Driving home from last night's rehearsal, I was listening to a podcast collage of various talks by Krishnamurti, a writer I've heard both revered and reviled over the years, although I really know very little about his teachings. I was only half paying attention when this fragment, out of context, jumped out at me, triggering a number of only loosely connected responses:
We are so conditioned, so programmed, like computers, that we cannot learn something new. The computer can, but we can't. You see, the tragedy is that the machine that we have created, the computer, can learn much faster, infinitely more than [we] can, than the brain can. And the brain which has invented that ... ultra-intelligent machine ... hae slowed down, because we have [become conformists].
My first fleeting thought was, ugh, I still suck at learning lines. It's the bane of my existence! (Turns out at least three people have dreamed recently that I fucked up the show by forgetting my opening and closing speeches--the 4 paragraphs which constitute 98% of my scripted contribution to the show.) Then I recalled Sarah's blogpost about her first experience rehearsing with robots, who never "forget" what they are supposed to say or do; on the down side, they tend to shut down rather than make the most of a situation (like, say, creating new lines until they can find their way back to familiar turf and/or the next cue for somebody else). Is it even accurate to refer to robots or game characters as "actors"?
I also thought about the way that, for all of us in one way or another, WoyUbu is either a big or small step outside our personal comfort zones into "something new." It's easier for me as a performer to slip into the skin of a character if I can think and speak spontaneously as him or her than if I have a set of lines to memorize (which is the major reason my solo performances and Cabaret roles have been mostly improv for the last couple of decades, with a few exceptions now and then to keep me on my toes).
Somewhere in there I also made a connection between Krishnamurti's comments on the possibilities and limits of humankind and Buchner's, as expressed most directly through my character in the show. ("You are created of dust, sand, and shit. Why must you try to be more than dust, sand, and shit?!" The unspoken answer: Because the compulsion to transcend our humble origins is precisely what allows us to transcend them--what separates us from both monkeys and computer-driven robots.)
And while this has little to do with his actual point, the Krishnamurti quote also makes me think about how I've always heard it's harder to master a new language after you reach a certain age--an age I have clearly reached, although I really do want to learn one for the first time since high school. I also wonder if it's too late to get my brain to handle the large chunks of dialogue I could in the past (at one point in my mid 30s I somehow managed to memorize a trilogy of my own monologues--a whopping 4 1/2 hours of material!--and now I keep fumbling over 4 paragraphs). Clearly the brain is a muscle that requires and responds well to exercise, or else actors far older than me would be out of work.
If I were a computer, you could feed page after page of text into me and I would recite it exactly the same way, night after night. Only where's the fun--the challenge to conformity--in that?
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