Alchemy of the Actor

An Alchemist turns base material into a new, refined form. Turning the Raw into Cooked. Lead into Gold. Darkness into Light. Alchemy is the facilitation of the Transformative Process. Without it, we wouldn’t see the evolution or resolution of a story through time. It is the Becoming, through Being.

As an actor, I take words on a page, and as they move through my imagination, and then into my body, vocalized into sound, performed as expression, shown as the mask on my face, and breathed into, those words and ideas come to Life. This is the alchemy of actor: to transform something that exists only in the mind, unseen in the manifest world, into a living dream in realtime.

I experiment. I experiment with this gesture, that glance, a look here, a verbal inflection there. How can these words on the page and the Director’s vision be made real through me? What comes so naturally in the moment comes with great effort to set the stage internally, to tune the instrument that I am and prime my capacities for bringing forth the creation. 

This is no small feat. It takes countless hours of practice to step aside and let the Character reveal itself, surrendering my own sense of self to become an identity foreign to “me” as I know it, and yet one I can relate to and step into as a garment or pair of shoes that is meant to tell the story. I don’t expect to know what should happen in any given scene, but wait to find out as it is expressed throughout. This way I become a channel for a deeper story to unfold before me.