Theatre Credo

I believe in theatre.

I have acted upon this belief or knowledge for many years now: searched for tools and worked with the stage, shaped thoughts and planned theatre performances. I have trehearsed and sweated, negotiated, travelled around the world and met other theatre-believers over countries’ borders.

I have repeated this sentence in front of different goups of people, in the ministry, in seminars; to the director of the bank to ask for a loan to cover expenses; to official people; producers, culture-oriented people, the elite, and of coarse to my colleagues in art. Becase of this belief I have got into trouble and sometimes into arguements. I have mopped stage floors and rehearsing rooms, made coffee for actors and spent sleepless nights, and what not – all for this belief in theatre. Last Tuesday there was a symposium whose purpose was to ”make creativity and Finland’s spiritual environment to flourish in 2010’s decade.” I noticed again to start my speach with the announcement: I believe in theatre.

In what do I believe when I say this? What do I say I know when saying I believe in theatre?

I fell in love with the stage when at the age of seven I sat in an opera. The piece was ”The Last Temptations” and the lead was sang by a bass singer, Martti Talvela. I was so impressed that a human being could have such an immense prescense. And yet the human being on stage was so small. It wasn’t about opera itself and it wasn’t about the religious subject of the particular opera piece. It was about the fact that I heard such a voice coming from a human being. It was a voice that one doesn’t hear every day. It was something else, and yet it came from the human being on stage. In the voice there was some rooted power and energy that was thrown at me from the stage. It didn’t have to do only with Martti Talvela’s voice. It had to do with voice as such. The energy as such. Some living force as such.

It had to do with something which we both, Martti Talvela and I, shared. His voice made it, and the whole stage supported it, so that it was given space, and the power of the stage was revealed. I sat in the audience all my senses open, totally still, and feeling in the energy I was a target of, the distant sound of the mointains, the sound of the sea and wind, the spot of a human being in the universe, or the living force that echos inside the planet Gaia, the very same that Dylan Thomas speaks about in his poem: ”the force which through the green fuse drives the flower.” It showed that these is this force in a human being, in me, also. The dangerous kind of power, the dangerous thick warmth and dangerous delicate sensitivity – unity with the rest of the world, nature and all the universe. Talvela’s voice and his concentration in the music, and the fact that he had trained his voice and body so that he is able to let that kind of voice come out of him, the voice that sleeps in every one of us – this experience empowered me and united me with the shy and silent force of me, the serious and nice girl that I had grown to be. At the same time it united me with the world and other people. I thought the voice revealed something in all of us, and made me look straight in the eyes of the other audience-members who had been sitting (or sleeping – hah!) in the opera audience with me. Though I must say that the performance had also affected the adults with whom I was in the opera with. The performance was discussed all the rest of the evening, and that too was something to see, for I don’t remember growing into very talketive culture.

I felt I had experienced something I call sacred. (”Sacred” can be said to mean the experience of oneself in relation to something bigger; the experience of the relationship some wholeness which is bigger than an individual human being with individual features and recognizable characteristics.

This I experienced in theatre. This is why I say I believe in theatre.

In socalled talk theatre – or performance art – we don’t have then sung voice as the material through which we encounter the unity of human beings and the world. The material through which we encounter this the actor’s body, and the many-sided world of the stage, on which the actor stands, sits, lies down; breaths and talks, in time. We encounter the common energy through the bodily energy of the actor; and everything on stage supports that event. The theatre for which I am ready be enthusiastic, fight, theoretize, travel around the world, learn more, feel way way and get outside my comfort zone is theatre in whose center is the actor – the actor that gives his/her body and voice to the same kind of material and energy like Martti Talvela gave his voice to.

How I see the work of the actor is the duty of the one going first, to be the duty of the one who remembers; one could say that it is a duty of the shamanistic priest. I think that the actor does something for the rest of us. This asks the actor to put aside his/her own identity: s/he has to be willing to give his/her body and voice to be like a victim, to concentrate on some action, gesture and deed so that the ones coming near the stage have the possibility to be part of something which unites all of the world.

For being able to do this the actor has to get into the registers in the human body and mind which are not all the time at hand in our digital daily life. And the director has to let and be brave enough to stand beside that actor.

The duty of the actor, I think, is to train his/her body like the opera singer trains his/her voice. And then walk the route created to the performance and control his/her gestures and voice in the actions that the performance gives to him/her, as pure as possible. At the same time s/he does something for the audience; connects with the life force that s/he has contected through his/her training, and lets it come out, through the gesture, through the voice through an action. This makes the audience connect with something which unites us. And to that kind of stage the holy might appear.

I think that in order for us as human minds and bodies to get underneath our anthropomorphic features – in order our plays not to narrow only to be performan and watch different sides of human life on stage – we as theatre artists must, in fact, dive deeper into the human being. For me theatre is not at all about performing different features of human beings. It is about searching and showing the human energy: which is the same force that through the green fuse drives the flower.

Our duty is to train so that, for our audience, we dig out the force that is hidden in the human body; what it is cabable of; what a strenght and sensitivity is inside it. And perform only the very core of it, to be a gift on stage, in the altar of theatre.

It is said the believing means leaning on something which is not seen. There is much belief in theatre; there is much throwing oneself into something which is not seen; there is a lot of fighting, crawling, getting up and getting down – towards what is not seen. But what does gives itself.

I believe in theatre. I know and feel its power.

I believe in the possibility of the human being to be able to give something bigger through oneself, during this season and year, and in the 2010’s.