The House of Ash

"Actors are some of the most driven, courageous people on the face of the earth. They deal with more day-to-day rejection in one year than most people do in a lifetime. Every day, actors face the financial challenge of living a freelance lifestyle, the disrespect of people who think they should get "real" jobs, and their own fear that they'll never work again. Every day, they have to ignore the possibility that the vision they have dedicated their lives to is a pipe dream. With every role, they stretch themselves, emotionally and physically, risking criticism and judgment. With every passing year, many of them watch as the other people their age achieve the predictable milestones of normal life-the car, the family, the house, the nest egg.

But they stay true to their dream, in spite of the sacrifices. Why?

Because actors are willing to give their entire lives to a moment-to that line, that laugh, that gesture, or that interpretation that will stir the audience's soul. Actors are beings who have tasted life's nectar in that crystal moment when they poured out their creative spirit and touched another's heart. In that instant, they were as close to magic, God, and perfection as anyone could ever be. And in their own hearts, they know that to dedicate oneself to that moment is worth a thousand lifetimes." 

~David Ackert

"We're dead as a species if we don't tell stories, because then we don't know who we are." - Alan Rickman

http://www.alternativereel.com/includes/top-ten/display_review.php?id=00106

"It does not interest me how old you are. I want to know if you will risk looking like a fool for love, for your dreams, for the adventure of being alive.

"It does not interest me what planet is squaring your moon. I want to know if you have touched the center of your own sorrow, if you have been opened by life's betrayals, or have become shriveled and closed from fear and further pain.

"I want to know if you can sit with pain, mine or your own, without moving to hide it, fade it or fix it.

"I want to know if you can be with joy, mine or your own, if you can dance with the wildness and let the ecstasy fill you to the tips of your fingers and toes without cautioning us to be careful, be realistic, or to remember the limitations of being human.

"It does not interest me if the story you are telling me is true. I want to know if you can disappoint another to be true to yourself, if you can bear the accusation of betrayal and not betray your own soul.

"I want to know if you can be faithless and therefore be trustworthy.*

"I want to know if you can see beauty even when it is not pretty every day, and if you can source your life from God's presence.

"I want to know if you can live with failure, yours or mine, and still stand on the edge of a lake and shout to the silver of the moon, "Yes!"

"It does not interest me to know here you live or how much money you have. I want to know if you can get up after a night of grief and despair, weary and bruised to the bone, and do what needs to be done for the children.

"It does not interest me who you are, how you came to be here. I want to know if you will stand in the center of the fire with me and not shrink back.

"It does not interest me where or what or with whom you have studied. I want to know what sustains you from the inside when all else falls away.

"I want to know if you can be alone with yourself and if you truly like the company you keep in the quiet moments.

- Oriah Mountain Dreamer

when i look around, i think this: this is good enough
and i try to laugh/at whatever life brings
cuz when i look down, i just miss all the good stuff
and when i look up, i just trip over things

“People who do not believe at all in a happy end impede changing the world almost as much as the sweet swindlers, the marriage-swindlers, the charlatans of apotheosis. Unconditional pessimism therefore promotes the business of reaction not much less than artificially conditioned optimism; the latter is nevertheless not so stupid that it does not believe in anything at all. It does not immortalize the trudging of the little life, does not give humanity the face of a chloroformed gravestone. It does not give the world the deathly sad background in front of which it is not worth doing anything at all. In contrast to pessimism which itself belongs to rottenness and may serve it, a tested optimism, when the scales fall from its eyes, does not deny the goal-belief in general; on the contrary, what matters now is to find the right one and to prove it. For this reason there is more possible pleasure in the idea of a converted Nazi than from all the cynics and nihilists. That is why the most dogged enemy of socialism is not only, as is understandable, great capital, but equally the load of indifference and hopelessness; otherwise great capital would stand alone.” – Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope

Check out more incredible political and social insight: http://www.walkingbutterfly.com/2010/12/22/albert-to-win-our-new-world/

"If you really want to help the American theater, don't be an actress, dahling. Be an audience." - Talullah Bankhead

"The word theatre comes from the Greeks. It means the seeing place. It is the place people come to see the truth about life and the social situation. The theatre is a spiritual and social X-Ray of its time. The theatre was created to tell people the truth about life and the social situation." - Stella Adler

"Pity the nation that has to silence its writers for speaking their minds. Pity the nation that needs to jail those who ask for justice, while communal killers, mass murderers, corporate scamsters, looters, rapists, and those who prey on the poorest of the poor, roam free." - Arundhati Roy

