Inspiration

Carnival suspends judgement. It does not erase hierarchy forever, but it temporarily scrambles it. Bodies become excessive, comic, sexual, grotesque, loud. The audience is absorbed into the event. Nobody stands cleanly outside it. You are implicated by being there. A floor show, by contrast, restores the frame. It says: here is the performer, here is the audience, here is the spectacle, here is applause, here is evaluation. Even when the content is transgressive, the structur

We often talk about memory as if it were storage. Open the right drawer, find the right feeling, bring it into the scene. But memory does not really work like that. It is less like a cupboard and more like an act of composition. Each time we remember, we rebuild. We select, colour, arrange, and sometimes unconsciously revise. Oliver Sacks wrote about this beautifully: memory is not a perfect recording of the world, but a living system that keeps reshaping experience into “nar

Training has been one of the recurring structures of my life. I have returned to it in periods of transition, when my circumstances changed, when my artistic values no longer seemed aligned with the work in front of me, or when I needed to recover a sense of direction. It has been a refuge, but never a passive one. Training has also been a test, an ordeal, and a chosen encounter with uncertainty. That description may sound therapeutic. I do not mean that training has healed m

Here's something I've never tried here. This is a constructed dialogue between two thinkers who never actually had this exchange. Oliver Sacks was a physician, neurologist, and writer known for books such as Awakenings and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, where neurological case histories become vivid accounts of perception, identity, memory, and consciousness. His essay “Speak, Memory” is the source for the idea that memory is not a direct recording of experience. Sac

The “Batman Effect” began as a psychology experiment with children who were given a task to focus on. Researchers asked children to complete a boring task while a tempting game was available nearby. Some children were asked to think in the first person: “Am I working hard?” Others used their own name. Another group was invited to imagine themselves as a character, such as Batman. The children who adopted the character perspective tended to persist longer. The idea is simple:

Embarrassment is one of the least explored emotions, partly because it arrives so fast. Before we can take any time to examine it, we want to escape it; or at least retreat into privacy because being embarrassed publicly is statistically one of the things we fear most. We apologize for feeling too much, and shrink ourselves back into an acceptable size. A mask of muted colours, with no mouth. But embarrassment may be more interesting than that. The history of the word carries

Now is the time that many students start their training journey by auditioning for schools. Here is some advice when you're looking around. Seek variety. Specialized training is not the only way. No single acting method is acting itself. A method is a telephone. It is the device actors, teachers, and directors use to speak to the art form. Stanislavsky, Meisner, Suzuki, Chekhov, Practical Aesthetics, Viewpoints, Grotowski, Strasberg, Adler, Hagen, Spolin, Lecoq: each offers

Intersection is a deeply human human trait. Not agreement. Not sameness. It's vitally important that different trajectories meet while remaining different. A rehearsal room works this way (when it's working). So does a city. So does a relationship. So does thought itself. The philosophers Deleuze and Guattari were drawn to these unstable meetings in their own ways. Their work resists the idea that identity, meaning, or culture should settle into fixed territories with defenda