Tuesday 8 May 2012

WHY DID I LOOSE MY PASSION FOR ACTING AND THEREFORE WHY I QUIT


I do not know. I just did. It felt rather out of blue, but I just could care anymore. There were more thrills, no more excitement, and it all kinda died in me. All was left is irritation, boredom, and dullness. One does arts simply because if one doesn’t do it. it will hurt. It was true for me once, but not anymore.
Auditioning was never really my thing neither networking, and the idea of going out there and selling yourself to strangers wasn’t appealing. Acting never made me any money, so I couldn’t just shut up and suffer and make a living. Moreover, there is no clear understanding of what to do to make a buck as an actor.
Doubts, lots of doubts all the time and simply minutes of happiness and satisfaction of actual acting job. That is just not enough. I do not know if I am any good at it ether. Bringing  characters to life from a line or two on a page is not what I can do. I am artistic and expressive, very theatrical and charismatic, but it is not enough. There should be luck more than anything else. Talent, looks, passion are amazing things, but they will not get you anywhere. Luck will and there is no real need for any of the qualities. We have plenty of one color actors out there. You can wait and hope to hit your luck if there is burning desire or sick ambition in you, but when there is none it’s time to cut the losses. Regrets? None. I loved every minute of it, but now there is just nothing left to enjoy. The dream has disappeared. Whom to blame? Why to blame? Shut up, write the memoirs and move on.
I go to the theatre often. Partly because I have to and partly to find my love and passion in it once again, but I am disappointed every time. Toronto fringe or New York broadway -  I am bored out of my mind. It’s not that everything  see is bad, which is also true, but mostly because I do not believe in this today’s theatre. It just doesn’t do anything for me anymore. I see people, called actors who are full of lies and pretense. I see dull plays about unimportant matters. I suffer through plain plots and flat characters. Theatre is drama and unfortunately there is no drama left in the theatre I  witness today.
It’s a common believe that actors live for the audience. We do not. It is, of course, feels nice and all when audience like what you do, but it is totally all about us actors. It is all about what I, the actor, find inspiration in. What motivates and bring me up really matters. It might be the love of theatre magic, the lights or the sound of applause, but it is what we need. There is an old russian saying, that the audience is a full. It is very true. Majority of the audience have very little knowledge of what a good theatre or film is. They base their opinions on like or don’t like. They do seem to be experts in theatre once they go see it, they believe they know it. It is not true as being sick all the time does not make you an expert in medicine nor a doctor. Yes, audience influence you and your work a lot. Eventually you do what they want and demand or favor and you make money or you do not feed to audience’s poor tasted and play to empty houses but keep your pride for the sake of art. God bless them. Yes, audience tells you want they want and oh, boy, they don’t want the good things. There is art and there is entertainment. People want a lot of entertainment and sometimes a bit of art. It is not wrong it is just how it is. 
A word for theater and film directors. I do not have a lot of experience and I have never done a hollywood movie with a famous and popular (does not mean great) director on board, but I find out that directors do not how to direct actors. I can’t judge about their ability to direct the whole thing. When I direct couple of things we can go back to this subject. No preparation process, luckily if you have a read through and no work on the character. You do the role almost as you did it when auditioning for it. No, not every theatre does that. Some do and that’s just wrong.
I have this show, you see, that I have been doing for seven years and due to the new course there is a question - what to do with it now? Well, I guess I can still do it once in a while when they call for it, but nothing on my side to push, promote nor sell it. No, I am not closing it, probably because it is the last thing I still enjoy doing. So, letting it sit there for some time and see what happens. That is the beauty of being pisces you either go with the flow or you fight the spring and swim against it.
Reading scripts when preparing for an audition it is fascinating how plain and one dimensional the characters are. Most of the time it is just a talking head with random lines, taken away from a story. Call me old fashioned, but I need to know the whole story in order to understand the character. Three lines of a dialogue is just simply not enough. Character in a play, script or story has to react to events and other character's words and actions in order to be live and interesting.  That is rarely the case in those sides which they send you to prepare for an audition. You can’t really understand what kind of an actor one is, unless you give him a proper monologue, dialogue to read. 
Another fabulous thing is a cold read. You walk into an audition and you are handed a script and asked to read it right away. What the hell? How is that suppose to help any of us? I might understand cold read in Hollywood, with big stars, who only play one character all their life, so it does not matter what is in a script, they will even read a menu at McDonald's as their character. We have young, starting their careers filmmakers who know very little in the business and no nothing about the work with actors. Are these people able to cast exceptionally good actors? No. How do I know that? Watch their movies - the answer is there. It’s bad.
The idea of a vacation or a break from all this acting crap once popped into my head. I was living in New York at a time and after certain incidents I had decided to take a break from a life of an actor. I fond a job, through a friend of mine, as a coat check girl in a restaurant in West village. Simple, local and I made big tips. I worked for thirty days in a row with one day off for Christmas. All I had to do, was to be at work at 6 p.m., help people with their coats, grab tips, grab a bite, drink the night away and go home to my 190th street, hopefully not too drunk to miss my stop. I was living the life of a vegetable. Boy, that felt good. For a month.   It’s time to try that again. Go away, change the job, change life style and see if i miss acting. I can always come back and start again refreshed and eager. Dragging my sorry ass through the life of, lets face it, unsuccessful actor is beyond good and evil.  That’s it then. Wrap it up. Have a break. Move on.

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