Creating the Living Word:
An Anglo-Russian-American Perspective on Psychophysical Acting
Paper delivered at the 2nd Shanghai Theatre Academy conference on Actor Training, November 2019
Bella Merlin, PhD.
ABSTRACT
The ‘creation of the living word’ was a phrase used by Russian acting pioneer Konstantin Stanislavsky (1963-1938) to capture the dynamic connection between actor, script and moment of performance. In this paper, Dr. Bella Merlin (actor, writer and professor) addresses through four different perspectives how we aspire as actors to create the living word. As a researching practitioner, she interweaves (1) her Stanislavsky-based Russian training, (2) her work with British-born director Tina Packer (co-founder with voice guru Kristin Linklater of Shakespeare & Company, Massachusetts), (3) her recent film acting in Los Angeles and (4) her teaching of young American actors born into technology (the so-called ‘iGeneration’). In Part I, Merlin takes a semi-objective look at Stanislavsky and Packer: first, she traces the evolution of Stanislavsky’s psychophysical Active Analysis and, thereafter, makes links with Packer’s contemporary rehearsal processes. In Part II, Merlin adopts a more subjective, practice-based approach: first, she assimilates the language-based ‘system’ of Stanislavsky into the visual realm of film and, thereafter, applies her evolving Anglo-Russian-American perspective to the classroom. This paper is a conscious ‘work-in-progress’ – i.e. it is a provocation as much as a definitive solution – in which Merlin ultimately invites the reader to consider how actor trainers can help a generation of risk-averse young people become willingly vulnerable and emotionally accessible actors.
KEYWORDS
Practice-based research. Stanislavsky. Active Analysis. Tina Packer. Shakespeare. Shakespeare & Company. Film acting. Contemporary actor training. iGeneration. Alejandro Ramirez.
AUTHOR INTRODUCTION
Bella Merlin is an actor, writer and professor of acting and directing in the Department of Theatre, Film and Digital Production at the University of California, Riverside. She trained at the University of Birmingham and the Guildford School of Acting, U.K. and the State Institute of Cinematography in Moscow. With a PhD. from the University of Birmingham, she has spent twenty years combining a professional acting career with teaching and writing. Her acting in the U.K. includes two seasons at the National Theatre, London, with Out-of-Joint director Max Stafford-Clark; as well as extensive appearances in regional theatre, television, film and radio. In the U.S.A. her theatre roles include Margaret (Richard III Colorado Shakespeare Festival), Nerissa (The Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare & Company) and The Queen/Arviragus (Cymbeline, Shakepseare & Company), all directed by Tina Packer. Other roles include Trinculo in The Tempest (dir. Allyn Burrows, Shakespeare & Company), Arkadina in The Seagull (dir. Katya Kamotskaya, UC Davis) and Night and Dreams: Beckett and Schubert at LA Philharmonic directed by MacArthur Genius fellow Yuval Sharon. Film roles include Jenny in Alejandro Ramirez’s Mente Revolver (Revolver Mind)(winner of the first-prize Alambra del Oro at the Granada International Festival Cines del Sur, 2018). In addition to numerous chapters and articles, book publications include: Konstantin Stanislavsky (revised edition, Routledge: 2018), Acting: The Basics (revised edition: Routledge 2018), Facing the Fear: An Actor’s Guide to Overcoming Stage Fright, Nick Hern Books, 2016), The Complete Stanislavsky Toolkit (revised edition, Nick Hern Books, 2016), With the Rogue’s Company: Henry IV at the National Theatre (Oberon/National Theatre, 2005), and the forthcoming Shakespeare & Company: Training, Education, Performance with Tina Packer (Routledge, 2019). Some of these publications have been translated into Chinese, Italian and Russian. She is married to award-winning actor Miles Anderson, and lives in Los Angeles, U.S.A.
INTRODUCTION
A Practice-Based Perspective
I write this paper as a practice-based researcher.
So what does that mean?
Essentially, practice-based research is research ‘based in action rather than theory to solve a problem. It operates from the inside out’.[1] So, I may ask a question such as ‘What does it mean to be emotionally available as an actor?’ Or ‘How can I apply text analysis to the visual media of film and television?’ I then address those questions by analyzing my practice-based experience as an actor, rather than as a scholar, historian or critical theorist. While that analysis is certainly endorsed by scholarly reading, the primary source material is the human experience of performance.
Practice-based research has been gaining traction in the United Kingdom, Australia and Canada since the 1990s; it’s gradually finding validation in the United States and slowly in Europe. (I’m curious to hear from my Chinese colleagues how it’s perceived here at STA and generally in Asia.) Usually in the creative arts – to cite theatre scholars Barrett and Bolt – practice-based research is ‘motivated by emotional, personal and subjective concerns’.[2] From that perspective, it’s hard to engage with acting processes and actor training without tackling head on the emotional, the personal and the subjective. And perhaps one of the most prolific practice-based researchers in contemporary acting was the Russian pioneer, Konstantin Stanislavsky (1863-1938). Throughout his life as a director, actor and actor trainer, he grappled with the intricacies of acting to find and fashion a reliable methodology – i.e. a ‘system’ – that could be used by all manner of practitioners with all manner of plays. The one realm to which he didn’t apply his practical research was film. Not only was film very young in its evolution during Stanislavsky’s lifetime, but also he didn’t actually believe that it was going to endure! Ergo, he spent little time considering it and had no experience in film acting.
