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October 07, 2005
A Russian Actor Pretends
What a scene this guy makes! Talking about the dancers and how their movements are meaningless and empty. I can imagine a class of actors learning to use their bodies and move in ways they may not ever need to just to explore the extremities of their capability of movement, and I can understand why. It is up to them to give their movements meaning, they are the actors.
In the same way, I can understand Tortsov, or Stanislavski or whoever he is, teaching these students to understand their "sense of movement" and explore the flow of energy that courses through their bodies not when they are performing concocted dance moves, but when they are doing something as normal and everyday as walking. However, I don't see how ultimately this excercise was any different from the dancers', seeing as NO human being actually walks this way. Tolstov likes to think that our movements are dictated by this internal energy, but the truth is, in everyday life, are movements are dictated more by the external things whose influence he despises. We walk a certain way because we feel a certain way, because we are rounding a sharp corner, or avoiding running into other people, because we are in a room surrounded by superiors or friends who look up to us. I would think that, as an actor, studying these effects should be the next step, immediately following a dance lesson or a lesson in walking, they both appear to be serving very much the same purpose- simply to open the body and explore its range of movement in order to be more capable of isolating characteristics of movement.
Posted by Roman, Christin at October 7, 2005 11:55 AM