David Choi
Corinne Chateau
THR 501 106 – Basic Technique I
September 29, 2015
An Actor Prepares (Constantin Stanislavski) – Assignment 1
Stanislavski discusses When Acting is an Art in Chapter 2. Specifically, he states, “Moreover, and this is of primary importance, the organic bases of the laws of nature on which our art is founded will protect you in the future from going down the wrong path.” (pg 17) He goes on to say that one could find a plethora of actors and producers worldwide that “are constantly violating nature in the most shameless manner. But if you are sure of the limits of true art, and of the organic laws of nature, you will not go astray, you will be able to understand your mistakes and correct them.” This section resonates deeply with me and with my own experience in acting as I made the transition from inorganic machine language to the natural language of my organic self.
In Information Technology (IT) there’s a term, GIGO, which stands for Garbage In, Garbage Out. This refers to the ability of powerful computers to produce large amounts of erroneous data in a short period of time. That is, if a program is inputted, or “fed”, bad or poorly formatted data, the resulting processed output will be either non-sensical or undesirable (“Garbage Out”). As I’ve discovered over the last four years, this just so happens to apply to the human body as well. If humans eat unnatural, processed foods and/or refined sugars (“Garbage In”), the result can be catastrophic on the human body and psyche. Food that is depleted of its life forces, vitamins and minerals – namely sugar – can result in a whole host of human ailments, particularly psychological disorders and many cancers1.
On Jan 1st, 2012, I made a New Year’s resolution to only eat foods that were natural and organic. I would review the ingredients on every food item that I put into my body and if I didn’t know or understand what it was, I wouldn’t eat it. Else, I would look it up and research it on my own. Also, because my father is a Type II diabetic, I decided to go completely sugar-free (except for the occasional whole fruit) to prevent diabetes from taking a hold on my life. Ever since I started to eat a natural, sugar-free, whole foods diet, all my symptoms of depression, anxiety and manic bipolar disorder were cleared from me; I cured myself of all my mental disorders through proper diet and exercise and complete abstinence from all pharmaceutical drugs, especially antibiotics2 and psychotropic medications3.
Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, a famed French lawyer and politician, once said, “Tell me what you eat and I’ll tell you who you are.” Before I started to eat properly, I could never fathom being an actor. I was a human who knew how to think like a machine and how to take machine data and create programs to reprocess it so that it would be easily digestible for human consumption. With my poor diet, I violated “the organic bases of the laws of nature on which our art is founded,” and thus I had no protection from going down the wrong path in life. But when I finally made my transition to a healthy lifestyle, the doors to acting opened up for me as if Providence was with me, compelling me on to pursue acting as a career. And in making my intestinal health4 my religion, I have since learned to protect my gut as it provides me the instincts I need to be true to the art of acting.