Like all of us I am a storyteller and an image maker. Except I am writing and imaging my life in the theatre, but in reality, too.
Because I’ve had the privilege of performing the same autobiographical play a number of times I could see how the play would shift during my training as a performer. The text was the same, but I was different because I had more life experiences, more acting experience but also because I have more breath in my body because of the training I have done with my voice teacher Fides Krucker.
Having more breath means the stories are rendered with more scope and scale.
Acting teachers and voice coaches know that it takes an actor more breath to perform Shakespeare or any kind of heightened poetic text. You can be as authentic as you want, but if you only have a small amount of breath in your body you will only be able to bring a small amount emotionally to the words which are poetic, not casual. Our emotional life exists on the breath. It is the breath.
But, theatrical genre isn’t just an aesthetic. It isn’t just a convention of form. IT IS A WAY OF EXPRESSING TRUTH. IT IS THE FORM OF EXPERIENCE.
This brings a question to the forefront of my practise as an artist.
We can write and live our lives with the vitality and scale of a sitcom. But could our lives be as expansive as the Greek plays? Shakespeare? Beckett? All these theatre makers were inscribing their truths. They weren’t just being theatrical.
If you are performers or not, I urge you to continue voice work, body work, breath work or if that doesn’t resonate with you then athletics or yoga or meditation, whatever you can do to get more breath into your body
To be inspired is literally to be filled with breath.
The more breath in your body means the more life in your body –> more sensation, more emotion, more awareness, more heart, more empathy, more sensuality, every moment becomes heightened.