But I'll publish it anyways because I typed the whole thing in the "Publish Window" and I don't feel like storing it in MS Word and editing it later.
But I'm warning you...

Pleasure
Le Plaisir.
PLEASURE....
"Was he a symphony of pleasure on the stage? Or was he a pile of spaghetti left in the pressure cooker for seven years?"
"You must show us your plesaure on the pleasure pleasure pleasurepleasurepleasurepleasurepleasure..."

Why should ANYONE give a shit about whether actors have pleasure on the stage? I ask myself.

At this school, pleasure isn't important to actors, it is their reason for being. No matter how badly you execute an exercise, you can always count on a positive comment if you "have the good fun" "at least they did it with pleasure" etc.

And why this obsession with pleasure? Because indeed, this is an approach to theater based 100 percent on having pleasure. The pleasure to pretend you are a god and you are playing Greek tragedy. The pleasure to make people love you even though you pretend are an idiot and fail at everything you do voila the clown. The pleasure to play with emotions voila the melodrama. The pleasure to play with the elements the animals the colors voila the neutral mask. The pleasure to pretend you are behind a fourth wall playing Chekov....and on and on and on.

But why all of this talk about pleasure?
What the hell is the reason that we need to feel good on the stage? God knows sometimes we feel like shit in life. Why on the stage be obsessed with PLAISIR?

Alors. The search in mon ecole is not for a movement based theater. It is an impulse based theater. Techniques and ideologies are treated frivolously before the god of impulse. And voila--

When the actors on the stage are going through a private emotional crisis- or when the actors onstage have a constipation problem- or when they are trying to be right, polite, clean, etc... (ie they do not have pleasure) the impulse is dead. The only hope for a live impulse onstage is a broken prop or dropped line.

I think any actor or serious theatergoer can attest to this. When the people on the stage are having a good time, whether they are playing King Lear or Moliere, there is more life on the stage. When the actors are a little messy, a little unguarded, a little "I don't know what the fuck is going on and I'm okay with that," we are happy to watch them for several hours. It is the same for the actors. When you are playing a boring show and suddenly there is a crisis on the stage, the actors love to run out and improvise, to try and get the show out of the shit. Actors love to be in the shit this way. And the audience loves them much more when they are scrambling, confused, and playing like mad.

I did this production of "Alls Well That Ends Well." Lets face it, the only thing anyone remembers about the show was the performance where I accidentally poked an audience member in the tit with a sword. And for the next ten minutes the actors had to scramble to pull the show back together because, well, an audience member got poked in the tit and the audience was having a hard time dealing with it calmly. And the actors had to adjust like mad to this audience that was out of control. And so we all became more open, more alive, and we had a lot of fun trying to continue playing shakespeare after the whole show was put in the shit by yours truly.

Hm. Just one example. But how many fucking boring pieces of theater have I seen where I only can remember some disaster happening and all of the actors suddenly coming alive to try and deal with this disaster. But the question, of course, is how to be this alive all of the time? Well of course one can just stage a play and then regularly fuck it up, but that isn't the point. The point is that these instances of fuck up are moments when the impulse leaps open. The actors have to drop whatever they think they should be doing and work from their impulse. And of course most theater, which is carefully structured, would like to be a carefully structured container for the creative impulse that can shift now and then for the given evening. Of course it rarely is.

And this is where the pleasure comes. The raison d'être of this fucking pleasure...When the actors have pleasure to be on the stage playing with each other, with their audience. pretending they are this and that...when they have the pleasure, they are open to impulse. When they are fixed, trying to get it right, etc etc....the impulse is DEAD.

I have found this always to be true. HORRIBLE actors who have pleasure to do whatever the hell they are doing onstage- I always prefer watching them to excellent actors who trudge out on the stage and "do their job." And when I am on the stage having good fun, I may be really bad, but I am never as bad as when I am onstage trying to get it right. I can even bore myself to tears this way. Or I want to play aggressively. I come onstage with force and will. Ah well this is shitty too.