‎"[Human beings] will begin to recover the moment we take art as seriously as physics, chemistry or money." - Ernst Levy

Found this here: http://www.hollywoodactorprep.com/blog/2010/07/actors-life-art-soul-usc-commencement-address/

Thursday, July 1, 2010 at 10:10am
USC School of Theatre Commencement Speech
By José Rivera

Congratulations, we’re all colleagues now.
Having been perpetual students of an art form that can’t be fully learned because all the stories haven’t been told yet, we are now able practitioners.
Not only that, we’re partisans in a great struggle that may seem holy to some and crazy to others, but is wildly quixotic even at the best of times.
We’re all veterans of hope, sergeants and captains of an idealism and courage that seem anachronistic and beautifully, dolefully, painfully antique.
Because what we do, what we are trained to do, is to keep an ancient and sullied and disrespected and much maligned and amazing tradition alive.
We together keep the spoken word from going silent, spectacle from disappearing in the ones and zeros of forgetfulness, great life-and-death themes from dying of malnutrition, enormous characters and souls from the purgatory of indifference and ignorance.
Together we keep the The House of Atreus from foreclosure and the Skryker from extinction and Kent and Salem from dying of cancer and Pozzo from getting too lucky.
We are apostles of language, dreamers in blank verse, aristocrats of sight gags, archeologists of gesture and dance and sword battles and mask wearing and mythic games of tragic and comic consequences.
We bring Falstaff to the party and hope he doesn’t get too drunk and pinch too many butts even as we enter through the back door and try to deliver dream-worlds to the wary and the post-modern and the unsuspecting.
We traffic in awe and metaphors and are impatient with the ordinary and expected.
We fight the inertia of silence and talk too loud in polite locations and there is no Ritalin for us.
We don’t succumb to psychoanalysis and the voodoo of easy answers.
We thrive on complexity and ask that our monsters truly terrify us, that our lovers truly slay us with their passion, that our magicians truly make something out of nothing and hand it to us with smoke and a rakish smile.
We seek connections with the strange and communion with brave souls seeking the truth – not the entire truth, just a piece of it will do – a coin of truth we can keep in a pocket near our valuables, that we can spend in those frightening moments when we don’t know ourselves, when we’re in too deep and some clarity would help, some beauty that could redeem and enliven the night.
We turn awful experience and bad relationships and murdering office jobs and loveless parents and poverty and addictions and angst and loss and death itself into the fearsome gold of art.
We are alchemists and con artists, acrobats and used car salesmen, liars and enlighteners, and we are here to do the earth’s bidding because the earth is screaming out its stories and begging for us to write them down, and act them out, and draw her pretty pictures on the face of the clouds.
What’s in store now that you’ve made it through this training ground of the imagination?
Here are some of the highs and lows you can expect on this amazing journey.
There’s joy as you travel to wonderful places and receive the smiles and affection of new friends made in the crucible of performance, in front of raging armies of critics and prove-it- to- me, I’ve-paid-too- much-for- these-tickets, I-saw-it-last- year- in-London audiences and a perfect stranger comes up to you after the show to say they never felt so transported in the theatre before and they understand something about life they never understood until tonight and how you captured her parents’ pain and nobility so beautifully.
Fatigue as you give it everything you have, every single day, every muscle engaged in a marathon that doesn’t end until you end.Pain because you tell yourself it’s just a gig, just a job, but then you fall in love with it anyway.
Discovery of your limits and appreciation for the breathless power of your mastery.
Bliss when you’ve written that one good sentence; or you delivered that one perfect moment when the lights are on you and only you; or you discover in the text an idea or an image or a parable so true that it makes your audience weep with recognition; or you put out into the world a rendering of a staircase or acostume or a throne of gold in three brilliant dimensions that just last week existed in none.
Awe when you sit backstage, a moment before your entrance and realize you’re about to give the greatest soliloquy in our language.
Gratitude when it dawns on you that you make a living from the honey and perspiration of your mind.
Excitement when you write Act One, Scene One on the top of the first page; and you sit along the wall on the afternoon of your third call-back for your favorite play; and you stand in the back of the house and that moment you worked on for fourteen hours with that actor who never seemed to get it gets the biggest laugh of the night.
Amazement when your lights reflect in the physics of time and space exactly what’s happening in the unlit chambers and labyrinths of the hero’s soul.
Even more amazement when your project, which you put together with faith, spit, and favors turns a remarkable profit in actual U.S. currency.
Humility when you look around and everyone else seems more successful, or richer, or quicker, or better reviewed or living on both coasts and are equally familiar with Silver Lake and Williamsburg.
Relief when you figure out that, like all great cyclical events in nature, your long career will rise and fall and you’ll be hot, then forgotten, then hot, then forgotten, then hot again.
