4 ideas
By successively eliminating make-up, costume, scenography, lighting, music, and even a separate stage, one discovers theatre can exist without any of them but cannot exist without the live, perceptual communion between actor and spectator. Rather than competing with film and television on spectacle, which it will always lose, theatre should cultivate the one thing those media cannot reproduce: living bodily presence in shared space.
Actor training should not accumulate a repertoire of techniques but strip away the psychic and physical resistances that obstruct an impulse from becoming action. The goal is to reduce the time-lapse between inner impulse and outer reaction until they fuse, so the actor does not want to do something but instead stops resisting it.
The 'holy actor' does not sell his body as a courtesan does, performing effects for approval, but offers it as an act of self-penetration that exposes his most intimate layers in public. This total act of disarmament challenges spectators to undertake a similar self-confrontation, making the performance a kind of secular rite of truth rather than entertainment.
Rigorous, precisely scored form does not kill spontaneity but is what allows it to appear, because an impulse without structure dissipates into chaos while structure without impulse is dead mechanics. The actor's discipline is the vessel that makes the most dangerous personal material transmissible, so the two poles intensify rather than dilute each other.