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“Acting Is a Way of Thinking – The Philosophy of the Art

of Acting and the Philosophy of Theater”

ION COJAR’s METHOD – A COMPLEX REACTION AGAINST AN

OSSIFIED CONTEXT

1. Hello everybody, my name is Theo Herghelegiu – please, call me THEO!

– and I live in Bucharest, Romania, Eastern Europe. I’ve been in a close
relationship with the THEATER for about 27 years, but the latest 22, were
intense years of practice: of directing mostly, a bit of acting and some
constant playwriting, too. I do not have an academic career, since my total
interest was for the stage, for DOING, for directing and writing and
researching new spectacular aesthetics and so on, and not for teaching
acting classes – so you may call me a ‘practitioner’; a theater maker, not
a theater teacher! ☺

2. Nevertheless, during all those years, I came in contact with very young
actors – with people who had just graduated an Acting School or other,
or, some of them, were still students at the time. So, my job, as a director,
was also to teach those guys things; to play the part of a professor who
helps them acquire some acting techniques, or reveal them an acting
method, or show them some concrete, efficient ‘tricks’ to be used within
this job. So, my personal conclusion is that ANY director has to be a bit
of a teacher, too. At least from time to time. ☺
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3. Both professions are vocational, and there’s no doubt in this. Some great
professors are unsubstantial artists, and some huge artists are very lousy
professors – that’s a fact and we all know it. But sometimes we meet
people who are exceptions to the rule. Strong personalities who have
developed consistent, remarkable careers both as creators and educators.
Today, we’ll talk about such a guy.

4. When Professor Miguel Mejia invited me to have this video conference and
talk to you, I suggested him 3 possible titles for this dissertation. Two of
them were subjects dealing with the very practice on stage, or with the
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craft of writing for the stage, as a playwright. The 3 subject yet, was a
pure theoretical one and it proposed an overflight of the ION COJAR’s
Acting Method [pronounced Yon Cojar, with a J as in Rio de Janeiro],
more precise: how he described Theater and the Pedagogy of Acting as
two different things and two different philosophies. A very erudite and
scholarly work, developed in many years – tens of years – and
published for the first time in 1996, in a book called “A Poetics of the
Art of Acting”.

5. Very disciplined and diligently (which, btw, is very NOT like me!), I
started to re-read his work (after like…25 years or so), to review and
summarize the book, to look after all the referential that he mentions
in his work, to read again the Aesthetics of Aristotle and to dip into
Stanislavky’s System, or Viola Spolin’s techniques, or Lee Strasberg’s
Method and so on. And I was on the verge of elaborating a very dense
essay about how Mr. Cojar created a system – a philosophical system –
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which apparently is unique, treating and approaching the Pedagogy of

Acting in a total different way than they used to do it until then. We talk
about the late 70s, or so. And then, I said to myself – if I were 20
something, and a student at the beginning of my career, would I be
REALLY interested in all this philosophical system, which, if I am to
confess, is very rough, and sophisticated, and pretty often, highly
pompous and scholastic? The answer was, obviously, NO. No, I would
not be interested in the presentation of such a rough and intricate point
of view, no matter how unique or fantastic that is! And thus, I found
myself in front of a small problem.

6. The truth is that this guy, Ion Cojar – everybody was calling him Iani
Cojar –was indeed a huge personality and he taught generations after
generations of students, teaching a method that seems to be unique even
today, and that was revolutionary at the time, and he fought for it – he had
been fighting to impose this method with his fellows professors, and
chiefs of departments, and with his bosses, and with everybody in charge
and in power at the time, but he was also very ‘boring’, and sometimes
quite exasperating for most of his students, aged 18-23. Nevertheless,
sooner or later, everybody would end up by adoring him. How come?...
Well, we’ll see.

7. This man, Iani Cojar, was presenting the academic staff a method of
teaching that was in full contradiction with all the habits and procedures
before. He has simply blown up the methods of the old school and
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developed a new one. He was interested in the particular TRUTH of each

and only person he was teaching. Cojar loved his students, enormously, and
his students loved him back. He died in 2009, at the age of 78, so I had the
chance to meet him while I was a student myself and to take part in some of
his classes too, and, most important – I had the chance to work with his ex-
students, later in life, as a director. I’ll come back to this.
[Let’s see his photo now!]

8. So, Iani Cojar was a very particular figure in the background of

Romanian Academic environment – he was surnamed THE OLD GUY,
because he was white haired, but his hair was actually completely white
since he was 27 years old. And he was notorious for his very, very long
speeches in the class. He used to talk for… hours on end; he would
explain his theories to his students for like… 5 hours, or 6 hours, without
a single break. Within their 4 years of study, his students would write
dozens of notebooks, filling the pages with ideas, principles and notes
that they wouldn’t necessarily understand at the time. Imagine that! ☺
But later on… once they got on stage…. once they became real actors…
they re-activated all that precious info and really UNDERSTOOD it, in a
deep and organic way, and they used it as a vital substance for their daily
work in the theater.