Anger when the words won’t cooperate and the costume’s too tight and you made a grave error in casting the world premiere, or passion seems to be ebbing, or you’d rather have a baby, or the grant goes to your rival, or that barbarian in the second row keeps texting his lawyer, or ten people show up to your reading in a theatre with three hundred seats, or you can’t stand Bushwick anymore, or the McArthur people overlooked you – again – or the sitcom’s too tempting, or your favorite actor’s not available, or the culture’s going north while you’re going south.
Or maybe you’ve forgotten something – you forgot the joy and the magic and the purpose and the need for it all.
But then you remember and come back anyway.
That’s the amazing part.
You come back the next day because even when the words don’t come and the costume’s cutting off the blood to your legs, this activity connects you to your most authentic and naked self, to the child who told sweeping sock puppet sagas and imitated your dad’s big laugh and drew pictures of avenging super heroes, to the adolescent who fell in love with the smell of opening night flowers, to the mature artist who became enthralled with the great blank space, that enchanted oval, on which battles determine the course of history and lovers learned the key expressions of the heart and men and women modeled heroism and humanity and Estragon lost his way and colored girls considered suicide and Proctor wouldn’t sign his name and Arial was free to go and a wicked Moon under a Lorca sky betrayed the idea of love.
You come back to balance art and family, and sometimes your checkbook, because nothing feels as good as the act of acting.
You endure the indifference of agents and literary managers because nothing sounds as nice as the click of that perfect metaphor falling into place.
You put off children, or you put off real estate, or you put off the thousand intangible compromises of the spirit because nothing frees you from the dark enchantments of gravity like this.
You stay up to three in the morning memorizing those sides for your best friend’s new play even though she wrote the part for you and the producers insist you have to audition anyway, because nothing brings you closer to Creation that this.
So why do you do these things?
Why come back when it hurts so much?
What kind of people are we?
How crazy do we have to be to put up with this?
Let’s face it, given the speed of today’s run-away clocks, given the accumulation of power and money in the hands of the very few and all the injustice that flows from that, given the complexity of social intercourse in an age of instant talk and delayed reflection, you’re a member of a different species entirely.
You age differently than the rest of the population.
You try hard not to succumb to the common theories and manias of the crowd.
You speak in tongues when everyone else is speaking in fortune cookies.
You make one-of-a-kind little miracles with your bare and blistered hands for below minimum wage as stock markets soar and die and soar and die.
You write about your existential pain in unsentimental words for sentimental audiences.
Your curiosity is so vast and out of control you don’t know boundaries and you annoy your lovers with your constant need to analyze their every nuance and no answer is ever good enough because each answer leads to ten new questions.
You dream in such vivid colors, you wonder if you can market your sleep as the next cool drug.
Your sensitivity to the pain and joy of others is so acute you might as well have multiple personalities.
You and failure are so intimate with each other you could birth one another’s bawling babies.
You try hard not to succumb to the common theories and manias of the crowd.
You speak in tongues when everyone else is speaking in fortune cookies.
You make one-of-a-kind little miracles with your bare and blistered hands for below minimum wage as stock markets soar and die and soar and die.
You write about your existential pain in unsentimental words for sentimental audiences.
Your curiosity is so vast and out of control you don’t know boundaries and you annoy your lovers with your constant need to analyze their every nuance and no answer is ever good enough because each answer leads to ten new questions.
You dream in such vivid colors, you wonder if you can market your sleep as the next cool drug.
Your sensitivity to the pain and joy of others is so acute you might as well have multiple personalities.
You and failure are so intimate with each other you could birth one another’s bawling babies.
You are gifted and cursed with a love of words so intense few other pleasures can move you like Lopahin’s declaration that he bought the cherry orchard, or what Li’l Bit had to do to learn to drive, or what devils of self-doubt whispered to a beautiful and wounded soul in a psychosis at 4:48 am.
For all this and more you came to this school and sacrificed, and worked your ass off, and delayed some big life decisions, and dreamed exceptional dreams, and fertilized your mind, and kept important promises you made to yourself.
That’s the important part: you kept the promises you made to yourself to stay in it and learn.
So now that you’ve come this far, and we’re in this room, together, what’s my advice?
It’s not a lot.
Love grandly.
Work forcefully.
Listen humbly.
Risk intelligently.
Risk stupidly.
Scare yourself.
Recycle your pain.
Think about greatness.
Make babies and make art for them.
Slay your heroes.
Laugh at yourself.
Betray no one’s trust.
Throw parties.
Make time for silence.
Search and search and search and search.
I could go on, but I don’t think you need any moreadvice from me.
I think you’re ready.
You, the fighter and hero of this morning’s tale are trained and ready to unpack your Heiner Muller and your tap shoes and your colored pencils and are brimming with ideas and full of courage and full of fight and you know the obstacles and laugh in their faces and the dragons you fight are windmills and thewindmills you fight are straw and the time to talk about doing it is over.
It’s time to do it.
So let’s go out now, you and I, let’s go out and make some art.
Thank you and all the best of luck.
Jose Rivera is a playwright. [wikipedia]