In 1993, I undertook a graduate acting course at the oldest film school in the world – Moscow’s State Institute of Cinematography (VGIK).[3] My main acting master Albert Filozov (1937-2016) was steeped in the heritage of Stanislavsky and equally celebrated for both his film and theatre work. On the very first day of classes, I asked Filozov what the difference was between stage acting and screen acting. His reply was simple: in terms of creating a character, the process is very similar. In terms of delivering the final performance, the technical aspects differ in size and amplitude. For stage, you radiate your performance out to the back row of the auditorium. For screen, you draw the camera into the eye of your mind.
This advice has been immensely useful to me during my professional life. However, I’ve recently found myself questioning the psychophysical nature of acting in general. My own career over the last decade has taken me from the U.K. (where my work included two seasons at the National Theatre, London) to the U.S.A. There my acting over the past couple of years includes Mente Revolver [Revolver Mind] by Mexican filmmaker Alejandro Ramirez and two seasons with Shakespeare & Company, Massachusetts (founded in 1978 by voice guru Kristin Linklater and award-winning actor-director Tina Packer). So, I’ve been navigating scripts as linguistically rich as Shakespeare and as dominantly visual as film.
While I’ve been acting, I’ve also been teaching undergraduates in the Theatre, Film and Digital Production Department at the University of California, Riverside. In other words, I’ve had the opportunity – in a variety of completely different spheres (i.e. theatre, film and teaching) – to explore through practice-based research the various emotional, personal and subjective questions that I’ve had about the nature of acting. At the heart of those questions is really: What does it mean be an actor in the twenty-first century? What does it mean to devote one’s professional life to using other people’s words to create a living experience? How might I be able to link the various experiences I’ve had – professional and professorial – to begin to answer those questions?
In effect, I’m trying to pull into focus some sort of Anglo-Russian-American perspective. In fact, this paper is my first attempt to articulate that perspective, which combines embodied knowledge from my Russian training with twenty-plus years of acting in Britain with my recently acquired understanding of Tina Packer’s American-based processes. In formulating this Anglo-Russian-American perspective, I address four key practice-based research areas, all of which concern the relationship between truth, emotional accessibility and the ‘creation of the living word’. Framing them here as questions, those areas are:
The structure of this paper basically falls into two halves. The first half is essentially objective, as I analyze the work of Stanislavsky and Packer.
The second half is more subjective, as I focus on my experiences of film acting and teaching. This two-part structure actually reflects the process of practice-based research: i.e. we take established methodologies; we pass them through our individual acting instruments (our selves); and we see how that might create new knowledge and perspectives.
So let’s start with Part I and Research Reflection #1…
PART I: OBJECTIVE RESEARCH: ANALYZING THE WORK OF OTHERS
Research reflection #1: Stanislavsky and the ‘Creation of the Living Word’
Stanislavsky devoted his life to finding ways of harnessing the ephemeral muse of inspiration so that actors could reliably deliver true-seeming performances every night. ‘Truth’ is always a tricky word in the blatantly artificial environment of the stage (and screen). After all, an audience knows that the circumstances enacted before them are not ‘for real’: there are pre-determined outcomes to the events that everyday life can never guarantee.
So the perennial challenge for us as actors is how to take our audience on a credible journey whereby they might actually believe in the possibility of what they’re watching. This is particularly the challenge with the psychological realism that tends to dominate western theatre and film, whether we’re talking superintendents or superheroes. How can we convince our audience that what we’re saying as actor/characters is the spontaneous expression of feelings provoked by the chain of fictional events? To do that, we have to ‘own’ the words and Stanislavsky called this process ‘the creation of the living word’. He likens the process to the organic growth of a plant. The living word is ‘one in which the roots run down deep into one’s soul. They feed on one’s feeling; but the stem reaches into the consciousness where it puts forth luxuriant foliage of eloquent verbal forms, conveying all the deep emotions from which they draw their vitality.’[5]
‘Creating the living word’ is no easy task. All too often as actors we simply don’t sound as connected to our scripted words as a plant is connected to its roots and foliage. But why is it so difficult? Because – as Stanislavsky said:
between our own words and those of another, the distance is of most immeasurable size. Our own words are the direct expression of our [present-tense] feelings, whereas the words of another are alien until we have made them our own, are the sign of future emotions which have not yet come to life inside us.[6]
Until we’ve made a deep organic connection to the script – until those words actually cost us something emotionally, physically, spiritually – they’re nothing but the two-dimensional blueprint of feelings we may possibly experience at some point in the future. You can test this out for yourself right now. Take Hamlet’s words, ‘To die, to sleep; To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub’… How much imaginative and psychological focus does it take to really consider the words ‘die’, ‘sleep’, ‘dream’, ‘rub’? ‘Sleep’ and ‘dream’ might be reasonably easy as most of us do them on a nightly basis. ‘Rub’ becomes harder, as we might not know exactly what it means? In this context, it could mean ‘issue’, ‘challenge’, ‘nub of the matter’, or ‘friction’. (After all, when we rub something, we create friction.) When it comes to the word ‘die’, that’s even harder. Death is the eternal mystery that few can fathom. So for us to ‘create the living word’ of ‘die’, we have to invest some serious time, imagination and openhearted vulnerability.
