Letters to a Young Artist

Chapter 1 Presence Dear BZ: Presence. You want to know what it is. Well, you hit on my favorite subject. First of all, even before I became an actress I was told I had "presence." "Stage presence." I didn't know what that meant. I forgot about it. Long after I had trained to become an actress, I came upon the word in a way that was intriguing to me. Joseph Chaikin was a theater director who came to prominence in the sixties in the experimental theater scene in New York. He wrote a book called The Presence of the Actor. In it he defines presence in this way: "a kind of deep libidinal surrender which the performer reserves for his anonymous audience." He then went on to write that sometimes a person has "presence" onstage, but not in life. And then he wrote: "Gloria Foster has presence." At the time I did not know who Gloria Foster was. She is in two Matrixmovies; she played the Oracle. As soon as I had a chance to see her perform, I did. She was extraordinary. And the interesting thing about Gloria Foster was that in person, she was not at all a "close to you" kind of a woman. By the time I met her I met a woman who definitely kept her own space. Onstage it seemed that the light shone right through her, and that, in fact, the light found her wherever she was onstage. Her film work was filled with both dignity and humanity. Her death left a hole in the theater. I agree that presence is that feeling that the person onstage or in a film is standing right next to you. In film the presence blasts across the screen. Presence defies the limits of a person's body, defies the limits of the actual space it takes up. Some people call presence charisma. Perhaps it's the same thing. There are many charismatic people who are not artists. And presence is not the same as fame, by the way. If you think about the people around you, there are many who have presence. There's a woman who is a cashier at Wilkes Bashford, a clothing store in San Francisco. Her name is "Miss Kish"that's a nickname she has been given. For years I went into that store and was intimidated by Miss Kish. She is an African-American woman in a store that's mostly frequented by whites (with the exception of a few famous blacks like the former mayor of San Francisco, Willie Brown). She wore a man's hat at the cash register, often a bright red one. She looked as though she did not suffer fools. I was shocked to get a phone call from Miss Kish in November 2004, when John Kerry lost to George Bush. She wanted to know my opinion. To me, it was as if Kerry had called! Presence means you hold your own space, control the space around you, and sometimes welcome others into it. I saw a man in New York City in the late seventies kissing trees on a regular basis. Of course, such an action is bound to attract attention, but presence is not merely the attraction of attention. When he kissed a tree, it took my breath away. He was an older man with white hair. It was his level of commitment that gave him presence. Lauren Hutton, the first supermodel, was discovered in the sixties by Diana Vreeland, the editor of Voguemagazine. At the very moment that Diana Vreeland discovered Lauren, Lauren did not realize she was attracting attention. She was in Vreeland's office as a model who simply showed the clothes to Vreeland and others at Vogue who made decisions about fashion. She was too short to be a high-fashion model. She was stunned by the scene in Vreeland's officethe glamour, the diversity of looks and attitudes. She actually stSmith, Anna Deavere is the author of 'Letters to a Young Artist ', published 2006 under ISBN 9781400032389 and ISBN 1400032385.