Theatre as a Means to Fight Egoism

Let’s talk about the role of acting in the method of integral upbringing. You often say that a child, like any person, should learn to change himself, to develop the ability to work above his states...

Of course, we are all acting. After all, we don’t know how to behave. Animals behave naturally. They don’t have feelings of shame or envy. True, they do experience biological envy, if you can call an animal’s emotions that. This feeling they have is determined by biological factors. Animals behave however Nature has programmed them to behave...

One more special quality of acting is that when a person comes close to being in contact with the environment, he “comes out” of his current problems and qualities...

Everything in the work of an actor is aimed at giving a person the ability to become included in others, to transcend his egoism...

When a person creates a certain new facet within himself, he discovers how multi-faceted he is. How many facets can there be in a person? And at what age can this be taught to a child?..

Which boundaries can we delineate here? Can children play animals or plants? Or should they only play people?..

I did not study the basics of acting, but everything in an actor’s work is aimed toward creating the right communication. This is natural. When we play the roles of our friends, we understand each other better and as a result, the amount of conflicts immediately drops. Statistics show this as well. A person starts to judge everyone, including himself and his friend. Besides his own role, he can learn one more role and live out both. He can become his own judge, or his friend’s advocate. These persona become totally equal! By acting, a person becomes objective...

And what is our real “I”?..

If acting is so important for man’s development, why was it so ridiculed and even persecuted for so many centuries? Some people were even burned at the stake for it...

The constant act really does engross an actor. This brings him great pleasure, but at the same time, an agonizing feeling arises where you lose your self. How can one get rid of it?..

When a person becomes a professional actor and becomes absorbed in the new way of life, he begins to fear many things. The image of Mephistopheles (the devil) immediately emerges in his subconscious. Why does this fear emerge?..

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?..

I find it much more interesting to play negative characters. They touch me more, while the positive ones turn out boring. Since these roles influence us so much, how should we treat them?..

We scrupulously analyze any situation or any character, then act them out and experience them, and they remain in a person. Tens or perhaps hundreds of such characters comprise the communicative mechanism that enables a person to connect to the world. A person becomes multi-faceted and multi-layered in his understanding of any person, and can therefore make contact with anyone...