Sidebar: The Actor and the Target

I recently purchased "The Actor and the Target" by Declan Donnellan, I director I know little about but regard highly. Just wanted to share some excerpts from the introduction that hopefully you might find helpful.

-Michael

13: ...this is not a book about how to act; this is a book that may help when you feel blocked in your acting.

16: Rather than claim that ‘x’ is a more talented actor than ‘y’, it is more accurate to say that ‘x’ is less blocked than ‘y’.

17: When acting flows, it is alive, and so cannot be analysed; but problems in acting are connected to structure and control, and these can be isolated and disabled.

20:

1. All the actor’s research is part of the invisible work, while the performance is part of the visible work.

2. The audience must never see the invisible work.

3. The rehearsal comprises all the invisible work and passages of visible work.

4. The performance consists only of the visible work.

21: The actor needs to accept the senses’ limitations in order for the imagination to run free. The actor relies utterly on the senses; they are the first stage in our communication with the world. The imagination is the second.

21-22: The imagination is the capacity to make images... Only the imagination can interpret what our senses relay to our bodies. It is imagination that enables us to perceive. Effectively, nothing in the world exists for us until we perceive it... Without our ability to make images we would have no means of accessing the outside world. The senses crowd the brain with sensations, the imagination sweats both to organise these sensations as images and also to perceive meaning in these images. We forge the world within our heads, but what we perceive can never be the real world; it is always an imaginative re-creation.