An Ego-Spherical Theatre
By Christopher Vened Szwaja
“I often warn people: “Somewhere along the way, someone is going to tell you, ‘there is no “I” in a team. What you should tell them is, ‘Maybe not. But there is an “I” in independence, individuality, and integrity.”
Quote by George Carlin
So, please, don’t tell me ever again to get rid of my ego. It is the best thing I have. It is who I am as I know it. It is my individual identity. In Latin ‘ego’ literally means ‘I’. Why would I even consider getting rid of my ego? Supposedly, in the name of some collective “we”? Oh, no! Who would do such a morbid thing: to deny oneself in the name of some collective ideology or belief?
If someone asks you to sacrifice your “I”, and/or to deny yourself to belong to some collective, such as some party, or some church, or a sect, or a theatre, or any kind of a group, run away. It is not a good group, or ideology, or faith that does not respect the individuality of a person. They want to make you a totalitarian being that is a no-one, a conformist, a member without your own self, without your own mind.
The group mentality of the collective is to modify your “I” by “They”, so “everyone is the other, and no one is himself,” as Martin Heidegger put it. It is in particular harmful for art. Mind you, collective theatres are never good. They can’t be good because the collective is not creative; it is not able to create but only to shout slogans.
Artistic creativity is rooted in the individuality of the artist. Only an individual man or woman can come up with something new, original, or simply authentic. It is a matter of an individual talent and genius, and those gifts are not endowed to the collective. In fact, the collective aborts it.
The artist speaks only in his own name, expresses the self, and shows the world as he or she sees it. One must be true to oneself to be a creative artist. John Wolfgang von Goethe said, “Individuality of expression is the beginning and end of all art.” This statement can be a motto of The Ego-Spherical Theatre.
The Ego-Spherical Theatre places an individual artist in its center as its alpha and omega. No doubt this formula fits perfectly well to the one-person theatre, when the artist is both the author and the performer of the show, as a one-man or woman show, or solo concert, or solo exhibition, and so on. I’ve done a one-man show, called “Human Identity,” which I wrote, staged, and performed myself. It was a fully satisfying experience. I did what I wanted and how I wanted, with full conviction that it is the right way. It is because in art there is only one right way to do it and it is my way. The point is to find it.
It might sound to you, as I am a proponent of extreme individualism. Well, I am! The risk is that you might create a false ego and to make a fool of yourself in front of the audience. Mind you, I didn’t. The audience liked my show and I got good reviews. However, not all of them liked it and not all reviews were good. Some people complained and even were angry with me for being politically incorrect. They wanted me to change it or cut it out. But I didn’t. I stuck to my guns. My wife thought that I was stubborn as a donkey, that it would be enough to cut or change a few lines and that would appease all those offended critics. But I refused to do that. She was right; I was stubborn as a donkey.
Alright then, but how does the formula of the Ego-Spherical Theatre fit to the group theatre, if at all?
Well, it does fit, if you treat each member of the group as an individual with his or her own mind, so to speak, with respect to her ego.
The group theatre is run by a team of individuals and each of them has a specific function. There is the writer who might not be present during rehearsal of the production but he or she wrote a play, or a script. And the first principle of the Ego-Spherical Theatre is: respect the author. Realize his play as written. For any unauthorized changes to the play is a travesty.
