Introduction

Thinking about art, about its subjectivity and its mystery, is something humanity has been doing since the beginning of time. It has not been, and it is not, easy to find a possible answer; one never finds it. Because, from my point of view, art is something like a question formulated metaphorically.

Human subjectivity, our emotions, our feelings, our imagination; in short, our so-called inner worlds are put outside, for other human beings and for ourselves, in a way that differs from logic and reasoning. Music, painting, literature, poetry, theatre and so on reveal to us events, points of view on the world and on human beings; unreachable, I believe, from logic and from science.

In every art there is a vehicle for expressing these mysteries; those vehicles are tangible, concrete objects that belong to the realm of facts handled by the will. For example: to create a work of art on a canvas, the artist needs a brush in one hand, a palette of colours in the other, a gesture that goes from the colours to the canvas, and the result is a stroke. It may be brilliant or not. A musician, a pianist for instance, needs to put their hands on the keyboard, move their fingers and produce a sound, a melody, which may be brilliant or not. In every art the same thing happens, and all their life long the artist perfects that vehicle for long hours every day, turns it into a working technique, and with the years, with experience and discipline, that vehicle becomes the messenger that prints the inner world onto the outer world.

In most arts it is fairly simple to observe that vehicle objectively; but in the art of the actor, the great difficulty, the strange thing about it, is that the vehicle is the actor’s own body and own voice, exposed to the eyes of the audience before whom, and only before whom, that art unfolds.

The art of the actor

What does the actor possess that is as objective as the brush, the colours and the canvas for the painter, or as the piano for the musician? We can say the body, but the dancer has one too, along with a choreography. We can say the voice, but the singer has one too, along with a melody. Choreography and melody that articulate their inner life as though they were a brush or the keys of a piano. The actor has none of that: no choreography, no melodies to order their world outwards.

Searching in that direction, in my own experience and in that of other actors, and with the aim of passing on to students something very concrete, as concrete as the other vehicles, so that they could work at it and train at it all their lives, I found a word that defines, I believe, as no other does, that transmitter, that vehicle which carries the experience, the life of the artist, and turns it into a work that becomes the experience of the audience.

Reaction as the vehicle of imaginary reality

This concrete element I call “reaction”, meaning by that the capacity to react to an imaginary reality “as if” it were real; in other words, the skill and, in the end, if the angel comes down, the “art” of the actor. Through that reaction the actor creates a reality that did not exist before it was produced.

Reaction is the actor’s magic, and it holds something objective and a great many subjective things. For example: this is a mobile phone; if I react as if it were a mobile phone, you see a mobile phone; now, if the actor (he shows the mobile phone) reacts “as if” it were a bomb that might go off, the delicacy and the care of the gesture make it exist for you and for me. What is subjective in that reaction has to do with the inner associations that are set off in each person according to their own history, real or imaginary, with bombs, explosives, grenades and so on, whether unconscious or conscious. The stage is the real; when fiction appears, it is because the actor reacts to an imaginary reality “as if” it were real. Starting from reaction, the actor enters fiction, fantasy, imagination. Creating the realities that surround human beings in life: that is the capacity the actor has to develop; those created realities are the character’s, not the actor’s. They are the circumstances that surround the character and make that character exist before the audience. The ordinary human being, just like the characters of the theatre, is the product of circumstances.

With my reaction I can create a distance (he makes the gesture of looking into the distance while describing: there is a little house with smoke, a sky, and so on).

I can create several kinds of realities.

In other words: as an actor, I have to create with my reaction an emotional reality distinct from my own as a person.

Lies and other “scenes” of everyday life

All of us, when we lie, make the other see things that do not exist. What matters is not that it should be true, but that the other should believe you. (When you want to leave a place, you react “as if” you had a headache, and you say for instance: “I have a headache, I can go.”) If you are believed, you can indeed leave. In other words, the person has made a “scene” in order to be able to leave. And here we are, brought into another important theme regarding human conduct: the capacity to make “scenes” for the other all the time in order to get what we want. Adolescents, for example, make scenes for us, they cry real tears and so on, and then they go out and say: “I wrung permission out of my father, and the cash with it.”

Everyone creates realities that do not exist in order to obtain something in life. The capacity to create realities that do not exist is to be found fundamentally in lies.

