Advanced Class 23/24 Graduation Speech

I somehow had the impression that the conclusion of such an endeavour as the one we have attempted together this year should include a fitting closing speech. I then asked myself what the point of such a speech could be, and came to the conclusion that I should say to you what I would say to you if I knew that you would only listen to me this one more time.

When I asked you what you had learnt this year, everybody also came up with something you felt you did not yet know, with open questions and with doubt. I congratulate you for that: Remaining in question is a fundamental ability and it will bring you far. Stefan wrote back that I had repeatedly talked about the different ‘human images’ in the various dramatic works we had been working on this year. He asked me if I could give an overview of which there are. This is a very good question. But I can’t. What’s more, according to all the rules of integrity, I shouldn’t even try. I will try to explain why.

We humans are first and foremost a product of the physical laws that created this universe, the chemical processes in it that gave rise to life, and the mechanisms of evolution that ultimately created us with all our sufficiently suitable properties. These sufficiently suitable properties have evolved to serve ourselves and are only insufficiently made for the search for truth. In order to act in the world, we have to distinguish, categorise, name and choose between things on the basis of what we call ‘acting on what we know’. But this ‘knowing’ has little or nothing to do with something as absolute as truth. Truth is a long term process and the world  is not built in a way that there would be time for it in every moment.  If the feeling of knowing didn’t exist, we wouldn’t even be able to decide whether to turn left or right. We need it, and that’s why it’s built into us, because otherwise our ancestors wouldn’t have survived. That is why I think that it would do humanity good if ‘I know’ were finally assigned to the realm of feelings and not that of facts. 

But there is another, a lighter side to this. The idea of calling us humans  homo ‘sapiens’ might itself be the best proof that what we actually know is little, but it depends on what we compare ourselves to. It must be said that we, more than other living beings, and certainly more than stones, have the ability to learn. Learning is a process of experience and its reflection, and depending on the experiences we expose ourselves to and our habits of reflection, we can have at least some influence, albeit small, albeit fragile, albeit fleeting, on how our knowledge is built. At least if we practise it, at least if we keep insisting on it, and at least if we keep insisting on a culture that rewards that and not the opposite, we can learn and therefore have some choice on how we see the world. But where there is light there is also dark. The ability to learn also implies that we might learn things that are wrong. If wrong views become our categories of knowledge, they will wrongly shape our actions.  The engineer Alred Korcybski wrote that ‘God will forgive your sins, but your nervous system won’t’. I think that is a good way to put it. The fundamentally wrong things will become ingrained in us just as much as the less wrong things, they will mould us and how we look at the world.

This year you have learnt powerful tools on how to capture an audience. People primarily don’t see theatre with their forebrain, I know that all of you have understood that. They are captured by the rhythm, by the movement, by the colours and the light, by the beauty and the contagious emotions. And riding on this wave of unconscious reaction is an ‘image of the human’. The ‘image of the human’ has always found new forms of expression in the history of theatre and will hopefully continue to do so. We have gone through enough different texts for you to understand that there is not just one way of seeing and portraying people. There are many, and again I hope you can relate this to your own experiences in class, it often depends on what you find important, where you put the weights, what you value, whether you condemn a character or praise it through your portrayal. I also think that all of us have had the experience of hearing about a terrible person and having to tone down the image when we get some additional  information about circumstances that was previously missing. It is important for the actor to know that we don’t know everything about our character and that our conclusions must be done with caution. You know that, we always do that in practice, we go slowly. Part of our work as actors is to make the hard decisions of what is important in the portrayal of a character and what is less. We can’t show everything, a play lasts only a few hours. And it’s up to you what you value, it’s up to you to distribute the weights, to emphasise (in time, in calories, in conciseness and your investment in sculpturality) what you think is relevant. Bertolt Brecht was very clear about the fact that it is up to the actor to make concise and clear what is important and should therefore be communicated. There is no escape from this. If you don’t do it in a conscious way, it will become visible how you do it unconsciously. Either way, your image of how you look at the world will expose itself to the audience. You’ve heard me say more than once that a good rule of thumb is that the playwright is probably smarter than you are. Hold on to that assumption as long as you can and take every work by every playwright as an invitation to question your image of the human once again. Remain sceptical of yourself. As the physician and physiologist Ivan Pavlov wrote in his letter to the scientific youth: ‘Always have the courage to say of yourself – I am ignorant’. You should read this letter, by the way. 

