Birth of A Soul
Universal Theater
For centuries humans have quarried. We’ve extracted stone from Earth for use as everything from grave markers to world wonders.
Quarry laborers, in days of yore, worked with primitive mining tools. Picks, chisels and hammers fashioned from metal or stone. Fair to say they had more than a few brutal days at the office.
They gave us many gifts, not least of which is a teaching story that has crossed time, place, and cultures. To wit (that’s lawyer talk):
A wandering anthropologist, doing research, came upon several men toiling in an ancient quarry late on a hot, sunny day. He approached one man, by all appearances drenched and dreary, to ask about the nature of his occupation.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m doing my work,” he said with resignation.
The friendly anthropologist moved on to a second man. He appeared drenched and worn, though not at all dreary.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m supporting my family,” he said with satisfaction.
Our friendly anthropologist espied a third man who appeared far more energetic than any other in sight.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m am building a cathedral, to honor the Holy Spirit,” he said beaming, his face soaked in sweat.
I’ll leave it to my dear departed friend, Snooky Young, to drive this lesson home. (With any luck we’ll find space for much more Snooks along the way. He was a gem)
Our experience of life grows out of how we see our lives. How we see saturates the how of what we do.
“Acting is doing things truthfully with a purpose in created circumstances.”
We do life to express Intention.
WHY?
Remember, the Universe is made of stories. Stories within stories. Stories related to all other stories. Our lives play out in activities and actions that serve a purpose.
Our INTENTIONS, known and unknown, move us. Stories take flight on the energy of intention. For the biologically inclined in our midst, cell scientists in particular, intentions are the mitochondria of stories.
ACTING HUMAN intends to connect intention to skillful creation. To live life alive. Not only to infuse our individual lives with creative life force, but to act generously (as Stella urges); to share, celebrate, and amplify vitality and spirit in a Universal Theater.
While individual persons will certainly accrue a long list of benefits in all prosaic aspects of daily life, occupational and personal, our truest intention is to live in and pay attention to the WHOLE. All life everywhere and always, in every here and now.
When we see ourselves as separate from the dynamic life of a WHOLE Universe we stand apart, flummoxed by an illusion we’ve come to believe is reality.
“When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.” ~John Muir
“Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.” ~Albert Einstein
BACK TO MOSCOW
Leopold Antonovich Sulerzhitsky, known as Suler, was a Russian theatre director, painter and teacher of Polish descent. He is associated with the Moscow Art Theatre and the household of Leo Tolstoy. Among his many students were Yevgeny Vakhtangov and Michael Chekhov.
(Michael Chekhov is Anton’s nephew. We’ll hear from him regularly as he has been influential in my study and practice of theater, and life, in ways that have birthed ACTING HUMAN.)
Tatyana Tolstaya was a Suler schoolmate; she introduced him to her famous father. Suler was taken with Leo Tolstoy's ideas of pacifism and anarchism and decided to dedicate his life to their dissemination.
Suler worked closely with Constantin Stanislavski for many years.
As Suler was well versed in Eastern-influenced religious practices, he introduced Stanislavski to yoga, meditation and Prana.
NOTE: Trumpet playing is a robust form of Prana. I didn’t know Suler. I knew Pops. Can we ever get enough of Louis Armstrong?
Stanislavsky came to see his system as a way for actors to embody spirit while engaged in realistic behavior.
Boleslavsky, who was as you’ll recall, an original member of the Moscow Art Theater and a co-founder of the American Laboratory Theater, defined acting as “the life of the human soul receiving its birth through art."
“Why did he (Suler) love the Studio so much? Because it fulfilled one of his greatest life goals,” Stanislavski said. “To bring together people with each other, create a common cause, common goals, common labor and joy, to fight banality, violence, and injustice, to serve love and nature, beauty and god.
Suler believed that art — and the process by which art was made — could implant those precepts here on earth. The world was a dishonest and broken place, but people were fundamentally good and had the potential to make the world truthful and beautiful.
Theater could enable this by telling the truth, and by revealing the unspoken common language that connected us all.
His student Vakhtangov declared, in terms Suler would have been proud of, that “the purpose of art is to lead people to be more attentive to each other, soften their hearts, and ennoble their actions.””*
*Excerpted from The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act by Isaac Butler
HERE WE ARE - AGAIN
As I started to write todays dispatch, the notion of more time in class, as promised, was where I began. Given the pesky creative process, we’ve taken a turn. Not too fast nor sharp. Nevertheless, I hope you were wearing seatbelts.
I feel we will best serve our highest intention if we diverge from that notion.
My gnawing feeling (which could be a simple milkshake craving) is that I’ve buried the lead, and that in emphasizing ACTING as such, informed largely by the ways I’ve taught live in studio, I am misleading us.
We will come back to class as our imaginations deepen sufficiently to experience classes in this medium, writing read on screens.
Acting is learned by doing. With fulsome imagination I suspect we can create a living studio experience together. In time. Patience.
For the nonce, a more pervasive understanding of the development of and context for ACTING HUMAN will best serve.
Now to the buried lead.
ACTING HUMAN is a spiritual practice.
Our practice together in what some call a Sangha in a retreat or monastery setting, we see as a daily practice, living awake and intentionally creative in what we’ve heretofore known as ordinary life.
I have some reservations about the term ’spiritual.’ For many it carries other worldly weight. ACTING HUMAN is in no way other worldly. It’s all about seeing clearly, compassionately, and creatively, in the here and now, in our mysterious and magical world.
We live in a Universal Theater. A seeing place.
To ACT HUMAN transforms life lived as ordinary, and conditioned, to an extraordinary (though entirely natural) experience of life lived alive. Life shot through with clear vision. Infused with spirit.
We awaken as we practice and create by skillful means.
As we build a Universal Theater that serves each and all of us, and we learn to play as “one singular sensation,” mindful of the social challenges that mark our times, and our capacity through a living theater to impact social ills, we can create, with heartfelt and courageous INTENTION, a wholesome world.
The kind of creative practice that ACTING HUMAN presages, mirrors what all spiritual practices promise - altered consciousness.
We practice to change awareness.
We change the way our minds see our minds.
We change the way we see the world.
The world sees us seeing, as we are, after all, one vision. We can, with sincere intention and practice, engender harmony, peace, and loving kindness.
Our experience of life grows out of how we see our lives.
When we live life alive the whole world sees itself as a theater where infinite creativity thrives. A theater of endless iterations, reflecting the highest human aspirations. A kaleidoscopic invitation to harmony, wonder and joy.
WE ARE ONE SINGULAR SENSATION - ACTING HUMAN
On Sunday: A Few Words On Words
Until then,
Lights Up!
Every installment gets better. I mostly love how you know/teach that what comes from inside this "human" is actually a connection with all, not a private separation as most of us seem to think. . .this inner work is a way to "embody spirit while engaging in realistic behavior." YES! Thanks for these writings, Richard. What a sweet Valentine's Day gift for all those you love.