"But if there was no war than there wouldn't be any good video games..." - Little boy (age 9) at the deli commenting on the anti-war patches on my backpack

"If one cannot state a matter clearly enough so that even an intelligent twelve-year-old can understand it, one should remain within the cloistered walls of the university and laboratory until one gets a better grasp of one's subject matter".

"What people say, what people do, and what they say they do are entirely different things".

"Sooner or later I'm going to die, but I'm not going to retire".

"One of the oldest human needs is having someone to wonder where you are when you don't come home at night".

From: http://womenshistory.about.com/cs/quotes/a/qu_margaretmead.htm

"Being an artist does not make any of us exempt from the laws of humanity -- in fact, it actually makes us more responsible to them." - Eve Ensler.

Read Eve Ensler's wonderful op-ed on Roman Polanski in the Huffington Post.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eve-ensler/does-the-brotherhood-of-f_b_305581.html

Also inspiring on a different note is this article about the very talented Jane Lynch. If you haven't seen her on Glee (or any of her work) you're missing out. I've been a fan forever and am finally glad she's getting the recognition she deserves.

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-et-jane-lynch14-2009oct14,0,1595975.story

"Optimism is a strategy for making a better future. Because unless you believe that the future can be better, it’s unlikely you will step up and take responsibility for making it so. If you assume that there’s no hope, you guarantee that there will be no hope. If you assume that there is an instinct for freedom, there are opportunities to change things, there’s a chance you may contribute to making a better world. The choice is yours." - Noam Chomsky

And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom. - Anais Nin

Clearly, I like quotes...

"You can go a month without food, you can live three days without water, but you can't go more then sixty seconds without HOPE." -Sean Swarner

"Optimism is a strategy for making a better future. Because unless you believe that the future can be better, it’s unlikely you will step up and take responsibility for making it so. If you assume that there’s no hope, you guarantee that there will be no hope. If you assume that there is an instinct for freedom, there are opportunities to change things, there’s a chance you may contribute to making a better world. The choice is yours." - Noam Chomsky

The new addition to my word wall:


I don't believe an accident of birth makes people sisters or brothers. It makes them siblings, gives them mutuality of parentage. Sisterhood and brotherhood is a condition people have to work at. ~Maya Angelou

Every Action Of My Today Is A Seed Holding Within It The Life Or Death Of My Tomorrow.

World Theater Day Message
by Augusto Boal

All human societies are "spectacular" in their daily life and produce
"spectacles" at special moments. They are "spectacular" as a form of
social organization and produce "spectacles" like the one you have come to
see.

Even if one is unaware of it, human relationships are structured in a
theatrical way. The use of space, body language, choice of words and voice
modulation, the confrontation of ideas and passions, everything that we
demonstrate on the stage, we live in our lives. We are theater!

Weddings and funerals are "spectacles", but so, also, are daily rituals so
familiar that we are not conscious of this. Occasions of pom
p and circumstance, but also the morning coffee, the exchanged good-mornings,
timid love and storms of passion, a senate session or a diplomatic meeting
--all is theater.

One of the main functions of our art is to make people sensitive to the
"spectacles" of daily life in which the actors are their own spectators,
performances in which the stage and the stalls coincide. We are all
artists. By doing theater, we learn to see what is obvious but what we
usually can't see because we are only used to looking at it. What is
familiar to us becomes unseen: doing theater throws light on the stage of
daily life.

