Taking The Mask Off

by Mario A. Campanaro

Taking The Mask Off. Not Many Can. Actors Must.

by Mario A. Campanaro

"Throughout our lives, we are rarely taught that we are the answer, and that omission is profoundly deleterious.

Think about it: from a very early age, we are taught that somebody else has the answer for us, that the answer is always in a book, that the teacher always has the answer, that our parents always have the answer, that someone else knows better, and that something is always out of reach. So we learn that we have to go to something else in order to get the facts, to get the truth.

To a large extent, that is true, because that is how we learn. But there is also something we forget, and that is that our experience is the greatest teacher we will ever have. Our experience formulates how we perceive truth.

I truly believe that there is so much within us that we have rarely been taught to access. But what is within us exists because of what we have experienced thus far. Those experiences have been our true teacher. They are our greatest teacher. Those experiences get all the credit. They get all the credit they deserve.

Whenever we approach an obstacle or a so called limitation, we often utilize those moments as the point at which we may choose to stop, or the point at which we say, ‘Okay, I have reached the end,’ or the point at which we say, ‘This is my limit.’

But I believe that those moments, when we confront obstacles or experience those so called limitations, are actually the moments of our greatest lessons, when our greatest teacher steps in. They are the moments when we are just beginning. Those are the moments when we learn ourselves.

Those are not the moments when we say, ‘I am going to crumble here. I am done.’ Those are the moments when we say, ‘There is an opportunity in this moment, in this experience, whatever it is, to find how I can creatively allow these circumstances to work in my favor. How do I overcome them? What creative genius lives within me so that I can now turn this lemon into something that becomes my artistic creation, or becomes the battery that fuels me to do something fantastic? What is really within me? How do I learn from this experience and grow, expand, and evolve?’

I think one of the reasons I love teaching acting is because I get to be around people who are not hiding behind a mask and who bring those exercises into their art.

And I know that sounds like a paradox, because are not actors ‘acting’? But I think it is just the opposite. One of the most amazing and magical things about acting is that it actually does the opposite of what most people think it is.

Acting really requires that we take the masks off. It gives actors, and I mean deep, meaningful artists, an environment where they can be who they authentically are within the world of the given circumstances of the text.

It does not have to be so monitored. It does not have to be so neat and clean and tidy and perfect.

It can just be human, deeply human, without having to bow down to social norms. It becomes about human existence and how people behave, how people relate to one another and the circumstances they are in, how people live based on their history, how people try to overcome obstacles, how people try to overcome suffering, how people deal with circumstances getting in the way, how people go through life based on what life throws at them, and how people try to improve present circumstances in an attempt at peace, love, health, prosperity, etc., whatever someone is trying to achieve.

I get to see people, true artists, struggle in the most beautiful way. I get to see people succeed in the most beautiful way. I get to see people's hearts and souls, their love and anger and frustration, their sadness and their joy.

I get to see the full color wheel of the human condition without a pretty little filter on it, a filter that tries to convince us, ‘This is the way it is supposed to be.’

Acting does not say, ‘This is the way it is supposed to be.’ Acting says, ‘This is the way it is. This is what humans go through. This is what I go through in relation to these given circumstances that a writer has given us.’

It takes the mask off and calls for the actor to show up in all their messy grit and all their great glory without apology, to say, ‘This is me. This is who I am.’

It is being willing to live as time and space stop in a moment in time, trying to pursue a need in relationship to another in a specific environment, and seeing what happens moment to unknown moment.

To really be in that vibratory place of life is remarkable.

It is beautiful.

And it is magical."