And

  • Look anew each time you look
  • Use several methods. We actors don’t have scientific methods, we have heuristic methods, but these are also useful and, unlike scientific methods, they have the advantage that they can be used at any time in life. Until you can look at a person, a situation, a conflict in three ways, you haven’t even begun to see anything. 
  • Use stereotypes as a tool, not as a solution. 
  • Never confuse your search for consensus with the search for truth. 
  • Remain in doubt. Beyond the premiere. Deadlines were invented to make sceptics show results. They force us to report preliminary results, but they don’t force us to close the chapter.
  • Read serious literature about people. By serious I mean fed by serious data. For that matter, we live in the most luxurious times mankind has ever known, the internet is your friend and there is no excuse for not doing the investigations.
  • Read the great authors. Read Aristophanes, Sophocles, Shakespeare, Goldoni, Nestroy and Kleist, and Büchner and Ibsen and Schnitzler and Chekhov, Gorki, Ostrovski and Horvath and Brecht.  And others, these are just my favourites. Don’t read them as if it were no work to extract something from them. Practise deep reading, practice 3D reading, as we have started to do here, and see which characters emerge from the texts. They are all human images and every human image contains, whether consciously or unconsciously, instructions on how to deal with people, so there might be some responsibility in creating it.
  • Have a life and reflect it.
  • Find a story that’s worth telling. That is usually not the story of which you know in advance that you will get applause for it.

Theatre cannot make legal judgements. It would be presumptuous to believe that our methods can do that. Society has courts and a sophisticated legal system that has developed over thousands of years. It is not our task. But there is a level below legal judgement. It is the judgement of what humans are and what should be seen and what should be valued. Seeing, as we can’t see everything, is in itself valuing. And emphasizing on one thing or something else, putting effort in more of this or more of that, is also attributing value. You can’t give value to everything. Theatre was the place where slow valuing of humans was invented by watching them over time, by extracting the situation, by relating what the characters say to what they actually do, and by working out the essential pattern of the situation by experimentally reducing the noise and complexity for the emphasis of this or that. But the actors are not the judges in this court of value. The judge is the audience, each one of them, it is their freedom and we have to leave this freedom to them. We, the actors, can only make the audience see. You have to find something in your characters that is worth to be seen. Not in the sense of a moral defence, no, but in the sense of defending the specific existence of this specific character, in the sense of their right to be seen in what they are and to complete our image of ourselves and of the human species.

And that is why I can’t tell you what human images there are. Because the images have to emerge, they have to be built, and they have to be re-built again and again, because as soon as we cease to question them, they become a claim and not an image built from working with what is. And that is also why I cannot tell you what there is to be seen. I showed you some tools for how to look. Now you are in charge. Your impact on the world may be small. But you, as actors, are trusted to have something to say about humans. You will, at least to some extent, at least sometimes, be at least partly responsible for how those around you, those closest to you and perhaps the row behind them, will see the world. That is the influence of the individual, and it should never be neglected. Give people a new perspective by allowing them to experience a previously unseen image. The quality of our own perception will be the basis for having something interesting to tell to others. You will have to learn how to see something that is interesting, surprising and new.

The engineer, teacher and philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once wrote that we must remain silent about what we cannot talk about. That sounds pretty definitive, but we should perhaps not forget that Wittgenstein was one of those who spent their whole lives trying to talk about things that no one had ever tried to find words for before. He had the right to conclude with this finalistic statement because he went to the limits of what can be named. The rest of us, as long as we have not done that, have not yet earned this right. The shadows of the unsaid and unspoken must remain part of our worldview, otherwise the categories of things that have, maybe simply by chance, already got a name, will start to determine what we see. When you started learning maths, you were told that numbers were these things from 1 to 10. It’s funny, but the school system actually lies to children. Why not tell them right at the beginning that they will find out later that there are many more numbers, far away and in between the numbers they already know? That would probably teach them the most fundamental lesson humans can ever learn: That there is more than we know and more than what we have a name for at the moment. It was again Ludwig Wittgenstein who wrote that the limits of your language are the limits of your world. I want to include the mists of what is already aware but does not yet have a name into his thought: The limits of your awareness will always be the limits of your world. Keep them wide. 

June 2024, Anne Frütel