I just really like this quote.
I aim to uphold no single definition of art, as I deem it counterintuitive to label something as visceral as performance art with the limitations of written language.
As with many ideas that we attempt to quantify, these ideas merely get lost in translation. Gunnar de Jong doesn't attempt to provide an overarching definition of art, allowing the reader to decipher it themselves.
The role of improv / action is "to build the imaginary circumstances and making them sensually real", as described by de Jong.
Here are the two main life lessons that Gunnar de Jong extracts:
1. An actor's obligation is to deliver behavior
It's not merely just the words and actions used, but also understanding the character at a much deeper level to embody it. I really love this quote that the author used from Mike Leigh:
People have talked about my characters as a collection of tics, but that’s reductive. The voice doesn’t exist by itself in a vacuum. It is how some people talk, specifically people from certain places in the Thames Estuary. But so many different things on so many different levels are organically on the go that you can’t quite put your finger on what it actually is that provokes your reaction. A fundamental misunderstanding about my work — or certainly a reductive view of it — is that by collaborating with an actor I arrive at what I could otherwise have arrived at if I’d sat in a room and written a script and then cast the actor. That somehow it’s just another way of arriving at the same goal. But this is fundamentally not the case. The philosophy of the thing is to create characters who are like people actually are, with all the attendant complexities.
2. Notion of going towards the harder choice
Characters going towards the harder choices make the scene more engaging and thus better written, and because it attracts more enticing behavior, it also manifests better acting.
The paradoxical nature of acting and improvising.
One of the main realizations I had over the course of this work was that when improvisations are done well, they feel well-written, and when text-work is acted well, it feels improvised. This submersion between both worlds isn’t surprising. In both, the aim is to fool the audience, essentially, into believing something that’s not actually happening.
Just another quote that I really loved about his distinction between great improvisers and actors.
Improvisation also helps you to develop a sense of the “first time,” one of the sine qua nons of acting. An audience should not sense that it is witnessing an entertainment which has been very carefully rehearsed for its delectation and applause, but rather that it is seeing something that is transpiring at that very second for the first time. That quality of the first time, unfortunately, is very rare among actors. It requires knowing what you’re doing, plus the ability to forget it and then to find it again when you get on stage. The truly great actors have that gift.’