To help actors ‘create the living word’ Stanislavsky went through four major stages on his life’s journey as a practical researcher.[7] Those four stages were as follows:
Stage One: The Director-dictator (1891-1906)
In rebellion against the old ‘star system’ of acting – whereby any authentic storytelling was subordinated to the flashy performances of celebrity actors – Stanislavsky foregrounded ensemble interaction. However, he was only a young director in the late 1800s (first at the Society of Art and Literature and then at the Moscow Art Theatre): he had few tools in his kit. So the best he could do was to dictatorially determine all the actors’ moves by writing them down in detailed production plans. These moves were then rehearsed onto the actors almost as if they were marionettes. Thus it was that his acclaimed production of Chekhov’s The Seagull was staged in 1898: a huge success for the audience but a trial for the actors, who were robbed of their own input. The last thing they were able to do was ‘create the living words’.
Stage Two: Round-the-Table Analysis (1906-early 1930s)
This led to the second phase of Stanislavsky’s research, which followed a period of study and deep contemplation in 1906. He truly wanted to recruit the actors’ creative input, so now in rehearsal, he assembled all the actors together around a table for lengthy periods of shared text analysis and discussion. Thereafter, he would encourage them to get up on their feet and put all this research into their performances. It was impossible: their heads were like stuffed potatoes. They were no more ‘creating the living word’ than they had with the determined production plans. Stanislavsky could see the gaping chasm between his actors’ intellectual understanding of a role and their psychophysical embodiment of that understanding. The actual act of sitting at a table with their pencils in their hands and their scripts in front of them was a comparatively calm procedure. Yet the characters they were playing might be involved in physically vigorous or psychologically febrile circumstances. Stanislavsky was aware that ‘A calmly seated figure will get in the way of us finding out how [the character] really feels […] and, without this knowledge, the text will have a dead sound.’[8] He was right: the text was far from living. Because of this gap between psychology and physicality – between dead sound and living word – Stanislavsky came to realize that you can’t entirely trust the psychological suggestions you come up with when you’re sitting round a table. Your understanding of a situation (and the character within that situation) will only be complete once you’ve explored the dramatic actions physically. As Stanislavsky put it: ‘the separation of the mental life from the physical life does not give the actor the possibility to sense the life of the character’s body, and therefore he impoverishes himself.’[9] Yet again, he had bypassed the living word – and this time by deadening the body.
Stage Three: The Method of Physical Actions (1930s)
The third phase of Stanislavsky’s practice-based research came towards the end of his life. By now he understood that we can only ‘create the living word’ when we’re navigating the plays’ given circumstances through our bodies and with our partners. This caused him to analyze deeply his whole rehearsal process. With his newly grasped insight, he disbanded the long discussions and instead he directed his actors like so:
You are looking for your little son who ran off somewhere while you were in the shop. Get up from the table and imagine that this is the street and your fellow actors are the passers-by. You have to find out from them whether they have seen your son. Act! Perform this action! Not only in words but physically. You will see that as soon as you include your body in the work, it will become easier for you to speak on behalf of your character.[10]
In other words, living bodies in action create living words.
This rehearsal process – that shifted from discussion to immediate, active embodiment – became known as the Method of Physical Actions, and at its heart lay improvisation. Stanislavsky had come to realize in his practice-based research that to ‘create the living word’:
Our own words are needed in the first phase of physical embodiment of a part because they are best able to extract from within us [the] live feelings, which have not yet found their outward expression.[11]
Through our physical embodiment of a play we can begin to connect to the writer’s text in such a way that it’s vivid and unique to each of us as actors, and will therefore make an energetic impact on our audience.
The basis of the Method of Physical Actions is that one simple action leads to the next action, which leads to the next action, which leads to the next, and so on. By following simple actions, we can achieve complex psychological objectives. So: ‘I open the door, I switch on the light, I walk to the refrigerator, I take out a bottle of wine, I uncork the bottle, I turn on some music – so that when my husband gets home from work the atmosphere will be relaxing and we’ll have a lovely evening.’ Simple achievable actions to attain my psychological goal.
Stage Four: Active Analysis (The end of Stanislavsky’s life and beyond…)
Stanislavsky’s experimentation didn’t stop there. When the Method of Physical Actions became formalized by state, he evolved his practice into what became known as Active Analysis. The basic principle of Active Analysis is similar to the Method of Physical Actions, in that you initially improvise a scene in your own words. The key difference is that the emphasis lies less on the specificity of action, action, action! It lies more on the non-linear, more chaotic interweaving of feelings, actions, imagination and energetic exchange with your scene partner.
The basic steps of Active Analysis are (1) you read a scene; (2) you discuss the scene; (3) you improvise the scene; and (4) you discuss the improvisation, noting where your improvisation strayed too far from the text and where it unlocked new discoveries. Through repeating this simple four-step sequence, you progress from knowing little more than the delicate outline of a scene to being dead-letter-perfect, without ever taking the paper-and-glue script onto the rehearsal-room floor.
Each improvisation – or étude – becomes more fully-fledged and embodied, and grows closer to the actual script. The image I use when I’m directing using Active Analysis is that the play is a trellis; my actors are the ivy, winding their way around the trellis; and as the director I’m the gardener. In rehearsals I tend to the tendrils of the actor-ivy, ensuring they grow freely and healthily, but don’t wander too far from the trellis of the play. The improvisations follow a simple outline or ‘map’: as one character’s inciting ‘action’ in a scene rubs up against another character’s resisting ‘counteraction’, an ‘event’ occurs. The unbroken chain of events that comprises the whole play’s structure is unlocked by the actors in the course of their improvisations. Each time a scene is re-read (Step 3) and the improvisation is discussed (Step 4), deeper and deeper text analysis is applied, using the usual tools from Stanislavsky’s ‘system’. These tools include ‘objectives’ (or ‘tasks’), ‘given circumstances’, ‘moments of decision’, ‘syntax and punctuation’, and the ‘inner psychological drives’ (i.e. thoughts, feelings and actions).