Last September, we were surprised by a theatrical revelation: we, who
thought that we were living in a safe world, despite wars, genocide,
slaughter and torture which certainly exist, but far from us in remote and
wild places. We, who were living in security with our money invested in
some respectable bank or in some honest trader's hands in the stock
exchange were told that this money did not exist, that it was virtual, a
fictitious invention by some economists who were not fictitious at all and
neither reliable nor respectable. Everything was just bad theater, a dark
plot in which a few people won a lot and many people lost all. Some
politicians from rich countries held secret meetings in which they found
some magic solutions. And we, the victims of their decisions, have
remained spectators in the last row of the balcony.

Twenty years ago, I staged Racine's Phèdre in Rio de Janeiro. The stage
setting was poor: cow skins on the ground, bamboos around. Before each
presentation, I used to say to my actors: "The fiction we created day by
day is over. When you cross those bamboos, none of you will have the right
to lie. Theater is the Hidden Truth".

When we look beyond appearances, we see oppressors and oppressed people,
in all societies, ethnic groups, genders, social classes and casts; we see
an unfair and cruel world. We have to create another world because we know
it is possible. But it is up to us to build this other world with our
hands and by acting on the stage and in our own life.

Participate in the "spectacle" which is about to begin and once you are
back home, with your friends act your own plays and look at what you were
never able to see: that which is obvious. Theater is not just an event; it
is a way of life!

We are all actors: being a citizen is not living in society, it is
changing it.


Dia Mundial de Teatro - 27 Março, 2009
Augusto Boal

Todas as sociedades humanas são espetaculares no seu cotidiano, e produzem
espetáculos em momentos especiais. São espetaculares como forma de
organização=2 0social, e produzem espetáculos como este que vocês vieram ver.

Mesmo quando inconscientes, as relações humanas são estruturadas em forma
teatral: o uso do espaço, a linguagem do corpo, a escolha das palavras e a
modulação das vozes, o confronto de idéias e paixões, tudo que fazemos no
palco fazemos sempre em nossas vidas: nós somos teatro!

Não só casamentos e funerais são espetáculos, mas também os rituais
cotidianos que, por sua familiaridade, não nos chegam à consciência. Não
só pompas, mas também o café da manhã e os bons-dias, tímidos namoros e
grandes conflitos passionais, uma sessão do Senado ou uma reunião
diplomática--tudo é teatro.

Uma das principais funções da nossa arte é tornar conscientes esses
espetáculos da vida diária onde os atores são os próprios espectadores, o
palco é a platéia e a platéia, palco. Somos todos artistas: fazendo
teatro, aprendemos a ver aquilo que nos salta aos olhos, mas que somos
incapazes de ver tão habituados estamos apenas a olhar. O que nos é
familiar torna-se invisível: fazer teatro, ao contrário, ilumina o palco
da nossa vida cotidiana.

Em Setembro do ano passado fomos surpreendidos por uma revelação teatral:
nós, que pensávamos viver em um mundo seguro apesar das guerras, genocídios, hecatombes e torturas que aconteciam, sim, mas longe de nós em países distantes e selvagens, nós vivíamos seguros com nosso dinheiro guardado em um banco respeitável ou nas mãos de um honesto corretor da Bolsa--nós fomos informados de que esse dinheiro não existia, era virtual,
feia ficção de alguns economistas que não eram ficção, nem eram seguros,
nem respeitáveis. Tudo não passava de mau teatro com triste enredo, onde
poucos ganhavam muito e muitos perdiam tudo. Políticos dos países ricos
fecharam-se em reuniões secretas e de lá saíram com soluções mágicas. Nós,
vítimas de suas decisões, continuamos espectadores sentados na última fila
das galerias.

Vinte anos atrás, eu dirigi Fedra de Racine, no Rio de Janeiro. O cenário
era pobre; no chão, peles de vaca; em volta, bambus. Antes de começar o
espetáculo, eu dizia aos meus atores: "Agora acabou a ficção que fazemos
no dia-a-dia. Quando cruzarem esses bambus, lá no palco, nenhum de vocês
tem o direito de mentir. Teatro é a Verdade Escondida".

Vendo o mundo além das aparências, vemos opressores e oprimidos em todas
as sociedades, etnias, gêneros, classes e castas, vemos o mundo injusto e
cruel. Temos a obrigaç o de inventar outro mundo porque sabemos que outro
mundo é possível. Mas cabe a nós construílo com nossas mãos entrando em
cena, no palco e na vida.

Assistam ao espetáculo que vai começar; depois, em suas casas com seus
amigos, façam suas peças vocês mesmos e vejam o que jamais puderam ver:
aquilo que salta aos olhos. Teatro não pode ser apenas um evento--é forma
de vida!

Atores somos todos nós, e cidadão não é aquele que vive em sociedade: é
aquele que a transforma!