9. Now, then, imagine people, more or less your age, eager to work, to
REHEARSE, to be on stage and experience the magic of the stage, the
secrets of the scenes in the play; eager to work with their colleagues, as
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partners, and eager to discover the secrets and potentials of the

characters they were supposed to embody, being put to listen for hours
and hours a theory that was meant to build a system within their minds,
before they started to effectively work and which sounded like this – for
example: “The Acting class is a workshop where we recuperate all the
five senses, all the memory types and all the imagination types, within
all the psychological trials which effectively process all the sensorial
information. The play is a semiotic system which turns into a material
system – the act of performing.

[Link] da Vinci said that “We need to describe the theory first, and
then the practice”. What is the Art of acting? The answer is difficult, and
its difficulty comes from the imposture of the question. The fact that a
valid concept which grasps the essence of the art of acting has not been
issued yet, is not because of the phenomenon itself, but because there is a
disparity between the mentality and the logic mechanism used to operate
upon the object, and the object itself. Meaning – the disparity between
our suppositions and the very nature of the object. ART is not the same
thing with THE RESEARCH of ART. The nature of the Actor and of the
phenomenon specific for his creation cannot be explained by the
mechanism of the classical binary logic. This nature breaks the principle
of identity and of non-contradiction, which states that a thing is what it is:
it cannot be, and not be at the same time. But the act of creation in
Performing is both REASON (thought) and FEELING at the same time.

11. More than that, an Actor, when performing, becomes a person having 2
or more identities at the same time. This is a paradox and we have to
integrate and operate with this paradox”… Obviously, everybody was
expecting something else for the Acting class, right?! But they had to sit
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quiet, listen to all this theory and write down what they thought to
be important, or useful.

12. The PARADOX, for instance, was one of this favorite themes, together
with the HUMANNESS (el Humano), the POTENTIAL of
VULNERABILITY, the ARCHAI [ARCHEOS in Spanish, etymology
Old Greek], and the AUTHENTICITY. And the most famous phrase that
consecrated him was this: BUSCANDO EL PROCESO, NO EL
ÈXITO! This is something they still quote today in the theater, whenever
an actor is interested in achieving immediate glory, or easy results,
instead of working accordingly for a well done role. This is also the basic
principle on which he separated the Pedagogy of Acting from the
Theater, considering them to be two different philosophies.

13. Coming back to Mr. Cojar’s examples, he would refer to the studies of
Lucien Levy-Bruhl, the French sociologist, who has split the human mind
into 2 categories: primitive and modern. The primitive mind does not
make any difference between supernatural and real, and it uses the
mystical participation in order to manipulate the world, while the modern
mind uses logic and reflection.

14. Levy-Bruhl enounces the LAW OF PARTICIPATION, naming its 4

characteristics: 1. The beings can be both themselves and something
different from themselves at the same time; 2. The primitive mind is not
anti-logic, it’s just different from our logic; 3. The primitive mind uses
images in the process of thinking; 4. The primitive mind uses the
polyvalent structure of logic, respectively: the non-binary logic (as a
correspondent in the domain of Science – today we all know that the
electron is both particle and wave).
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15. Iani Cojar changed the old way of understanding the idea of ACTING
in Romania and the old way of teaching within the Drama Schools. The
student was taught how to perform a character, how to pretend, how to
compose a character with exterior means, how to imitate or
impersonate, or how to simulate emotions, moods, reactions.

16. What Cojar did, was to make the students discover their own truth. He
made the actors, the directors and the Acting teachers create
circumstances that were bringing the truth to the surface, so the actors can
really LIVE on stage and be able to experience authentic psychological
processes that were truly transforming them, as human beings, during the
performance. He accomplished this by imposing the principle that
ACTING IS A WAY OF THINKING. That the actors have to THINK
before they can FEEL, or ACT. That without thinking in a very specific
way, there is no acting, and no doing on stage. And he developed several
concepts to sustain his fundamental principle. And this principle used as a
teaching method for actors, was considered to be original and innovative
at the time, and it still is.

17. Going back to one of his landmarks, the Potential of Vulnerability, we

have to say that he was talking a lot about the ‘mirror effect’. The mirror
effect is a SPECIFIC psychological process by which the actors activate
their Potential of Vulnerability and it represents a precious raw material for
them. It’s all about the power to identify yourself – to mirror yourself
– in the character you are supposed to play.

18. The modern man, by continuously abstracting things, has moved away
from the immediate reality, by THINKING it, while the primitive man it
is attached to the sensible world, by LIVING it. This is neither anti-logic,
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nor pre-logic; it’s just a different logic, which we may call META-LOGIC.
As a conclusion – the art of acting is a specific logic mechanism.

19. Mircea Eliade – a famous Romanian philosopher and writer – said that the
difference between the Sacred and the Profane consists in the presence,
respectively – the absence of the signification. Theater is a place where
we operate with meanings; with significations. If something is lacking
a meaning, that something is useless, therefore it has to be avoided.

20. The objects of the visible reality have an invisible dimension, and, as
Rilke has put it: “There is a prisoner in every single thing”. Meaning – a
virtual potentiality. Meaning – a POSSIBILITY. What does the artist want,
and he wants it badly? – To release that prisoner. What meaning and final
objective should any good School of drama have? To fulfill the conditions
for those possibilities, those ARCHAI – the vital principles – lying in
every student to become real. To be real-ized. To be actual-ized.