Through the four-step process of Active Analysis, the line of thought (embedded in the playwright’s text) and the line of action (discovered through the actors’ improvisations) are uncovered and interwoven into the fabric of the production. Thus characterizations and ‘blocking’ emerge organically from the synthesis of text, actors and their live interaction. In other words, the final production ‘finds’ itself through the improvisations, rather than being imposed by a director from the outside.
Active Analysis also foregrounds some of the less used, but incredibly useful, aspects of Stanislavsky ‘system’. These include: Here, Today, Now (i.e. whatever is happening right this moment within each actor and between the actors is the raw material with which to fashion the performance). And grasp (i.e. the power of the actors to seize all the sensory information coming to them from their eyes, ears, noses and touch that cause these words to come out of their mouths). And of course the pause: Stanislavsky was insistent that ‘The actor always cheats you during moments of surging temperament.’[12] (I.e. he acts up a storm, but he doesn’t necessarily feel anything.) ‘To really measure the power of the actor’s excitement,’ continues Stanislavsky, ‘we must direct our attention to how he takes in the facts and events, how he evaluates the thoughts of his partner; we must watch him during his moments of absorption’. (This is particularly relevant to screen acting – as we’ll see – where close-ups are all about these ‘moments of absorption’). Perhaps most significantly for our discussion here, the improvisations unlock the potency of verbal action. All too often as actors, our haste to learn our lines as quickly as possible diminishes our experience of how our words actually land on our listeners. In fact, how our own words land on us! Words can change the world. Words have active power. Experiencing that power is ‘the creation of the living word’.
Active Analysis is the final legacy of Stanislavsky’s transformative work. His protégée Maria Knebel (1898-1985) ensured that the legacy continued. Knebel (herself an acclaimed actor and director) worked closely with Stanislavsky during the last years of his life, and in 1954 she wrote a doctoral dissertation on Active Analysis, which placed her as ‘its definitive spokesperson’. As American scholar and proponent of Active Analysis, Sharon M. Carnicke writes, ‘By the end of the twentieth century, Knebel had come to be seen in Russia as the most clear-sighted witness to Stanislavsky’s last experimental work.’[13] The way in which Active Analysis unites an actor’s mind and body, intellect and intuition, really is the culmination of Stanislavsky’s practice-based research as he strove for ‘the creation of the living word’.
Harnessing the dead, twentieth-century, Russian male perspective with the very much alive, twenty-first-century, British female perspective, I now turn our attention from Stanislavsky to the pioneering actor, director and trainer Tina Packer.
Research reflection #2: Tina Packer and ‘the creation of the living word’ on stage
Tina Packer co-founded Shakespeare & Company with internationally acclaimed Kristin Linklater in 1978 in Lenox, Massachusetts, U.S.A. In the preceding ten-year period of the 1960s and ’70s, English-born Packer and Scottish-born Linklater had each crossed the Atlantic on individual missions to conjoin British acting technique with American emotional availability. They were both in their own ways committed to ‘the creation of the living word’ – Linklater through freeing the natural voice,[14] and Packer through embodying Shakespeare’s language.
Packer trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) in the 1960s and then acted at the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) at the start of her career. And her understanding of the primitive, atavistic resonances of language – for actors and audience alike – is visionary. But it has come after a good deal of her own practice-based research. Moving from the RSC to television and film in the 1970s, she rapidly experienced a disconnect between word and effect: the words that she and her fellow actors were speaking came all too easily, the emotional content seemed all too glib. Her frustration with the acting industry in Britain at the time was significant enough for her to seek out Linklater in New York City in 1972. Within a matter of years Packer had convinced her to cofound a theatre company dedicated to breath, word, image, emotion and deep communication, using as its source Shakespeare’s language.
Throughout the course of Shakespeare & Company’s forty-year existence, Packer has committed herself in equal measure to professional performance, actor training and education (including rigorous scholarship as well as schools programs and community outreach). She would seem to be the first woman in history to have professionally directed and/or acted in every play in Shakespeare’s canon, completing the cycle with Cymbeline in 2017. Like Stanislavsky with his ‘the creation of the living word’, authentic communication has been at the heart of Packer’s life-long, practice-based research.[15]
In fact, my experience with both Stanislavsky’s Active Analysis and Tina Packer’s directing process has revealed some interesting Anglo-Russian-American correlations. These correlations come as no surprise. After all, RADA’s acting program in the 1960s – where Packer graduated with honors – had certain Stanislavsky-based underpinnings. And Kristin Linklater worked at NYU in the 1970s alongside the luminary, American trainer Peter Kass, whose teaching incorporated the profoundly psychological aspects of Stanislavsky’s ‘system’. Furthermore, William Shakespeare’s theatrical canon springs from the Renaissance when science and the arts were all seeking the ‘truth’, with vast expansions in philosophical thought about the meaning of life. To ask our own questions about that meaning, let’s head into the rehearsal room…
‘Working the play on its feet’: Packer’s process of actively analyzing
Just as Stanislavsky overthrew his early practice of spending weeks sitting round the table analyzing a script, Packer eschews traditional table work. She believes that it locks actors in their heads while the table visibly ‘cuts their bodies in half’. Her heart-felt aversion to head-led text analysis comes from hours of such experiences in her early career at the RSC. Lofty discussions led by Oxbridge-graduated directors had caused creative spasticity in Packer (just as they had with Stanislavsky’s actors).
