What is the actor’s creation? The actor creates with something that is immaterial. It takes on a temporary form (of gesture, sound, word…), but nothing remains. After the performance is over, it has vanished and lives on only in the memory of the people involved (or not).

To be creative within the theater event the actor needs to go to the same “immaterial and transient” place within himself. This “place” is his own soul, or: his experience of himself and of life around him.

We can observe how we are unable to define or capture our own experience. “It” eludes constantly, shifts constantly. The act of wanting to capture “it” has already changed “it”. “It” is the way my soul, my will, my inner life, moves. “It” is outside of my control, because this “it” is “me”.

What can I do in this attempt to create with this slippery soul of mine, a soul I can never be sure of, because it will never be one thing?

Instead of placing importance onto the ‘result” of being one thing or another, I can notice how my relationship to life is moving from moment to moment. A way to notice this is to move myself. Not to move to create anything in particular, but to move in order to find out: what do I really feel or want, how do I really relate to what is happening. Not how should I react, but how do I react? Maybe I find out that I really push something away I think I ought to embrace.

By allowing myself to move, to express what is there I am noticing the movement of my own soul, a movement that might have been curbed by socialization; I am noticing how I constantly accept, reject, long, suffer, etc…

Experiencing our own ever-changing relationship to the world is to be in contact with our own life of gesture. We are in contact with our own “will”.

Out of this contact with a living force within him the actor can begin to experiment with this world of gesture: If I find that I am withdrawing from someone, say: a teacher, what would happen to me, if outwardly I would start to approach him with open arms.

It is important that I do not lie to myself, in order to attain a certain result. When I move, I will have an experience. This experience is always the truth.

It is important for me to believe more in my experience, then in what anybody (including myself) expects to happen. In this way I allow the gesture, my own gesture, to speak to me and to change me. This change will happen to me. I cannot change. I can only be changed. A gesture that changes me can be called a psychological gesture; it can awaken in me the notion of who I have become, a notion of who that person is: the character.

(Text by Ragnar Freidank)