21. “A stone is just a stone, until it becomes a weapon, says Martin

Heidegger”. But a stone can become a sculpture – a piece of art, or an
ashtray – a useful domestic object, or a weapon – an object of crime,
being just a STONE as well. This way of thinking, which contradicts the
binary logic, corresponds to the actor’s mentality. The Actor is both the
artist and the work, at the same time. The Art of Acting is a way of
thinking; it is a specific logic mechanism. Only AFTER THAT it is a
way of doing.

22. The actor brings into reality those possibilities lying inside of him. He
releases the prisoner. He allows the arche to become a reality from being a
latency. (According to Aristotle, an arche is a principle; a vital force that
lies in all of us, un-manifested yet, but ready to come to life). The
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actor objectifies virtual potentials inside him – inside his polyphonic

personality – and turns them into real things.

23. When the art of acting is authentic, it can be perceived in a wholeness

where one cannot tell real from possible, present from potential,
concrete from abstract, awareness from intuition and rational from
irrational. This wholeness includes the entireness of the contradictory
human nature, in its very essence.

24. Unlike the angles that had considered INTERPRETATION (tone,

gesture, stance, position) to be the stock for the actor’s work, the great
theater schools in the 20-th century (Stanislavky, Michael Cehov, Lee
Strasberg) considered the METHOD and the PRINCIPLE to be the
grounds of the actor’s work. The problem is not WHAT or HOW the
actor does, but WHAT HAPPENS TO HIM during the performance on
stage. Between these 2 states: ‘something is happening’ and ‘nothing is
happening’ lies the difference between TRUE and FALSE.

25. One of our greatest actors and acting teachers, Octavian Cotescu, used
to say a simple, but strong phrase to his students. When somebody was
really trying. and he or she was expecting their effort to be rewarded and
the scene to be applauded, and yet – no big bravo for that student, so he,
or she would ask: “What’s wrong, Professor?”, Mr. Cotescu would
answer: No te cuesta, cariño! – and that became a famous jest in our
theater. Because it says so much, with so little – No te cuesta, cariño!

26. Another aspect that Professor Cojar was really obsessed with, was the
CONCEPT. The concept meaning the specific mentality of the character.
For instance, the concept of Ophelia in Hamlet is LOVE MEANS
EVERYTHING. The concept of Moliere’s Harpagon is MONEY IS ALL
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THAT COUNTS. The concept of El Cid is HONOR AND DUTY

ABOVE ALL and so on… Once the actor assumes the concept, the
concept becomes a founding principle, a dynamic principle, capable to stir
the imagination, as a basic condition for the creativity of an actor. Once
the student has assumed the CONCEPT, he cannot act randomly
anymore.

27. Actor’s creation becomes a raw of unique and unrepeatable

processes, that have to be acknowledged and fixed. How? By
becoming aware of every step you take along this path.

[Link] is not enough to have one good rehearsal; what’s important is to be

able to re-build that path every time you rehearse the scene.

29. Even if there are not two identical rehearsals, the CONCEPT, once
assumed, will lead to an authentic raw of creations. We talk about UNITY
within DIVERSITY.

30. In art, as in life, exaggerating one of these two terms leads to a crisis.
Overgrowing the idea of UNITY leads to flatting, while overgrowing
the idea of DIVERSITY leads to losing the particularities that define
that unique and specific principle: the HUMANNESS.

31. Iani Cojar was emphasizing this concept a lot. And this is another
particular mark of his method. He was obsessed with the humanness; he
was hunting it every single day in his students’ work in class. He was
interested in pulling out the humanness from his disciples and in teaching
them how to permanently search this humanness in whatever scene they
do, or whatever character they play.
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32.I was telling you earlier that I had worked with actors who had graduated
the Drama School, at Ion Cojar’s class. Well, I did that, covering about 3
generations of his students. All of them have stories about what was
happening in their classes and some of them are really funny.

33. For instance, a boy and a girl were rehearsing a scene from The
Rainmaker by John Grisham, and the situation was that the boy was
entering a stable, where a pretty ugly young girl, having an inferiority
complex was working something, and he was supposed to seduce her.
And the scene didn’t work. It just didn’t work. Then, professor Cojar
called the boy and whispered something in his ear – he would do that
quite often: he was giving directions to each student, like a secret, a
different ‘secret’ for every student involved in a scene, so that EACH of
them knew something that THE OTHERS wouldn’t. This time, he told
the boy that when he feels the time is right, to simply touch the girl’s
boobs. Obviously, the boy said NO, motivating that under no
circumstances would he do such a gesture to his class mate. Cojar said it
again: Touch her teats. The boy refused again. Cojar said it once more:
Touch her teats, or I’ll have you expelled from school.