At a wake, for instance, one puts on a suitable face because one wants to make the other see one’s pain, whereas the person who is really in mourning does not react: it is the pain itself that makes them react; since the pain is real, they laugh, they drink a coffee, they have nothing to show anyone. The stimulus is real and, as such, it produces the reaction. They do not have to make the “scene”.

Erich Fromm used to ask his patients to “put on a frightened face” until fear arose and they actually felt fear. Without putting on that face, that frightened expression, they could not discover fear, because they were afraid of feeling fear. He made them act fear out, “react” “as if”, which allows imagination to begin articulating that fear those people had never been able to articulate. In order to experience it, they needed the “scene” of fear. In other words, reaction makes it possible to articulate life. That is why we read the inside of people from their reaction. The autistic person dies, because they have no reaction; nobody knows what is happening to them, there is no signal; in other words, inner life cannot be read unless a reaction appears that makes me understand something of that life, so as to be able to help it.

Reaction is the scene made by the actor and by people.

For this we look for the help of outside elements: clothes, objects, hairstyles, make-up and so on. In our houses, for instance, we have a wardrobe full of different “costumes”: we go looking for a job and we ask ourselves: what do I put on to make my reaction easier? At home we have a whole range of those “costumes”, one for each of the roles we have to play in life. And with that costume we make scenes (of the father, the husband, the fiancé, the son, the employee, the employer, and so on). Even to sleep we have special clothes, a special light and the reaction of closing our eyes in a relaxed way to summon sleep. Very small children do none of that: they simply fall asleep.

Reaction is not a synonym for lying; it is inherent in human behaviour in relationships. If a person arrives late and I do not make the scene for them, they will always arrive late; and afterwards you tell a friend: “You cannot imagine the scene I made; I think the message got through.” In other words, there is something in the human being, in our reaction, which means that in order to live and to relate we have to make the scene. That is why one can never be entirely truthful, and that would not even be fair or objective: for if you get angry with someone and hit them because you feel that it is true, the anger is yours, but the other is not guilty of my anger. In life, roles have to be held. I have come to think that suicide is a last and tragic scene one makes for oneself and for others.

Conditions and kinds of reaction

Reaction has to meet certain physiological conditions for the phenomenon of art to occur in the actor. It must involve release (like the painter’s arm or the pianist’s hands and body), release being for us the exact energy needed to create a reaction. The energy and the number of muscles involved when an actor playing Hamlet sees his father’s ghost are not the same as those used when a friend one has not seen for a long time comes on stage. If there is too much tension, the inner world stays blocked and the body draws the feeling, it shows it, it tells it, but it does not express it. If there is too little tension, if the energy is insufficient, nothing can be seen. That is why, in working terms, this reaction has three levels.

It is thus possible to measure the actor’s progress: it comes precisely when one gets closer to the “do”, to the exact note. In the early days there are too many nerves and they make one exaggerate, or leave one a little inexpressive; but over the years one reaches a reaction so exact that it makes the audience imagine what is happening on stage as something lived and real.

The magic lies in what the reaction sets off in me. What is set off when the exact note is given? Imagination, emotion and unconscious forces impossible to analyse. Imagination starts working and, all of a sudden, it is real. In other words, emotion is in the muscle; there is nothing inside and nothing outside. Everything is in the memory of my muscle.

Reaction, art and madness: “my madness stops where the other begins”

Reaction sets off a series of images that articulate my life; I can therefore think it, articulate the chaos, the inner disorder. In real life I cannot do that: I cannot express my violence to the limit of what is possible, because the other is not responsible for my contained anger. Art appears as a possibility of articulating those things that life has not allowed me and will not allow me to do, because we live in society: I cannot do as I please, since respect for the other is fundamental. My madness stops where the other begins. If I go beyond that, I am outside the conventions, outside the norms, and then I am called mad. Madness has to do with having used, in real life, codes that are not, at that moment, part of the social codes with which we live together.

Art does not have the codes of life, those of common life; that is why we would not be so far off the mark in saying that, in a certain way, art articulates madness, among other things.

Everyone’s true face is the face of solitude. Watch yourselves when you are alone and someone comes in: however much you trust that person, a grimace appears, a tension that says: “Yes, the one who is here is indeed me.” If you stay as you are in your solitude, the other says to you: “What is wrong, are you all right?” My solitude, nobody knows it.

What I am setting out here is a working hypothesis that serves us, actors, to think of ourselves as such.

