Neutrality: The Actor and the Alexander Technique. Inside the atom subatomic particles – lepton, boson, hadron, neutrino, and quark – partner and dance in eternal opposition. Attraction and repulsion meet in the atom so perfectly that outside it the net result is atomic neutrality. Neutrality is a state of balanced contrariness. Actors aspire to neutrality. Emotion, movement play in them so freely that it might be taken for relaxation. It is that, perhaps, and much more, a state of neutrality in which forces are equalized and in play, distance and nearness, entering in and staying back, up and down, involvement and psychic distance, the centrifugal and the centripetal. Our life, our breath, our acting, all of nature, are built upon contraries. Without them, said Blake, “there is no progression.” Relax and you prove yourself to be, well, a relaxer. Oppose though – cultivate contraries – pull the keys toward you just as as much as you push them away or press them down, let your back stay back just as much as you move forward, let your head belong to the sky just as much as your heel to the ground, hear as profoundly as you speak, and you prove yourself to be, not a relaxer, but a player. On what stage, you ask? Well, in words of the Bard, all the world, on the stage of your choice, whether it be a kitchen, the earth, the sky, some theater great or small, all the world. Wherever you find it possible and practical, oppose, live in the dance. Cultivate contraries, but contrariness, not so much.
Posted on: Sat, 25 Jan 2014 14:55:11 +0000
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