34. Well, the guy went back, did the scene, and, at a given moment, he
grasped the boobs of his partner. The girl was shocked, so she slapped
him badly, with all her force and fury. The boy was totally astonished,
but Cojar cried : Go on, go on!, and they went on , and they did a
gorgeous, authentic, very much alive scene. Later on, during the class
exam, there was no need to touch any boob, or to slap anybody, because
both the girl and the boy KNEW what happened to them and they could
use that from their emotional reservoir, and that was the HUMANNESS
in them that was activated.
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35. Another example is that of two students rehearsing a scene from

Platonov, by Chekov, where the guy was dead drunk, and the woman had
to sober him up, because there was an emergency of a kind. Platonov was
so wasted, that he simply wouldn’t wake up, because he actually didn’t
want to discuss anything, or to relate to anybody, or to “see” that woman.
But the girl’s objective was to wake him up, and to do it quickly. So,
after trying this and that, the girl bit her partner’s toe so hard, that the boy
acting Platonov jumped and screamed and saw the woman and became
present in one second. That was another example of HUMANNESS used
to solve a situation on stage.

36. Some other time, doing a scene from The Morometes, a Romanian novel
by Marin Preda, two students playing two poor peasants, man and wife,
were having an argument. The man was supposed to feel a lot of fury
towards his wife, like being on the verge of killing her, or beating her
badly, at least. And the student rehearsing the husband couldn’t get there
– he simply could not charge all that fury inside of him. So, during the
exam, the girl acting the wife felt like spitting him, so she spat him in his
face, big time. The guy was so shocked and he felt so much rage, that his
impulse was to punch his class mate really bad, but then he simply
thought that the girl was a mother in her real life, having a 3 years old
little girl, so he restrained his impulse and continued to play the scene
making supernatural efforts not to hit the woman. And all that effort,
which was soooo authentic, made the HUMANNESS in that scene to
reach a high, precious level.

37. And the examples could go on forever, but I think you got the idea.
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38. Iani Cojar considered that the Art of Acting begins and dies with
every great actor. In theory, the art of acting is the same for all the
actors, but practically, it is different for each of them.

39. This art is redefined and reinvented by every authentic actor. The
authentic art is tested by every subject who experiences the actualization
of their virtual alterities – of the archai of their own personality, and
who really assumes those alterities effectively, not just symbolically.
Those alterities are actually unpredictable ways of being; of existing.

40. He said that any School of Drama is a mined teritory, full of traps
and permanently threatened by big dangers. The student’s good
intention to learn is undermined by the bad tendency of copying; of
importing the information mechanically and in a hurry, while the
professor’s good intention is undermined by the tradition of direct
teaching, of empiric teaching, of simply showing fragments of acting
craft and artistry to the students.

41. The way to the truth is more precious than the truth – used Iani Cojar to
say, quoting a philosophical statement. This was the main difference he
made between SCHOOL and THEATER – the school must pursue the
process; the theater is interested in the final product: the show. He
considered that the old schools and methods were imposing constraint
and submission, instead of the freedom of expression.

42. Without freedom, there is no creation. The restrictions destroy the

spontaneous, living actions. But the necessary climate is hard to achieve –
the scoring system and the hierarchies lead to the apparition of self-
importance, vanity, selfishness, chicanery, bullying, envy, inhibition,
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unfair competition, frustrations. It is often forgotten that Theater is

about US, never about ME.

43. The first condition for a group to be creative is to obtain the free
cohesion and the mutual trust. Under circumstances of restrictions and
psychological and physical discomfort, all the processes specific to the
LIVING are blocked. They are set on an alarm mode and generate
uptightness.

44. Freedom is necessary for creation, undoubtedly, but you still need
discipline in the class, and THAT was something that Iani Cojar obtained
by cultivating the RIGOUR in his students’ work, the CONSISTENCY is
his speeches, and the STIMULATION of playing; the pleasure of
permanently discovering the truth while working, or watching the work
of the class mates. He was manipulating his students’ CURIOSITY and
EAGERNESS - two major catalysts for the work on stage.

45. By cultivating the MODEL and “the modelling” in accordance with an

“ideal model” it overthrows the very purpose of Acting teaching; it moves
it from acquiring a method to imitating an exterior behavior. The
MODEL and the MODELLING are not compatible either with the
originality and the action of self-discovery, or with the self-generative
processes. Thus, instead of obtaining dynamic knowledge, we obtain
mechanic knowledge.

46. The mechanical mentality is interested in: HOW is the object? HOW
are its characteristics? In theater, there is another principle that
functions – one which answers the questions WHAT? WHY? –
determined by the miracle of the moving.
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47. By claiming and imposing this principle, Iani Cojar was actually fighting
against a very wide spread pattern within our Theater Academic
Educational system, which was preserved for a long while. 99 % of the
Acting Professors at the time were great actors themselves, and what they
did, was to “clone” themselves, endlessly multiplying their personality
when teaching their students how to act, by imitating them, or by copying
their tricks. And, obviously, that was not a happy situation for the future
young actors.

48. THE HUMAN BEING, AS A LIVING SUBJECT, MUST BE KNOWN

IN ITS CONTINUOUS MOVEMENT, HAVING INSTABILITY AS
AN INHERENT FEATURE, said Cojar. The behavior of a living subject
is always probable, depending on the hazard. The authenticity of the
acting on stage does not depend on the literary support (the play), but it
depends on the processes of ACTUALIZING the virtual possibilities
hidden inside the actor, which represents the miracle of creating on stage.

