Agony and Ecstasy of an Actor

NINTH SKANDHA from "Ravana Katha"

1

 I don’t know very much, but a very little.

                        I don’t know why people sing, why they paint, why even perform.

             Why do people touch each other’s hand as if that is how they ‘recognize’ touch.

             I don’t comprehend tears, laughter, encouragement, and dejection.

 Why do people yawn, why even sneeze.

Why do people take a turn in their sleep.  

(There’s no language for tears,

there’s no country for lullabies,

the only country is childhood in you,

I only understand this.)

    I don’t understand this between why and why not. I don’t know why I do theatre. [1]

2

This time I am a performer, an actor. Gentlemen, please give me your ears.

    You can’t blame me to be pretentious. Because, you too are pretentious.

If I wear the ten headed mask upon my face, definitely I’ll be the Ravana in your eyes. I’ll enact, which is nothing but pretensions. Okay, I accepted everything. But it is equally true that you are also pretending as if you believe me to be Ravana, and nobody else. [2]

Then why blame me?

So, let us pretend.  Let us pretend again and again. Pretension,

 Only pretension will be our mere mean of communication.

3

 I know, every act is some kind of enactment of some act.

Each moment we act.[3] At this very moment,

I’m acting like a writer and you are like a reader or a listener.

  While opening a file in your office, if you are unable to forget that

you are a lover,

 You are somebody’s wife or husband

Or a poor citizen,

Being seated on your reading table if you don’t forget that you are a responsible father,

 A social worker or a singer,

                                    You are a journalist or a gambler or a football player,

 Putting your eyes into your beloved’s eyes if you still keep yourself remembering

 How much is left to reap in the field of paddy,

 Or if suddenly you remember that you have forgotten to add sugar to the cup of tea;

                                                Then know it,

You are a flop actor.

4

Everyone enacts,

as we have our pasts and futures[4],

as we have our identities,

as we have our heavens to provide us our times[5].

as we have fear of loosing our identities,

 When you walk on the streets you are a traveler,

An eater while eating food.

In front of your father, beloved or a master you are constantly acting like

A son or daughter,

 A lover

 Or a disciple.

When I an actor enter to the stage for acting, only then, I offer myself to be seized  that                I’m an actor. I’m mere a performer.

Only that is the time, an actor offers the ‘self’ to be seized

At that very moment being seated among the audience’s seat you start to pretend that you are not believing me as an actor. With all your conscience, you pretend that I’m not a mere performer. I am either X, or Y, or Z.  I am Ravana. You let your ears open to listen me, keep your eyes open to see me.

5

Being a performer I ever liked the wings and the skies of a proscenium.

Won’t you stare at me if I have a pair of real wings in my back?

Won’t you hear me if I stand under the real sky and start to speak?

 My wings are hiding me.

My sky is constantly limiting my territory.

My cyclorama is my horizon.

I never can reach beyond these; neither can I touch your hand in real.

Again and again I become the Ravana.

I start my interior monologue. Dedouble[6] myself.

 Ravana is not only a mythological character; or an image built up in our grandmother’s tongue, in our childhood days.

Ravana is also a ten-headed – Bhaworiya, actor.

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[1] These lines were written much earlier and performed in various places. Translated into English by Parnab Mukherjee.

[2] Actors are probably the only art makers who can be told (in response to gestures they make with their vocal and physical apparatus, their own attributes and their responses) by an observer that what they have palpably executed is not real or truthful. Anuradha Kapur

, “Actors Prepare”, Theatre India, N S D. Vol-9

[3] Once B V Karanth explained in a theatre workshop, while dealing with actor’s training.

[4] The actor or actress represents, but what he or she represents is always still in the future and already in the past, where as his or her representation is impassible and divided, unfolded without being ruptured, neither acting nor being acted upon. It is in this sense that there is an actor’s paradox; the actor maintains himself in the instant in order to act out something perpetually anticipated and delayed, hoped for and recalled. The role played is never that of a character: it is a theme (the complex theme or sense) constituted by the components of the event, that is, by the communicating singularities effectively liberated from the limits of individuals and persons. The actor strains his entire personality in a moment which is always acting out other roles when acting one role.        

Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense P. 171.

[5]  There is time for everyone, under the heaven: from bible, used by T. S. Eliot in his Love Song of J. Alfred Prufock. Pit Seegar composed a famous song “Turn Turn Turn” on it.

[6]  A term coined for interior monologue, see discussions on the poem mentioned above.