“An actor must always maintain their distance; the audience should not see them everywhere, they should not know their character, lifestyle, or difficulties. In a word, the actor should not become familiar in the eyes of the audience. However, the current times do not say this. We have indeed fallen into a bad period of time. Especially the youth. We must do our best for the youth. But this is not just about your or my thinking. This greed, this corruption, mixing the halal with the haram is 99 percent with us. Whether it’s managerial positions or auxiliary roles. Those in charge of people's fates have these issues I have listed. There are very few people who truly understand the work they do and feel that responsibility.”
This was stated by People’s Artist, well-known actress Afaq Bəşirqızı in an interview with Medianews.az.
She later mentioned that artists work in jobs other than their profession out of necessity:
“I no longer know which side to see as guilty?! An actor becomes a clown, an actress drives a taxi. Imagine, an actress covers her face so she is not recognized and works in a company that accepts taxi orders. You know that I do not lie in this world. That person is not far from me. I see that actress almost every one or two days. What am I trying to say? I want to explain how serious the situation really is. The care that the president shows for the arts, that sense of closeness, no other country’s president can show that. It is a legacy left to him by the Great Leader Heydar Aliyev. When Heydar Aliyev heard that the leading actress of the Russian Drama Theater was working as a matron at the metro station, he immediately established a special pension and award for actors. Our president continues this and increases those salaries year by year. But not every actor or actress can receive this award. The artists who still come to the box office today and who have made great contributions to the development of the theater receive this award. Of course, there are undeserving ones among them as well. Aunt, uncle, and cousins work everywhere with us and will continue to do so. We witness even worse of this in the world of arts. I think talented actors working in the theater who do not have honorary titles but bear many responsibilities should be given concessions. How? Let me say. We have categories here. Their high categories can be reduced by one category and given to these actors to support their livelihood. But I should also note that not all theaters have academic status. These salaries are only in academic theaters. Still, thanks be to our president who suddenly granted academic status to 3-4 theater institutions and even the philharmonic. We have the National Youth Audience Theater along with the State Puppet Theater. The Puppet Theater is a theater that laid the foundation for the National Youth Audience Theater, the Academic National Drama Theater, and the Musical Theater; it is a creative hearth. It is already time for this theater to earn its own title and raise its category. We hope that the mentioned theater will soon be among those theaters.”
Ali Əsgər,
Medianews.az