Therefore, the very first rehearsal in a Packer production typically involves ‘working the play on its feet’. This exercise is just like Stanislavsky’s call to arms of getting up and looking for your lost son, and finding ways (as Stanislavsky put it) ‘to speak on behalf of your character’. The major difference is that the richness of Shakespeare’s text – with his philosophical, psychological and spiritual understanding of human behavior – is so dense and immense, that the words themselves are the merger of actor and character. When we allow the images that Shakespeare conjures up to resonate around our skulls and bones and imaginations and autobiographies, we find we don’t need to speak ‘on behalf of our characters’. Our characters actually speak on behalf of us – if not on behalf of humanity. The words and structures used by Shakespeare are far richer and more liberating than anything we could possibly think up ourselves. So Packer in no way invites the actors to improvise the text. She does, however, invite to the party their bodies, hearts, energetic connections and emotional imaginations. So everyone is playing on the impulse – from the very first time these actors with this text meet in this space. Here’s what she does:
With the cast, crew and creative team seated in one large circle, the actors involved in a particular scene stand up inside the circle and ‘work through the scene on their feet’. If characters are mentioned who aren’t directly present in the scene, the speaking actor indicates or addresses the actor playing that character wherever they’re sitting in the circle. In this way, a visual, energetic connection is made with that real-life person, and there’s an embodied understanding of what it means to be talking about that character in their absence.
While ‘working the play on its feet’, actors are invited to make bold choices and take big risks in what Packer describes as ‘No blame, no shame’. In fact, her primary condition could easily be that of Stanislavsky who said, ‘Don’t fix anything before the scene. This is the surest way to deaden the scene and your parts. The true adjustment will come on the stage as a result of the correct state of the actor in the character, from his desire to fulfill the problems of the part in the given circumstances.’[16] Because everyone in Packer’s cast knows that these won’t be their definitive interpretations, anything goes. As long as they’re listening to each other, connecting with the images, following their impulses and not hurting each other, themselves or the furniture, whatever happens while they’re ‘working the play on its feet’ constitutes valuable raw material.
If the actors know their lines, that’s great. If they’d rather have their scripts in their hands, that’s fine. It’s even possible to request that an assistant director feeds them the lines from the side. It’s not about memory-test or performance. It’s all about immediate, embodied connection with the other actors, as well as with the circle of audience. This playful and daring first pass through a play has many psychophysical resonances with Stanislavsky’s final practices, not least in terms of discussions.
Analysis through discussion
Although Packer eschews the long, heady text-thrashings that she’d experienced at the RSC, script analysis still happens, of course, but in more subtle and surreptitious ways.
Just as Active Analysis involved ‘Discuss the scene’ (Step 2) and ‘Discuss the improvisation’ (Step 4), in-depth discussions are a vital part of Packer’s rehearsal process. A believer in the power of collective knowledge, her epithet is, ‘I listen to what you’re saying; I hear what you’re feeling; and from that I create wisdom.’ In other words, her staging of a production comes from deep witnessing of and listening to the whole team’s thoughts and discoveries. Just like Stanislavsky in his later practices, Packer is not an auteur-director with a predetermined vision of a production. A play reveals itself to her as the company share their experiences. So even after the very first (joyously chaotic), ‘working the play on its feet’, she invites observations and revelations from everyone in the circle. These discussions create a symbiotic, two-way process, whereby the layers of the onion are contrapuntally peeled away to reveal the play and added on to create the production.
Packer’s original practice of ‘dropping in’ and its resonance with Stanislavsky
The next stage in Packer’s rehearsal processes also bears striking similarities to some of Stanislavsky’s processes, though with a markedly different and original set-up.
Stanislavsky’s Active Analysis usually begins with silent études. I experienced an adaptation of silent études in Moscow under my acting master Katya Kamotskaya.[17] In Kamotskaya’s adaptation, the participants in a scene would stand at some distance apart and – maintaining eye contact throughout the exercise and prompted by their basic understanding of their character’s goals – they would silently find a point of contact. This contact might be a handshake, an embrace, a gentle shove, or none of the above if contact proves impossible for the actor/characters as they silently pursue their objectives. It’s extraordinary how much powerful, instinctive and emotionally rich information can be unlocked about the scene and the characters’ relationships through this simple exercise. The actors don’t have to remember any lines: they simply and silently pursue their character’s basic need in the scene. In this way, the merger of actor with character is seamless: the actors themselves have often noted afterwards how they’re barely aware of where their own personalities ‘ended’ and the character’s motivations began.
Packer has an exercise that is similarly rich, and yet completely different. Working with Shakespeare’s plays, Packer’s imperative is obviously and necessarily language driven, so silent études wouldn’t really serve her purpose. However, she has developed an original practice – evolved and refined over the years – that achieves equally profound energetic and emotional accessibility, with no psychological trawling. It’s called ‘dropping in’.
Here’s how it works. Let’s suppose we’re ‘dropping in’ the dialogue between Hamlet and his mother Gertrude in the ‘closet scene’ (Act III, Scene iv). The physical set-up for ‘dropping in’ involves the two actors sitting ‘eyeball-to-eyeball’ (as Packer describes it), knees interlocking, hands lightly resting on their thighs, their bottoms snug into the back of their chairs and their feet on the ground so that their spines are long and their bodies supported. Since the very early origins of (what would become) ‘dropping in’ were developed in collaboration with Kristin Linklater, breath is extremely important. The actors should allow their breath to fall deeply into their relaxed bellies. Meanwhile their jaws are loose and their lips are lightly open.