A person, in front of a church, kneels down and so on, to call upon God, so that their being may find something spiritual; afterwards they feel good, because they have made the scene of speaking with God. The ritual is needed, the reaction is needed, for the inner world to show itself outside.

The affected part and the actor: reaction as a synonym for life

The exercise of the “affected self” was devised by Augusto Fernandes at the time when we were rehearsing Goethe’s Faust, and this way of approaching certain aspects of the characters through certain personal aspects of each one of us filled us with enthusiasm. Especially given the challenge set for us by the complexity of the world described by Goethe in Faust.

The working hypothesis is that we are all, always, affected by something. As though we had a great many “selves” affected by the stimuli we receive in life. But those “selves” do not speak frankly: for instance, someone steps on my foot on the bus and I say: “It is nothing, do not worry”, whereas what I wanted was to go for their throat. I articulated it “socially”, but the affected part is there: it has not spoken, it has not been able to express itself in its totality. So the “hypothesis” is: what would happen if that affected part spoke? There are “selves” affected for good, for ill, for the positive, for the negative.

All the characters in the stories of the theatre speak from their affected part. Oedipus is affected and tears out his eyes. Romeo is affected by Juliet, and it is the affected part of love that speaks: he loves, and if the other is no longer there, life no longer has any meaning, so he kills himself. Othello is affected by jealousy: he kills and kills himself. None of them has any contradictions.

For example, the actor calls upon an affected part and reacts so as to be able, from there, to say a text or make a movement; otherwise I say it from my social part. To come back to the example of the bus: I picture the person who stepped on my foot and, little by little, the affected part begins to appear; I react as I would have liked to react at that moment, and I then start to speak, to move, and so on. We arrange things so that the other is an imaginary being, so that the effort of creating that other becomes part of the work. It is a guided exercise. The part that has been affected begins a strange journey: first there is an anecdotal stage, the “how” of the way the events happened (we take no account of it); then comes a psychological stage (which we do not concern ourselves with any further, still less try to interpret). And finally comes the creative stage, the one we are interested in developing and stimulating. From that place, the emotion having already been set off, the actor begins to express it poetically: saying a poem, or a text, dancing or singing in an absolutely ordered way; expressing it with harmony, both in movement and in sound. Many times we have observed that in this manifestation there appeared ancient rituals and unsuspected melodies.

Everyone needs to reach that place where the part that is affected and has never spoken shows itself. We have parts affected in childhood, which have never spoken and never expressed themselves. Art in general, and the actor in particular, is able to make those parts speak.

In the actor, expression begins to grow larger, to take on volume; one learns to open one’s arms, to let the voice out, to open one’s eyes, and something from within begins to be drawn outwards. Reaction is a synonym for life; that is why the word “action” is of no use to us: it does not awaken the imagination. One might say that action does not exist, except for God’s action creating the world; after that, we are all “reacting beings”. Nobody “starts” an action: it has already been started somewhere. From the inner point of view, that of the emotions, we are “reactors”, and those reactions have triggers: they are the experiences printed into our life.

In Shakespeare’s Othello, by feeling the feeling of killing without really killing her, the actor makes the feeling come out in the form of expression; what does not take place is the crime. With my violence I create something new, without harming the other. What is saved is my violence, because it is articulated and I can think it. It is said that a dance of love is love made thinkable; but if it is not manifested with an order, it cannot be thought. I never knew anything about my courage until I put it outside. If I do not know that I have it — and I do have it, but I cannot articulate it —, I believe I am an idiot, a shy person, and so on; but that is not true, it is only the way I have articulated my life, and I believe it is so.

For example, a young man says he cannot open his arms: “But why can you not open your arms? Do it like this” (he opens his arms). The person believes he needs something from within. What I do is tell him to do this for a while (he opens his arms). Then he begins to feel an emotion; afterwards I have him sing a song, and he sings, or he cries. But now he has been able to, because he did that (he opens his arms). Since he had never done it, he believed he could not.

Vowels and consonants

Another theme, for the actor, is the understanding of speech: what speaking means, the infinite nuances of the music of speech. Vowels, for example, carry emotion: they make oneself and the other perceive the emotion. Consonants articulate the emotions according to the language. Vowels are understood the world over; consonants are the cultural aspect, the explanation, the why of the emotion: they make it understandable in Spanish, in English, in French, in Castilian, and so on. The release of the vowel carries the emotion to the audience, and it is always musical. The audience is struck by the tone, because it goes to the exact point of the emotion. The first cry, at birth, is vowels: not only the “a”, but potentially all the vowels.

