Acting Manifesto

When we practice acting we practice love. We practice meditation. We make ourselves real and transparent to others. The theater artist recognizes that reality exists in between people and only in our minds. When we practice acting, we offer to the other our subjectivity. And the same is true of love.

Love makes us as accessible to the other as is possible between human beings. When we discover the consciousness before us, we become psychic and transparent as an offering. This is how we go deeper before we go wider. Depth is more important than breadth to the theater artist, and it is the process of digging that nourishes the soul.

The path deeper is a road of meditation, of presence in the moment when everything else can fall away. This is a presence with oneself that reveals the self to the other. We see ourselves reflected in the other, and so we all have the ethical responsibility to be an accurate mirror for the her. This process of reflection morally binds us to one another with a pact of intimacy. As we interpret the other and the world around us, we have to simplify and do away with embellishment. We find honesty in the simple.

In this in-between, there necessarily exists all historical power dynamics between gender and race, but we can acknowledge the social construction of these concepts and fight their control by being present for the individual in front of us. Through love, listening, and compassion, and with the task of reflecting the individual accurately for themselves, we become obligated to the person, their personhood, and subjectivity, rather than to the history that separates us. While it is important to remember that we exist in a context, through acting we can find each other in this moment.

© 2018 by Mia Schachter. All Rights Reserved.