Ion Cojar

Ion Cojar was a Romanian acting teacher, researcher and theatre director. He is the founder of a unique method that revolutionized the Romanian school of acting. Ion Cojar changed the old way of understanding acting in Romania, when the actors were taught how to play theatre, to act, to fake, imitate or mimic life, emotions or characters, with a new one that demands actors, directors and teachers to create the circumstances in which the truth of life can occur, and the actor/actress to go onstage or during filming through authentic psychologically-realistic processes that cannot be anticipated or consciously controlled, at the end of which he/she would be actually changed as a person, so that the audiences may be able to follow the lifelike processes, to understand and believe what they see and hear, to empathize with the actors. Ion Cojar also argued that we can know for sure that the actor is not faking or acting, but is going through an authentic process when we see instant, organic changes in the color and texture of his face, like when blood instantly floods its vessels in important moments, because these changes are impossible to fake. As a professor and researcher at The National University of Theater and Film from Bucharest, guided by the principle "process, not success", Ion Cojar worked with his students in order for them to develop a specific psycho-emotional mechanism that, along with the use of a specific acting method, would allow them to transform conventions in life truth, unlike the old acting school when students were taught how to play theatre. Ion Cojar always said that "the art of the actor has nothing in common with theatre", a statement that became his trademark. The professional actors who are trained via Cojar's pedagogical method tend to use in their creative processes an acting method derived from the previous one. One of his former students, Luminita Gheorghiu, won the Los Angeles Film Critics Association Award for Best Supporting Actress for her performance in The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (2005). Professor Mircea Gheorghiu, another former student of Ion Cojar, is considered to be the main continuator of his teaching method in the art of the actor. As a theatre director, Ion Cojar also argued that the audiences, in order to empathize in a total way with what they're seeing and hearing, must not have any clue or the impression that they're witnessing a theatre show, but a genuine life event. In theory, Ion Cojar gathered all his research and discoveries in his book entitled "O poetica a artei actorului" ("Poetics of the actor's art").