Going Towards Life
Pigeon considers life. Photograph by Aviva Rahmani 2021
I had my first dramatic performance at age 11 with the Beechwood Players in Scarborough, New York. It was a one-line roller skate walk-on in which I declaimed, “it’s Midnight!” I got the bug and immersed myself in what I could learn of The Method, practicing Stanislavsky’s exercises in my bedroom. Three years later I got a huge audience response after delivering a soliloquy in my school, at the imagined bedside of my dying boyfriend. A year later, I wrote my first play, “To Love,” about a teenage interracial romance that drives a young girl to consider suicide. A few more years later, I immersed myself in Antonin Artaud’s thinking about the theatre. To this day, I am comfortable with total immersion in whatever I create.
In an article by Alexandra Schwartz reviewing Isaac Butler’s, “The Method,’ for the February 7, 2022 issue of The New Yorker, she wrote about how “The Method” evolved in the hands of various drama teachers from Lee Strasberg to Stella Adler and actors from Marlon Brando to Robert De Niro. At the end of her article, she quotes Adler, “The essential thing to know is that life is in front of you. Go towards it.”
It is worth considering the valuation given today to whether we “feel” someone’s motivation. In the contemporary world, being engaged with something you feel passionate about is considered a worthy goal for any stage of one’s life. Routinely, people want to take the emotional temperature of content in the sales of a commodity, whether materialistic or cultural. There is also the notion that passion leads to a living wage. Sometimes it does, sometimes not, especially for creatives. The average earnings for an artist in 2017 was $10,000. I would venture that number is even less today. AI has left many creatives wondering if even that small margin of opportunity could be narrowing. But evidently, people would still prefer the human touch. The question is, how can creatives of all kinds, deliver that humanity and still pay bills? In the end, this goes to providing a universal base income to everyone. An idea that periodically surfaces, but gives the radical conservative Right the heebie jeebies, screaming, “communism,” their ultimate bogeyman.
In the last century, the artist Joseph Beuys declared that, “everyone could be an artist,” and founded his ideas about Social Sculpture on that premise. The assumption in that statement is that every human being has equal value, not a new idea but apparently unheeded today, as billionaires head to the stars and many people can’t pay their bills with three jobs. But if it’s true, how different might our world be if everyone had the option to go towards life with passion, joy and security?