At the side of each actor sits a dropper-in, who prompts the actors with words from the text. All each actor has to do is literally and metaphorically allow a particular word to ‘drop in’: that means ‘drop into their imagination’, and ‘drop into their bodies on the breath’. So, the dropper-in takes the opening lines of the dialogue and ‘drops in’ (i.e. speaks aloud) the first impactful word (e.g. ‘Mother’). The actor repeats that word. The dropper-in then says the word again, followed by a free-associating question, and ends by repeating the word. As the actor breathes in, they allow the word to drop into their bodies (imaginatively and breath-wise). And on the outbreath they utter the word, infused with whatever resonances are provoked for them by the dropper-in’s question. Here’s an example, drawn from Shakespeare & Company’s ‘Guidelines to Dropping In’:[18]
Dropper-in: Mother.
Actor/Hamlet: Mother.
Dropper-in: Mother. Do you love your mother? Mother.
Actor/Hamlet: (breathes in.) (On the outbreath, says) Mother.
How the actor says ‘Mother’ will be informed by whatever thoughts arise in spontaneous response to the question ‘Do you love your mother?’ These thoughts can come from anywhere: there’s no need to censor anything, as there’s no right or wrong response. So the thoughts might be related to Hamlet and Gertrude; or they might be related to the actor himself and his relationship with his own mother; to some residue of an image seen on the news that morning of an immigrant child reunited with his mother; to a memory of himself as a three-year-old child with his mother; to a fleeting thought of what it will be like at his mother’s funeral; to a imagined glimpse of what it was like at Gertrude’s wedding to his uncle; to a sudden quizzical possibility that the actress sitting in front of him playing Gertrude might actually be his mother. Whatever. It really doesn’t matter. The point is to stir deep, atavistic resonances, to forge actual in-the-moment connections, to inspire potential directions in which the scene might go. In other words, to incarnate a whole heap of possibilities that a head-led, round-the-table analysis or a solitary navigation of the text might not have thrown up.
The whole scene is explored like this. And afterwards the actors discuss whatever arose for them during the ‘dropping in’. This paper doesn’t allow for a truly in-depth navigation of this dynamically fruitful process. Suffice it to say it’s an exciting way to research a text and it throws up unexpected and emotional findings. The main points to remember are (a) no one can get anything wrong: the droppers-in are simply free-associating, and the actors are simply harvesting ripe fruits for future rehearsals; (b) the final interpretation of the scene might bear no overt signs of any of the discoveries made during the dropping-in session, yet the residue of them will be in the DNA of the scene somewhere (be it in the relationships, the shared moments, and the often highly-charged emotional journeys); and (c) words hold lots of unexpected information and possibilities, so no one particular interpretation need be fixed like a butterfly on a board.
For all its simplicity – just as Stanislavsky’s silent études seem so simple – ‘dropping in’ is incredibly rewarding and the pay-offs for the actors are huge. In terms of learning lines, building relationships, subtly unlocking imaginative backstories, and creating an energetic experience of the language, it’s paradoxically very time-efficient. And it’s the absolute ‘creation of the living word’, its roots plunging deep within the actors’ psychophysical selves. The text becomes clear, necessary and blooming with luxurious foliage!
But why do Shakespeare in a televisual age?
My students sometimes ask this question – before they’ve actually taken a Shakespeare course, that is! Once they do, they quickly discover its usefulness. Given how limited our twenty-first-century range of language has become (sometimes as little as 280 tweeted characters) the vast canvas on which Shakespeare paints is invaluable. Indeed, the American theatre magazine, Backstage featured an article ‘Why (and Where) You Should Study Shakespeare’ (listing Shakespeare & Company amongst its eight recommended places). In the article Benjamin Lindsay writes ‘Once you can do Shakespeare, you can do anything.’[19] If an actor has tackled a Shakespeare comedy or tragedy, he argues, they’re more than equipped to do a television sitcom or Game of Thrones. Lindsay cites Scott Kaiser (Shakespeare scholar and director of company development at Oregon Shakespeare Festival) as saying, ‘A lot of Shakespeare really translates immediately into the other mediums if you can work those muscles. If you can run a 26-mile marathon, you can certainly run the 5K.’[20]
The way in which Shakespeare’s imagery works an actor’s imagination provides unmatchable training, not least because the Elizabethan theatre barely used any scenery. It didn’t need to. Shakespeare lived in an aural age where ‘the creation of the living word’ was second nature. There were no advertising hoardings, television commercials, newsfeeds, smartphones and tablets providing constant visual stimuli. So: ‘Being on an empty stage,’ says Kaiser, ‘and having to imagine an entire world around you [uses] exactly the same muscles as standing in front of the green screen and imagining everything that’s going to be provided for you digitally in postproduction’.[21] So you see, movie actors need Shakespeare training! Which brings us to my third research reflection – screen acting.
In Part II, we move into a more subjective realm, as I continue pulling into focus my Anglo-Russian-American perspective on psychophysical acting and ‘the creation of the living word’.
PART II: SUBJECTIVE RESEARCH: ANALYZING ONE’S OWN WORK
Research reflection #3: Adapting Stanislavsky’s text-based ‘system’ to the visual medium of film
Three years ago, the Theatre department at the University of California, Riverside, evolved into a department of Theatre, Film and Digital Production. As part of that evolution, I’ve found myself consciously adjusting the lexicon of my acting classes to deliberately embrace both stage and screen. Coming as I do from a graduate program where the world’s oldest film studios sit side by side with classrooms filled with actors working on Shakespeare, Chekhov, musical theatre, opera and myriad contemporary writers, I’d taken for granted that Stanislavsky’s ‘system’ crossed between genres. Indeed, Stanislavsky himself crossed literary genres, though – as I mentioned – he didn’t cross media: he didn’t work in film.
