Not All the Roles Must Be Played

– Actors don’t like to play psychologically unstable people or to experience death on stage. When working with children, how can we define the boundaries of which roles are admissible?

– Children should only portray the characters of the people whom they need to come in contact with. This can be a prince or a pauper, a wealthy person or a poor one, an evildoer or a righteous person, a man or a woman, it doesn’t matter.

But they don’t have to enter other characters. I have to understand every person I am in contact with in our society—be it a child, an adult, or an old man. I have to learn to play their states within me and acquire their characters.

– So a child shouldn’t play a person who has died, for example?

– Why should he come in contact with someone who has died? What would be the point of that? Or, for example, why should he have to communicate with a very young child?

Of course, contact with an infant is possible. But usually infants are cared for by their mothers. She understands the baby instinctively. This is how one animal understands another one in Nature. They are practically one organism, and a mother exhibits the animate feeling towards a child.

To understand the relationship between a child and a mother, we have to become included in them and we have to play out these states. But for that, we don’t have to have contact with an infant because there is a mother for that.

However, I do have to understand all the other people and as a result, accumulate the whole world, all of humanity, within me.

– Should a child play various life situations rather than abstract things? Should he portray a real fear rather than an abstract one?

– What kind of abstract fear can there be?

– A child can see something in a movie, for example.

– Life is full of real images and impressions. It’s necessary to teach a child the right understanding and the right way to join every life situation and every incident he encounters.

How does a child find the right way to communicate with a specific group of people who are from a specific social sector? Or how does he understand himself? Who is he? Let him act out himself. It seems to him that he is always in himself, inside the nature that is his. But let him imagine the opposite.

I am the stage director, and this stage director is observing me acting out “me.” This makes me look at myself critically at how I express my “I”. It’s as if two planes begin to coexist within me.

It turns out that this is the only way I can communicate even with my self. This is the only way I can understand myself.

Maybe actors are taught to act in other ways, probably using specific professional terms. I am not familiar with the basics of acting; I am speaking about it the way I understand this process, the way I see it.

We have to get to know man’s nature. We are only now starting to realize that we are all egoists and do not see or feel others. But in order to save our civilization, we have to become similar to Nature and become integrally connected.

Acting or playing is very important for a person’s development. To rise from one level to the next, I have to literally act out the next level. This is how a child portrays a pilot or a chauffeur, for example, and when he becomes an adult he really does become one of them. Playing is instilled in us by Nature.

The same thing happens in our workshops. When I play other people, it’s as if I become them and their characters enter me. That is how a person accumulates the whole world within him.