The reality of feeling

There is fiction in the actor’s playing, but love is real, feeling is real; the father does that out of love, and so does the son. It is feeling that makes fiction, in life, not a lie. The spy, on the other hand, lies intentionally: creating a whole character, wanting the money, the power, the ambition. And that is what motivates the spy’s reactions; the lie is in the motives, in the intention, in the why of my conduct.

Questions and conclusions

Horacio Serebrinsky (1): most of us, as therapists, work with what is called instrumental dissociation, that is, not sticking to the patient’s emotion and so on; the self affected by what someone tells… How does one obtain that articulation of dissociation?

Lito Cruz: I believe one has to get to poetry. When you poeticise it, you give it an artistic name: a song, a phrase by another author, a dance movement, and so on. Once you have poeticised it, aesthetic pleasure takes precedence over psychological emotion. Then the actor may suffer, but the aesthetic pleasure of producing a reaction matters more; there has to be an aesthetic level, there has to be order (art): hysteria is chaos and art is order; if there is no order, you cannot think your life.

When you find how to name your suffering in a new way, you save that emotion. That is why we identify with poets: they speak for us, they say what we would have liked to say. When Borges suggests that dying is a habit people usually have, death becomes thinkable through a metaphor that has no logic, but that speaks to you of a reality logic cannot reach. One enters the plane of art, the “meaning” of art begins to appear. Logic has a limit and it has a function; but if one cannot name something of one’s life in that way (by painting, for instance), if the plane of metaphor does not appear, one stays in the psychological circus. When poetry and metaphor appear, human feeling is named and thought.

Sometimes we do not do certain things simply because we do not do them. The day you do them, you feel good. Logic makes my thoughts start finding a great many explanations; a mental discourse appears that troubles me and complicates everything all the time.

Marcelo R. Ceberio (2): the similarity, the parallel between psychotherapy and the theatre is truly fascinating… The need to have a level of playing within the very condition of being a psychotherapist becomes imperative in our work. For what counts is not only what we try to convey as content, but the how… An intervention that falls exactly right so as to be able to have an effect. That how is given by the do. Because explanations are in the last instance fictions, inventions; in fact we shall never find that first cause…

Lito Cruz: I believe there is always a level of playing, not only in the therapist but also in the patient; the advantage is that the therapist knows it and the patient does not. The former has a higher level of observation of the whole situation, which makes it possible to aim exactly at what has to be done at each moment. That observer, among other things, keeps the therapist from “identifying” with what is happening to the patient, and so on.

What the actor’s work also gives you is the development of an “observer”: there are many planes in reality. That “observer” saves us, puts us at a distance: I observe my tears, but I also make sure nobody notices that I am using a cardboard knife; that my voice can be heard; that we are not standing with our backs to the audience; how my partner is acting, and so on.

If we looked at ourselves under X-rays, we are all skeletons, and that is real: death is with us. When one can speak from that place, knowing that our life is an anecdote and that in fact all that is missing is the date, the place and the hour of each one’s death… There are planes, notions according to which there are realities taking place at this very moment of which we are not aware, because we have not been educated in that way, because we were not taught it.

Children are taught to work out reality in a mental way, and they are not taught to see how their mind works. We were not taught the notion of a more total reality: that what I say is one thing, what I am another, and what happens to me yet another. There are several instances of reality, but society gives precedence to the mental part. The other parts are not much listened to, except when the body speaks through illness, or when the human being finds the form of art that allows him to express himself, and therefore to know himself a little better.

When you know how to play the piano, the inner world resonates, it refers back to the piano and the coming and going begins; but you begin by playing the piano, otherwise there is no coming and going.

Art is a mystery, the inside is a mystery, there is an inner world, a strange one; I tell my students: let it be so, it is not fitting to dig, it is fitting to do the task one has to do. And mystery, for the actor, is a beautiful promise; otherwise attention goes where it should not go.

Everything I have said above is in fact nothing but hypotheses that I use in order to work and that, like any hypothesis, move me forward towards an aim where I may perhaps discover whether they are true or not. They are opinions, experiences after years of work, and of course all of them debatable, changeable, transformable, like all opinions. But they serve for working, for thinking and, as here, for passing on, for raising questions, challenges, reflections on things as vast, as complex and as wonderful as art, human expression and its final addressees.