“For anyone to go on stage and perform live in front of an audience requires considerable bravura and skill. To repeat this night after night, and to keep it fresh, the theatre actor also needs to be highly disciplined and self-possessed.
Each evening an actor enters the building as themselves but will go on the stage as somebody-else. To achieve this transformation, a dressing room is provided, which allows him or her to make the psychological negotiation that is required between themselves and the fictional character. To photograph actors when they are “getting into character” is to see them at their most photogenic as you can see why they have been attracted to this particular thrill of becoming another.
In a world which increasingly allows us to have a “second chance”, live performance is a unique hand-made piece of work, which is created in front of you and cannot rely on another take, as in film, or digital correction if something goes wrong. The performer is therefore very exposed and there is something endlessly romantic and heroic about it.”
I love how he describes acting as a remarkable profession. This introduction makes me want to study the psychology of an actor. In sociology, the analogy would be that we are all actors, and the world is our stage.
Media often only focus on a private life of an actor, but then again, not all actors are capable of describing what they do. It’s not until I read a lot of interviews that I can partly imagine what it’s like to play someone else for a living — and being exposed the whole time.
I love anything behind the scene for the exact reason that Annand explains in the last paragraph. I wish I could see this exhibition. We need more of this stuff.
