People Who Get It are People with Potential
This post will ramble. It is about being able to see people’s natures and being decisive, about the ability to change and about some of my students who really got it.
I’m up on Daqingshan Mountain (or I was when I wrote this), near the coast of China in the province of Shandong. It is raining this afternoon, so I can’t go out and train. Today at lunch, Master Chen Zhonghua, who teaches me Chen style Taijiquan and informally about Daoism, was speaking with us about being able to see what is actually in front of us. He was being very direct, telling us not to give people any second chances. He offered the following example: if a martial arts student is clumsy and violent, a danger to those around him, recognize this and plan for it – do not hope that he or she will change. He pointed out that very few people are actually able to change themselves, offering a Daoist principle that is someone is able to change even one thing about themselves, they become a xian, literally an immortal, more accurately, an unusual person.
At some point last week, Master Chen pointed out one of my fellow students and said to me “see, he doesn’t move like people typically do, his rhythm is odd and idiosyncratic, there is hope for this kind of person”.
I find these instructions paradoxical. I absolutely see what he means, and yet this kind of thinking sets of my alarm bells because it sounds almost identical to the empty cant I hear from most professional acting teachers that there are naturals and only these people should be selected for training. In my experience, the “naturals” that my fellow theatre professionals usually choose are self-interested, exhibitionist dullard clones without any sense of art or craft whatsoever. By contrast, the people I have had a strong feeling about and found worthy of encouragement are usually gawky, idiosyncratic, eccentric and cerebral. I have, in my students and collaborators, a lot of unfinished projects; there are people whom I think highly of who are still emerging, so I’m not going to mention them here.
The students of mine who, to my eyes, confirm Master Chen’s way of seeing things, are five people. I’ve taught about 250 people acting in an institutional setting, and about another 120 in workshops. The people who saw what I was doing and somehow managed to extrapolate it into far more than I ever actually showed them are Jean-Marc Noël, Marc Tellez, Emma Zablosky, Stephie Demas and Danielle LeSaux-Farmer. Jean-Marc took an acting class with me at UQAM and then directed an excellent devised piece about the myth of Lot and Sodom. Marc worked with me as a co-teacher and performer with One Reed Theatre. Emma directed two pieces, a devised work based on a Joseph Conrad short story and a version of Mueller’s HamletMachine; both were extraordinary and I sat there wondering where the hell she had learned to create work like that! Stephie was my apprentice director for a student show, Ariadne, and I also advised her on a short piece about the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his almost-wife that she took to Istanbul. Danielle took classes and workshops with me, played Ariadne and helped devise educational theatre for palliative care education; she’s at the Conservatoire du Québec now. That’s five out of 370. Of course, lots of people learned lots of things, but only 0.014 were able to apply the principles I taught them consistently outside of a classroom setting. What is odd, is that when I first met these people, I immediately had a sense that they already knew what I was going to teach them, it was somehow already in their natures. So far, myself included, I don’t think I’ve taught anyone who has changed themselves. For the people I’ve mentioned above change seems more likely, less difficult, than for most of us.
The paradox of this way of thinking, about change, is of course that change is a transcendental, future-based ideal; how can we reveal what is actually here, without getting lost in fantasies about the future?
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