the timboucher experience

There’s another outline of thought I’m beginning to see reveal itself amidst my historical researches into the life of the traveling performer. I don’t have enough academic background to know properly what the scholarly terms are for it, but I would describe it as the actor as vessel. Stage directors like Copeau sought to completely demolish the substance of the actor as a person and rebuild each into a perfect vessel for the execution of the director’s dramatic vision. Marionettes and puppets even were considered during certain time periods to represent the sort of eliminative perfection which could be achieved when the actor ariste was able to surrender himself fully to the demands of the role. The body, face and hands, likewise of the skilled mime or pantomime artist responds fully to even the subtlest commands of the mind through what appears to be an effortless exertion of will, seamless in its fluid integrity. True beauty is hypnotizing, mesmerizing. It sets artiste-actor and spectator perfectly into the space of the moment and a moment wholly other, wholly elsewhere, wholly imagined, holy.

Two summers ago, I heard actors at my summer theatre talking about whether or not its okay for career actors to have obviously visible tattoos. Some people suggested it would limit the roles one would be able to take. Tattoos have a certain image in culture, which a director may or may not want. But looked at on a deeper level, the subject points towards the aesthetic and perhaps spiritual question of how much of one’s own distinguishing and perhaps uniquely marked “self” can and should be eliminated in the attainment of the Philosopher’s Stone, the fulfillment of the artistic process, mastery, perfection, apotheosis.

• Preparing the Vessel
• Kate Bush’s Mime Babooshka
• Self-Reduction & The Actor
• Goddamn
• Actor to play Officiant at