I’ve always worked in both live and recorded media so I don’t think twice about using Stanislavsky’s toolkit for stage, screen, commercials and radio. As a teacher, however, I find my student actors need overt clarification of how their training with theatre scripts is directly relevant for their work in film. They want to know why it will help them become betters actor on the camera to use the full capacity of their voice in a theatre, or to break down a scene into its ‘bits’ of action.
I’ve come to realize these questions are both a technological issue and a generational issue and, therefore, warrant some serious consideration.
How do we use Stanislavsky’s ‘system’ for film work?
When we shift as actors between theatre and film, the delivery of our performances obviously shifts (from the literary narrative of the stage to the visual narrative of the screen); so too does our analysis of the script. What do I mean by that? I’ll answer with some examples from my own acting practice.
With any role, I apply various tools from Stanislavsky’s kit, starting by breaking down the script into its bits (or beats) of action. That means I’m looking at where the inner or outer energy of the scene changes (either because somebody enters or exits, or because a major action happens, such as a gunshot is fired or a confession is made). And I’m marking that section as a ‘bit’, be it as long as two pages or as short as five lines. This activity gives me a clear guide to both the scene’s internal rhythm and external shape.
I then consider what my character wants from the scene (i.e their objective or desire). Is that desire fulfilled – do they get what they want? Or is that desire blocked in some way, so they have to adopt a new strategy? (I also consider why the writer wrote the scene in the first place? How does it forward the overall narrative of the piece?).
I then look at the clues in the syntax and choice of words. Why does my character say what they say? And what have they chosen not to say? And why? I also look at the language passed between characters, as that gives me insights into possible thought process. This is particularly rewarding with Shakespeare, where words are frequently recycled between characters, who seem to become infected by each other’s ideas. So for example when Gertrude says ‘Hamlet, thou hast thy father much offended,’ Hamlet picks up on her syntax, replying, ‘Mother, you have my father much offended.’ Not only does he recycle the verb ‘offended’, but he also recycles Gertrude’s whole sentence structure. From his wordplay we can tell he’s in a tricksy, provocative mood, so she’d better watch out!
I don’t fixate too much on stage directions, though I do consider their content and meaning. George Bernard Shaw writes short essays for his stage directions, which can give us some useful insights into both character and milieu. Chekhov provides a few select stage directions, particular ‘pauses’, which are always worth noting as pauses hold a lot of inner information. Shakespeare writes very few explicit stage directions though lots of implicit ones. And most contemporary playwrights give minimal stage directions, assuming the director and the actors will work out the visuals in rehearsal.
In sharp contrast, film and television scripts can be all about the visuals. The words of the dialogue are really just the tip of the iceberg: the real meat of the drama is where the camera will guide the viewers’ eyes. And the clues to what the camera might focus on lie in the screen directions. So as we’re preparing a screen role, we need to read the screen directions with great attention. Here’s why…
The media of television and film enable the viewer to penetrate a character’s thought processes. Because a shot might end up as a close-up on an actor’s face – which might then be shown on a forty-foot movie screen or a sixty-inch TV monitor – there’s the opportunity to suck the spectator right into the character’s mind. So analyzing the character’s thought processes is a vital part of our preparation as actors. And the way to start figuring out what those thought processes might be is to study the screen directions written into the script.
First of all, the screen directions in a film script allow us into the mind of the writer. We’re guided to what they bore in their imagination at the time they were envisaging the script. A scene may not be filmed – exactly shot for shot – as the writer lays it out; nonetheless those screen directions will be the first inroad the director has into the inner fabric of the script.
Which means each screen direction also gives us insights into the director’s potential vision. In collaboration with the director of photography, they’ll construct what’s important to the audience’s eyes. What might the camera close up on or pull away from? Will the focus be pulled between two characters in a two-shot, letting the audience know whose thoughts are most important? (Though, bear in mind, we rarely know as actors exactly what the shot contains at the time of filming. Nor is it really what we want to be too absorbed in: we’ve got a story to tell.) As I said, it’s unlikely the screen directions will be adhered to absolutely; yet, it’s vitally important as we prepare for a role that we understand the atmosphere those screen directions create, the emotional state of mind for the character, and what they really want out of the encounter. These are all fundamental aspects of Stanislavsky’s ‘system’. So let’s put it into practice.