49. The theater is a convention, an invented system, a game, therefore an

artifice. The situations are fictional, but the actor turns them into
significant realities. There is a hard question, though, that we all have to
face: who defeats whom? Who’s going to win? The ACTOR, or the
PART? Jerzy Grotowski established two extremely simple, yet mostly
efficient criteria: 1. I BELIEVE, OR I DON’T BELIEVE (what I see on
stage); 2. I UNDERSTAND, OR I DON’T UNDERSTAND (what I see
on stage).

50. And if we stop for a second and think about these so simple ways of
evaluating the quality of a theatrical act, we will see that Grotowski has
just caught the essence of the acting true value.
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51. What he has stated is perfect and it’s complete. But the problem is how
do we get there? How do we make our work on stage to be credible and
understandable? This is where the method comes in and helps us build a
“facility” filled with tools and principles that will help us be true, clear
and spectacular on stage. And in order to do that, we use everything we
have at hand. In order to activate that HUMANNESS in us, we must
cover a long way. And we always start with the author’s text. (Except the
situations when we deal with some post-dramatic performances, as Hans-
Thies Lehmann, the inventor of the concept, calls this way of making
theater, where the dramatic text is no longer a vital ingredient).

52. Ion Cojar considered the text of the play to be an encrypted semiotic
system, and the performance to be a dynamic material system. The
performance includes the code of the author (the text) but it also
overruns it.

53. All the arts are a reduction of the reality. Except the Art of Acting. The
art of acting is an irreducible unit; a bio-psycho-socio-cultural unit.

54. “Unfortunately, in time, the way of thinking the Acting Pedagogy has
become incompatible with its very object. The most obvious
incompatibility being that the study itself is called “the study of dramatic
characters”, while the art of acting, and the art of improvisation are not
reducible to the semiotic system of the playwriting!!!; their main objective
is to initiate and build creative personalities” – Iani Cojar belived.

55. He was very categorical about the difference between

INTERPRETATION and CREATION. He considered that the
CONTENT of this subject of study – the art of acting – should be based
upon a set of fundamental principles, upon developing themes and ideas
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to sustain a coherent theory about the core of acting, and upon

a methodical practicing of this theory.

56. According to the MIMESIS principle - the character, and the subject,
and the theme of the play have the value of a seed for the actor: we know
that a seed contains the future plant in its embryo, but we can never
know IF or HOW it will grow. We can only assume, we can only hope
and we can only be aware of the possible beginnings and promises.

57. More than that, all the trials must afford the luxury of failure. This is
why to fail it’s not wrong, it’s not bad. All trials have their meaning, or
their purpose. By trying, the student learns how to be true, how to find
his own truth, his own authenticity, his own humanness.

58. The pedagogy of acting can be a ritual of constraints and submissions, a

taming and a tough training, where the censorship rules, and the fear to be
wrong, to make a mistake unavoidably leads to duplicity and lack of
comfort, both for the individual and for the group of people.

59. One of the greatest directors and acting teachers in Europe, David Esrig,
used to say that, in Theater, there is no such thing as GOOD or BAD.
Never! It’s just APPROPRIATED, or UNAPPROPRIATED. That’s all.
Something can be totally unappropriated for this scene, for this line, for
this intention, for this character, for this moment of the rehearsals etc,
and absolutely brilliant for another line, another situation, another
character, another moment etc…

60. We can also translate this very true and elegant point of view of Mr.
David Esrig’s into the binomial: useful / useless, according to the
efficiency degree. If something proves itself useful in the process of
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rehearsing, it means it’s appropriated and it can be part of the

construction. How do we define “useful” under these circumstances?
Well, one criteria would be the power of providing credible, verisimilar,
understandable, spectacular, unexpected humanness.

61. Another statement of Ion Cojar’s was this: Only a climate of freedom
and freely consented discipline can develop the PERSONALITY;
without it, there’s no great actor!

62. All professions in the world are originated on conventions that become
objective through their subjects, called “players”. The most serious
magistrate, the most notorious surgeon, a high priest or a high politician
play a game; play a part more or less successfully, proving a bigger or a
smaller talent. In every domain there are ‘dummies’, extras, impostors,
frauds. Imitation, fakeness and imposture do not have a good reputation
anywhere. They are dismissed and sanctioned wherever they show.
Why would it be different in our domain?

63. Many actors allow themselves to be cheated by the ideas of imitation

and simulation; two terms which are often used to reduce the idea of
acting. This kind of actors believe that it’s enough to imitate the feelings,
or to practice the self-illusion in order to achieve a mood of
‘devastation’, or a mood of violence, or a mood of exuberance.

64. There is a lot of talking and commenting about the so-called Mood-
Based Theater. The biggest sin of this way of understanding the idea of
ACTING, is the refusal of an honest relation with the reality; that very
reality that establishes the human actions.
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65. The energy that turns the convention into a psychological truth,
producing the EMPATY, so the spectators can identify themselves with
the characters on stage, is the job of the actor alone. It depends on him
and him only, on his availability, on the limits of his nature and his
professional education.