Then there is the director of the play, or film production, whose main duty is to stage the author’s vision and to overview its realization done by the actors, choreographers, designers, and technicians. The director’s position in the theatre is the least creative – in the strict sense, but the most authoritative, because he determines the concept of the performance, organizes the rehearsal process, and the director always has the last word. But it is the author of the play, the actors, the choreographer, and designers who are the undisputed creators of the performance. I am not saying this to diminish the director’s merits. The director is indispensable in the theatre, without him it is difficult to put on a good show. The theatre team works well only under the director’s leadership, because he or she guides them so that their work fits the whole performance, integrally coherent. Otherwise, if there were no director, it would be a patchwork of often incompatible elements and parts. To prevent that the director needs to impose the strict interpretation of the play as the common denominator on everybody involved. Everyone involved has to agree on that to unify the message of the play (or a film), and to find its characteristic style, and to invoke its particular spirit. Nevertheless, the director shall not limit the creative input from the designers and actors. They are independent artists, responsible for their own work, in their own rights. A good director would not trample on their creative freedom but at the same time would not let them go overboard or in the wrong direction. Jerzy Grotowski, a Polish theatre director who had a gift to formulate catchy phrases, said, “the director is as a midwife assisting the actor in his dramatic search.” True, it is a desired quality and skill for the director. Some gifted directors go even further: they know how to invoke the causative spirit of the whole production and to inspire everybody involved. There are directors who are also the author of the production. They have their original vision and know how to stage it. Some of them are even able to show how to perform it. I worked with a director like that. His name was Henryk Tomaszewski, and he was the founder and director of the Wroclaw Pantomime Theatre. I was a member and a soloist of that famous company and worked with Henryk Tomaszewski for eight years. He was a theatrical wizard. He knew how to create theatrical miracles and how to inspire the actor to perform it. However, such a creative gift is an exception, not the rule. This cannot be imitated, because it will only result in usurpation. This creative genius can’t be faked. It either is or it isn’t. There are directors who would like to pretend to have this talent, but beware of them; they are merely false gurus. The theatrical miracles come from within, not from without.
When I direct a play, be it written by me or someone else, I expect the actor to portray the character as exactly as written. Yet at the same time I want the actor to be authentic in it, to express his or her own self. It seems contradictory, but it is not. The character in the play is merely a blueprint described as a pattern of conduct and behavior but the individual essence is missing. In different words, the character in the play is like a human puppet but without a soul. To bring this ‘puppet’ to life the actor invests it with his own soul, or in different words, with her own individual inner essence, which is the self or simply the ‘I’ of the actor.
I believe that this individual inner essence is innately given, let’s say, by nature or God, if you prefer, by that it is irreplaceable. The idea is that there is predestination in it and it manifests itself as the subjective disposition “I”. Each individual “I” has a preference for this or that. “I” makes choices and decisions and is able to experience the world in an individual way. Naturally there is no other “I”, there is no collective “I”. So, it is why we are not all the same.
The individual preference of “I” is a decisive factor in forming the character of a person, which in psychological sense is the ego. The repeated choice becomes a habit, and habit forms the character.
In life, the functioning of “I” might be automatic. It is enough to trust it, to be true to yourself, to discover your preference for this or that and by that to always be certain what you want, and what to do, and how to conduct yourself in life. Just by following your preference, you will become who you are. Great, it seems simple. But is it good or bad? Well, it is good if you are by nature a good person, but bad, if evil. By nature human beings are both good and evil. Yet the proportions of it are not the same for all people, some are more good, while others are more evil. There is no equality here; the proportion varies. In some extreme cases, there are bad seeds that become evil persons, such as perverted sickos, or murderous psychopaths. If they become such by nature, it is better if they restrict their natural impulses and develop an alter ego instead. But is it possible? Not in all cases, some psychopaths are not reformable, but virtually yes, it is possible: people have free will to choose and to retrain their preference, if it is harmful to others. It can be done through education, cultivation, and also conscience does its work on its own, if you let it.
In acting, the functioning of “I” is rather not automatic but must be consciously readjusted to make the same choices as the character does in the play. For the actor, the character in the play is an alter ego. To acquire it, the actor must suspend her own private ego on the account that one is not able to act in two different characters at the same time.
Mind you, I am asking the actor to suspend her ego, not to rid it off. Having an alter ego isn’t something unusual in life, even a few of them. Almost everyone has at least one alter ego, usually it is a professional ego, such as being a nurse, or a doctor, a bricklayer, or a fashion model, a soldier, a lawyer, or a politician. But the actor has as many alter egos as the roles he plays, or rather how many characters he portrays. And by that the actor experiences many different ways of life through fiction, as if he or she had many destinies or fates.
Apparently acting is ego-centered. But I don’t want the actor to fall into a pitfall of extreme individuality, which would be being narcissistic, with a mantra: me, me, and me. To avoid that, the actor must remember that she is acting not for herself but for the audience. And the audience represents the humanity as a whole, with which the actor has contact on the universal basis.
I suppose that the essence of human identity may be grasped, revealed or understood as a crisscross of uniqueness and universality. That crisscross is mysterious. And although the proportion of universality is vastly larger than uniqueness, without this bit of difference we would all probably be the same, as if we were cloned. But we are not the same; you can see it with your own naked eye.