Preparing a character is the opposite of building-it is a demolishing, removing brick by brick everything in the actor's muscles, ideas and inhibitions that stands between him and the part, until one day, with a great rush of air, the character invades his every pore.
Interpretation
The process of preparing for a role involves stripping away personal barriers to embody the character fully.
In this quote, Peter Brook emphasizes that an actor's preparation for a performance is less about constructing a new identity and more about dismantling their own preconceived notions and limitations. This thorough dismantling allows the actor to authentically embody the character, resulting in a genuine and immersive portrayal that resonates with audiences.
In practice
In a drama workshop, when discussing the approach to character preparation.
The purpose of theatre is... making an event in which a group of fragments are sudde nly brought together... in a community which, by the natural laws that make every community, gradually breaks up... At certain moments this fragmented world comes together and for a certain time it can rediscover the marvel of organic life ... The marvel of being one.
I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage. A man walks across this empty space, whilst someone else is watching him, and this is all that is needed for an act of theatre to be engaged.
The meaning of a theater event is that none of us could see something so clearly as with the new energy that is brought with the meeting of a theme, actors living it, and an audience gradually entering it to live it with them. At that moment, a certain light appears, revealing what we would never have thought of on our own.
It's easy to give up, and that's the one thing we cannot do. That's what gives me a reason for working: to leave people with a little more courage, with a little hope that has been nourished. Even if, of course, it's going to disappear, whatever touches one isn't lost forever.
Drama is exposure; it is confrontation; it is contradiction and it leads to analysis, construction, recognition and eventually to an awakening of understanding.
Through a shared aim, shared needs, shared love of a shared result in theatre, from the creation of space... the coming-together of an endlessly repeated climax of shared performance, again and again, something special can appear.
I think what's really the most ideal thing is for the player themselves, within their own imagination, to carve out what they view as being the essence of the character.
The musical scale is a convention which circumscribes the area of potentiality and permits construction within those limits in its own particular symmetry.
Well-written novels make you more empathetic towards other people. You can identify with someone who isn't you. You can change your identity. A 14-year-old boy can become Anna Karenina. It is a miracle.
None of my other investments give me the joy that autographs do because they make me feel that I am holding a piece of history in my hands.
To create something from nothing is one of the greatest feelings, and I would - I don't know, I wish it upon everybody. It's heaven.
Art is not for the cultivated taste. It is to cultivate taste.
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