66. The great actors always start from themselves; from their own identity.
They seek to maintain this identity, so they can feel with their own senses,
so they can judge with a sharp mind, so they can use their full potential of
vulnerability and feel whatever might happen to them on the way
suggested by the author. The truly brilliant actors, the geniuses, know
how to uncover and develop their own subject. This is the paradox of
depth in the art of acting. The path to the OTHER (the character) passes
through MYSELF. Only by being myself I can be all the others lying in
me.

67. All the characters are inside us. Climbing from ME to the CHARACTER
involves 3 moments: me in the given situation, discovering my
function/role in the convention of the play, assuming the concept – that is:
the logical mechanism of the character. ME, MY ROLE/FUNCTION,
THE CHARACTER.

68. The potential of vulnerability is the second instance (after the way of
thinking) responsible for the quality of the acting on stage. The old
theater school blends; levels the creative energy of the student, instead of
stimulating it. It approaches the students not the way they ARE, but the
way they SHOULD BE. So, instead of teaching them the truth and the
honesty, it teaches them how to pretend, how to use prefab ideas, how to
manipulate clichés. While the truth is that REALITY comes first;
IDEALITY is recessive.
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69. Professor Cojar used to say STOP! and he would interrupt the
rehearsals in the classroom whenever the students had started the scene
without being truthful.

70. But he would also stop them during the examinations, in front of the
whole academic team of professors; in front of the commission, I mean.

71. Once, he even interrupted a performance, on the stage of the National

Theater of Bucharest, and he shouted from the audience: “Stop! Resume
the scene from the beginning!”, and those actors did that (btw, they were
two important and famous artists of the Romanian theater) and they
KNEW he was right, because they were faking, they were not authentic, so
they started the scene again and everybody could tell the difference.

72. Very often, Iani Cojar used to say to his students: “Please do not
play phantoms!”

73. What did he mean!? Well, he meant they must not ‘set up’ anything in
their heads before rehearsing, they must not try to embody
preconceived ideas about the characters, but they should simply exist in
the situation, truthful and real.

74. He would urge them all the time to use all the 5 senses: to hear the
partner, to see the partner and everything around, to smell the partner
and the smell in the room, to feel the things they were touching, to feel
the taste in their mouth; to be alive and to USE all the info provided by
the 5 senses into their acting.

75. He would also tell his students that acting is like football training – before
you touch the ball, you have to do a lot of exercises. And this ‘exercising’
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was the equivalent of the long, long hours of theory. He was a real fanatic
of the truth.

76. Another anecdote – which is actually real – is about one of his students,
who did a crazy thing during an exam, and the Assessment Commission
insisted that Mr. Cojar must fail that student. The student, whose name is
Dragos, was playing Orlando, in As You Like It by Shakespeare, and the
scene was happening in the Forest of Arden. So, during the exam,
Dragos jumped like a monkey on the spotlights bar support, which was
precariously fixed high above the heads of the audience, and made some
risky, crazy movements up there. The staff was really pissed off and they
wanted Dragos seriously punished for his improper and dangerous
behavior.

77. So, Mr Cojar went to him and asked why did he do such an insane action.

78. And Dragos answered in pure honesty that he wanted to impress

Rosalind, for whom he was leaving poems in the trees, as Shakespeare
himself wrote, so he’d use a tree to do that, but there was no tree in the
classroom, so he used what he could find: the spotlight bar. Dragos was
completely sincere, so his professor never failed him and he defended his
student in front of all his colleagues and gave him a high score.

79. Iani Cojar would never spend his authority on a student to punish him, if
the argument and motivation of that student were real. He was a
fabulous pedagogue.

80. There is another story, when he was rehearsing the graduation play with
his students. They were doing Maxim Gorki’s The Lower Depths (Los
bajos fondos) and the student who did Vaska Pepel was a very talented
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young man, but a truant, and bit of a jerk and a bad tempered guy, too.
Anyways, his part was coming out wonderfully. But his partner had some
real issues in finding her truth and the right things for her character.

81. So, the guy, who had got tired and bored to rehearse over time, and
besides that, he also had another small job to do, said he would go home,
because the time was over and he did whatever he could, so that’s that.
Cojar told him to stay, but he just packed his things and left the stage. So
Iani Cojar followed him in the foyer of the theater and literarily kicked
his ass, as hard as he could.

82. (For what it matters, Cojar had been trained as a professional box fighter
when he was young, and he took part in a number of matches, being
pretty good with this sport).

83. The student turned around, looked into his professor’s eyes, understood
the huge shit he was actually doing to his class mate; he understood that
his professor humiliated him the same way he had humiliated his stage
partners, and he just said: “OK, Sir, I got it. I’m coming back and do my
job”. And so he did.

84. “What is all about our specialty?” – would Iani Cojar often ask. “What
is it? Art, or craft? Stereotype or creation? What can and what can’t be
taught here?”. He thought that it was very important, on the one hand, to
define the OBJECT of this specialty, and on the other hand, to establish
the right relationship between the OBJECT and the METHOD.

85. He thought that the fake methods were most visible in two directions: the
one which reduces Art to a craft, to a simple skill, where everything is pre-
known and it can be solved by a set of techniques, and the other one,
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which stubbornly resists all efforts of emancipation through theory and

systemic thinking.

