Today is the International Day of the Actor and Actress in honor of San Ginés, patron saint of actors. He was a Roman artist who in the third century made a parody of baptism, but soon converted to Christianity, for which he was beheaded. He is represented with a mask and a stringed instrument, prefiguring the two masks of tragedy and comedy still in force.
There is a unique pleasure: going to see a play where, without external artifice, a character appears played by an actor, an actress, who is capable of immersing us, with her voice and gestures, in a different world.
Getting into a character, whatever it may be, experiencing their own emotions, understanding how they deal with their environment and capturing with their voices, the expression of the eyes, mouth and body gestures, is the challenge for those who act. to give us a new Oedipus or a new Jocasta, a new Hamlet, a new Ophelia, a new Don Juan, a new Joker, a new Joan of Arc, etc.
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But where does this universal art come from?
It comes from ancient Greece. Initially in festivals in honor of the gods, where in the fifth century BC, great writers such as Sophocles, Aeschylus, Euripides and Aristophanes created tragedy and comedy. Then, the second source was the famous Commedia dell’Arte, in Renaissance Italy, and the English Elizabethan theater, which was embodied in Shakespeare and touched on taboo subjects such as sex and death.
The seventeenth century was the great era of the so-called classical theatre, with rigid rules (unity of time, place and action) that bequeathed to us still performed works such as those of Molière, with his Tartuffe and his Miser.
With the exception of Italy with the Commedia dell’Arte, and Japan with the kabuki theater, until the 19th century women were forbidden to exhibit themselves on stage in a trade that was seen as immoral (many actors were excommunicated); therefore it was men who played the female roles. Let us also remember Olympe de Gouges, who during the French Revolution wrote the Declaration of the Rights of Women and also dedicated herself to the theater; she formed a team of actresses and ended up guillotined.
The 20th century saw many changes in the way of doing theater. Collective creation reappeared, heir to the commedia dell’arte. The voice was no longer the main element in the training of the actor, the work of the body prevailed and the method of the German playwright Bertolt Brecht stood out, with the “distancing” of the actor in front of his character so as not to create emotion in the audience but rather reflection.
But it was the method of the Russian director Stanislavski that began to be applied with greater insistence in the great theater schools, including the famous Actors Studio in the United States, which also trains film actors. In the method, the actor must work on sensory memory, the psychology of the character, and deploy his imagination and creativity to the maximum. Some of the great movie actors come from this school, like Al Pacino, Antonio Banderas, Nathalie Portman, Meryl Streep.
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In Colombia the theater is currently very active, but the path of actors and actresses has not been easy. It has been a profession with little support from the State and, for this reason, it has required a lot of dedication and not a little sacrifice on the part of those who have decided to stay in the trade.
The legacy of great artists and schools that bravely insisted, such as the School of Dramatic Art in Cali and Bogotá, the current ASAB, the university groups, the Enrique Buenaventura school or the experiences of Teatro Libre, La Candelaria, TPB and many others who were and still are, continue to open the way to resume classical and contemporary theater, or to present works of collective creation.
Even in the midst of incessant technological innovation, acting work is still present, using resources that depend solely and exclusively on the human being: the voice, gestures, the body. Thanks to actors and actresses we can imagine, rebuild, see life and contemplate existence from different angles. Happy actor and actress day.
2023-08-26 17:29:34
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