86. The traditional confusion between THEATER and the SCHOOL OF

THEATER comes from the lack of any principle. When the
evaluation judgment is eclectic and non-professional, the objects lose
their specificity.

87. The mimetic empiricism - which he considered to be an endemic disease of

the Romanian educational system - enables the transfer of a mentality
soaked in the pragmatism of immediate success. It takes this mentality from
theater and puts it into the theater schools. We still have to cope with a
huge confusion between the Art of Acting, as a specific educational object,
whose purpose is to teach and train, and Theater, as a specific spectacular
object, whose purpose is to be consumed by the audience.

88. The object of Theater is the opera finita. The show. We care
about WHAT we get, not about HOW we have got it.

89. The researchers; the scientists are justified by their RESULTS, not by
their PROCEDURES. Theater belongs to the philosophy of the object.
The Art of Acting belongs to the philosophy of the method. Great artists
can be great teachers too, if, and only if they become aware of this
distinction – the philosophy of the object and the philosophy of the
method.

90. A good Drama School won’t teach the truths of the past generations, but
the methods and the ways taking to the undiscovered truths of the present
generation.
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91. Is there a Master who can know these truths before he teaches them? No,
there isn’t! But he will be the first beneficiary and the first witness of the
truths uncovered by his disciples, if they have learnt to apply correctly the
good methods of the Master, and not his solutions! As Lessing has put it:
“The path leading to the truth is more precious than the truth itself”.

92. The philosophy of the method makes the things depend on the human
beings. The philosophy of the object makes the human beings depend on
things. The object serving the man, and the man serving the object.

93. The educational activity cannot work without a founding principle. On the
other hand, it’s true that excessive theorization can kill spontaneity
and can damage the living phenomena.

94. The best example, is the famous Stanislavki’s exercise with the centipede,
when his students were supposed to become aware of the order that the
centipede was using to move its 1000 legs. After realizing that the first leg
that moves is leg number 1, and then leg number 759, and then leg

number 26, and then the 322nd leg and so on, they realized that the rest of
the legs are stuck and the centipede cannot move any farther. In
conclusion, you have to be aware of every move you take, so you can
forget them all and move freely.

95. “Man is a cultural being by nature, because it is a natural being by

culture”, says Massimo Piatelli-Palmarini, and he adds: “the culture
dominates and corrects the nature; the culture is capable of shaping the
biological component of the human being”. So, the human being lives
in the world of his own creations. The HUMAN system is a three sided
reality: individual – species – society.
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96. The human being cannot be defined separately, but as a whole, as a

bio-psychological-social entity. Before being a subject to the
Aesthetics, the ACTOR is a subject to the sciences about MAN.

97. Most practitioners, Cojar believed, consider the theories to be rather

confusing for the free expression of talent, so neither the definitions, nor
the concepts are operational for the artistic creation, so there’s no sense
in wasting time with such things.

98. Our personal belief is that sometimes this kind of things are really
useless, but sometimes they are vitally necessary.

99. There are specific types of actors who need to be fed a big amount of
theory, and actors who are rather inhibited if the director talks too much
about principles, and philosophy, and so on. Some of them use this
input in a creative way, some others, who work with their instincts a lot,
are rather puzzled if the speech gets too long and too dense.

100. Then, we have different stage situations, like a dead end, or a

serious dilemma, or an unpredicted complication, so sometimes it is
compulsory to stop and analyze and explain and uncover all the details by
using thorough theories of the dramatic facts, and sometimes a single
phrase, or even a single word is all that you need in order to put the light
on the dark corner and to reveal a hidden meaning.

101. And last, but not least, it depends on the play we deal with. One
cannot stage Shakespeare, for instance, or Sophocles, or Gabriel Garcia
Marquez, or a Kabuki play without mastering a solid and coherent
theoretical system, in order to analyze the meanings and reveal the
mysteries of the text; but if you make an easy, simple contemporary play,
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it may require just some basic explanations and a lot of “doing”

and practicing, and that’s it!

102. But, again, these are situations that we are supposed to face in the
theater, not in the theater school. ☺

103. One may ask, says Iani Cojar, what does it matter; what relevance,
what practical effect can have upon the work on stage if the ACTOR
knows that what he’s doing has this name, or that name?

104. It matters a big lot, he thinks. Because everything the actor feels
like doing from the INSIDE, and all he does and how he does it,
represents the direct consequence of a WAY OF THINKING, which
is based upon a CERTAIN, CLEAR principle.

105. The same way that the blood circulation, or the wonders of the
genetics were nourishing the life of the big LIVIG SYSTEM before they
were discovered and labelled, the same way, the miracle of creation in
art, by revealing its mysteries, will not affect or spoil the processes and
phenomena because of acknowledging them. There is a substantial
difference between TALENT and COMPETENCE.

106. With other arts, the Creator; the Art maker, although included in,
and represented by his work, still remains outside the work. Theater and
the Art of Acting are not like this! The ACTOR includes himself in his
work and identifies himself with the ART OBJECT he has created. His
art is syncretic, and the final PRODUCT is the PROCESS itself. The
work is accomplished only if the process is an authentic creative process.
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107. The specificity of the Art of Acting lies in SUBSTITUTION,

in ACTUALIZATION of distinct characters, and in the
BEHAVIOUR raised to the power of signification.

108. Behavior is essential on stage – how do we recognize a person in

real life? According to their behavior. It’s the same thing for a character
on stage. Behavior means how that character reacts, how he walks, how
he talks, how he laughs, or what kind of clothes he wears etc – and all
these are the result and the manifestation of a way of thinking.

109. Iani Cojar’s point of view about the ACTOR is based upon the idea
of UNITY WITHIN DIVERSITY, TYPICAL FOR THE
CONTRADICTORY HUMAN NATURE.

110. For him, the dramatic action of the actor is both spontaneity and
elaboration. The principle of truth is placed at the very base of
the pedagogical process.

111. “The need to imagine things follows the human being along his
whole life. This is the greatest gift for humanity – the power to imagine
things. This is the shelter of a “portable God”; the facility of angels and
demons. This is the space of creativity. Einstein considered imagination to
be more important than knowledge.

112. But there are factors that tend to paralyze the creativity, such as:
the critical spirit, the mechanization, the anxiety.

113. The artistic imagination has been described as being “the spiritual
action which produces new ideas; which discovers a new way of
understanding the world”. The key-word in this statement is ACTION.
ACTION is the key-word for everything we do on stage. ACTION is the
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magic word that generates all the Acting ways, all the Acting modes.
ACTIONS – may they be physical actions, or speech actions –
represent the engine that moves the act of playing from A to Z, in a
dynamic and active way.

114. Imagination, as well as creativity, also has enemies. And they

are: vanity, the functional fixations, fear, criticism, unhealthy doubts.

115. Concerning the MIMESIS principle, in the Art of Acting, it is

something that never dies.

116. Like NECESSITY, for example, the PRINCIPLE lives forever and
it never changes.

117. What does change, it’s the shape they take, in time. But the
principle is beyond the changing contingent.

118. Aristotle, even if he was proclaiming the MIMESIS principle

within Arts, also said that THE TRUTH IS LESS NECESSARY THAN
THE VERISIMILAR, his opinion being that the verisimilar is more
philosophic than the reality.

119. “The impossible which is convincing is preferable to the possible

that cannot convince” – says Aristotle. And it has been proved that, in
Theater, everything is possible, on the condition that is has a reason and
a meaning.

120. So, the MIMESIS principle is a genetic one. It concerns the

LIVING, it concerns the TOTALITY, and it implies the process of
BECOMING. This global perception is absolutely necessary if we want to
create a character.
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121. The ACTOR, who can have two identities at the same time while
on stage, produces LIGHT: he enlightens the meanings; he makes
VISIBLE things which are only INTELLIGIBLE. The real Act of
Acting, starts as a procedure, and ends as a phenomenon. It starts as a
convention and it becomes an objective action. It begins as an artifice
and it accomplishes authenticity.

122. The Art of Acting is both invention and discovery; both fiction
and reality.

123. The first ratifying criterion for the creative art of acting is the
AUTENTICITY of the dynamic phenomena and processes of the
“living”. The authenticity remains the capital issue for the art of acting,
answering to the Grotovskian question Do I believe it or not?

124. The authenticity – a specific criterion, is the only way to

objectify the condition of acting in theater.

125. The actor gets to be a specialist, to acquire a set of clichés for

certain characters he plays. That’s why we may say that one of the
particularities of TALENT, for an actor, is the speed and easiness to de-
specialize and re-specialize for another kind of CONCEPT, for another
way of thinking and being.

126. The ultimate purpose of Acting is the capacity to induce

EMPATY, so the audience can travel together with the character, going
through the entire journey.

127. The art of acting involves some unpredictable processes. It cannot be

programed or predetermined. It either happens, or not. This is precisely
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why, the main preoccupation has to be that of preparing and providing the
best possible conditions for it to happen.

128. David Esrig used to put it in a poetic, yet very suggestive way: “The
angels might come down on stage tonight, but, if we want them to stay,
we need to prepare the cradle first!”…

129. Iani Cojar believed that the MAN inside the ACTOR is
always there, except the cases when THE IMPOSTURE kills him.

130. And he also thought that the Art of Acting does not mean to imitate
the beautiful nature, but to express the complex and contradictory nature.

131. He educated many generations of students, he loved them all, and

his legacy is a quite intriguing method of teaching, which, even if it
includes many points of view to disagree with, it definitely has an
unmistakable truth in it: you can never FORCE an actor to be good; you
can only HELP him understand why he is not good, and what to do in
order to become good.

132. You can guide the MAN inside the ACTOR to find his own path,
leading to the final destination that you, as a director, have chosen.

133. The rumors say – and they are nothing but rumors: one can never trust
a rumor! – yet, the rumors say that in 2009, before dying, while in the
hospital, Cojar was visited by one of his former students, to whom he would
have said that: “Don’t tell them, but Acting is not a way of thinking in the
first place, as I’ve thought all my life…; it’s a way of feeling!”