Text analysis in preparing for a film role
Here’s an example from Alejandro Ramirez’s Mente Revolver (Revolver Mind)[22] in which I play the role of a homeless American by the name of Jenny. Having found a revolver in a trash can in Hollywood, Jenny crosses the Mexican border to sell the gun in Tijuana. She then uses some of the cash to rent a room in a cheap motel, and for the first time in many years she takes herself out for the night. On returning to her motel room in the early hours of the morning, she discovers that she has been burgled and all her remaining money stolen. Here’s the screen direction for this scene, which in Ramirez’s script comprised nothing but actions:
92: INT. CHEAP HOTEL, BEDROOM, TIJUANA, MEXICO – MORNING
There’s a light coming from the vanity. JENNY is looking for something in the drawers. Separates every item that she takes out of the plastic bags. As she goes through them she gets more desperate for not succeeding. Looks under the mattress, finds her document files, looks inside the stuffed bunny and finds the packet of cigarettes where she used to put the money, opens it, but it is empty. JENNY gets desperate and goes through the stuff again, looks to see if the money is inside the bed, goes through the bunny again, but she finds nothing and drops her head on the bed in despair, she gives herself some time afterwards, she sits down, and thinks of ‘what to do’. She leans on the wall worried, scared, and looks at the packet of cigarettes empty in her hands.[23]
In preparing for the role, I applied the same Stanislavsky-based text analysis that I would to a play:
First of all, what are the given circumstances? There’s a clear sense of atmosphere in ‘There’s a light coming from the vanity’. Although it’s daytime, the mirror light is on. So how does that piece of information play on our imaginations? To me it suggests the room is dimly lit; there’s something unsettling about the vanity light being on rather than the overhead light, as if something is in mid-action; in my mind’s eye I can see that yellowish glare of a cheap motel mirror light. Even as I read the script, my mind is filled with questions and I want to know more…
We’re then given a very precise score of physical actions in the film directions (reminiscent of Stanislavsky’s Method of Physical Actions). On the one hand as the actor, I feel it’s part of my job to have a sense in my body of this specific score of actions (almost like a choreography): after all, the writer wouldn’t have written these physical moves if they weren’t meant to be embodied in some way. At the same time, I know that the art of film acting is all about spontaneity, catching impulses as they happen, being prepared to live in the moment so that the camera can capture those moments of truth. So in my preparation I write out the score of actions like a piece of dance, and at the same time I’m prepared to ditch the specific sequence on the day of filming and go with the flow if the director wants me to. But to be that free, I need to uncover the psychophysical information contained in that score.
Action-wise, Jenny is looking for something. That’s straightforward!
Feelings-wise, it’s more complex! The repetition of the word ‘desperate’ as well as the repetition of certain actions – looking repeatedly in the bed, in the bunny, in the cigarette packet – obviously lets me know she’s in a panic. The tempo-rhythm of the scene would seem to be fast and intense, like a racing heart-beat. This is endorsed by the adjectives ‘worried’ and ‘scared’.
Thought-wise: Jenny’s mind is revolving: the stakes are high. Whatever she’s looking for (i.e. the money) is of supreme importance to her. I’m also struck by the juxtaposition of opposites in the screen directions: while Jenny is in a panic, there’s also something methodical about her actions. She separates out the articles, she knows where her documents are, she knows where she usually keeps her money, she ‘sits down and thinks of “What to do?”’ So we’re presented with a personality that, even in a life of unpredictability (as a homeless life must surely be), there’s an ordered nature to her mind. There’s a thoughtfulness amid the chaos.
By doing this sort of analysis of the script directions, I now have some basic inroads to the three ‘inner psychological drives’ of thoughts, feelings and actions for Jenny. So I can start to feel where she might live in my own psychophysical instrument.
Stanislavsky’s four pillars on the film set
As I’ve said, we have to be prepared with film and television to throw out all our preparatory work once we’re on the set. After all, acting for the camera includes following impulses in response to what actually happens there and then. This in itself can make screen acting both incredibly liberating and incredibly scary: we have to walk the knife-edge of the moment. To which end, I found myself with Revolver Mind heavily drawing on Stanislavsky’s four pillars of relaxation, concentration, imagination and observation on the film set. I’ll give you another example. (It should be noted that I had just completed Shakespeare & Company’s exceptional Month-Long Intensive training for mid-career professionals, so I was already feeling like a fine-tuned Formula One racing car!)
On the first day of filming, we were shooting a scene in Hollywood where Jenny is walking the sidewalk pushing her shopping cart. Suddenly she sees a stuffed toy bunny in the middle of the road. Almost without thinking, she runs into the road, rescues the bunny and takes it back to her cart. On the day of the shoot, it was very busy on Fairfax Avenue. Although we had police on set to stop the traffic, there were other delays as we navigated the daily life of a busy city. As I was standing on the sidewalk with my shopping cart ready to shoot, I noticed a real homeless woman walking towards me. Her energy and focus were such that it was almost as if she were trying to make herself invisible. While her eye-line was to the ground, I noticed that it shifted from one side to another in a very deliberate way. I was curious as to why. Then I realized that she was looking at the cigarette butts tossed on the sidewalk: she was trying to see if there was enough tobacco left in any of them to warrant her picking them up. In this moment, I understood the way in which the four pillars on which Stanislavsky’s ‘system’ rests all connect to provide a sound base for the actor at work. I was sufficiently relaxed to be able to take in the surroundings. At the same time, my concentration was such that I could be both in character and attentive to the world round me. (Stanislavsky calls this ‘dual consciousness’.) My observation was such that I noted what the real homeless person was doing. And my imagination was instantly able to incorporate it into my own characterization. It became crystal-clear for me that, if we’ve done the appropriate prep on our roles, we can feel relaxed on set, we can harness our focus to the task in hand, while remaining open to the world around us and letting those observations (of partner, environment and unexpected happenings) instantly feed our imaginations. In that one brief moment, I had an enlightening sense of the ‘inner creative state’ that helps us as actors in the stress and immediacy of a film shoot.
So how can I share my recent practice-based research – garnered from combining Stanislavsky and Shakespeare and contemporary film acting – with my students?
Research reflection 4: Teaching acting to the ‘iGen’[24]
You find me at a time when my tectonic plates are shifting regarding actor training.
I’ve been teaching actors now for twenty years during which time my methodology has galvanized into four guiding principles: (1) ‘dynamic listening’; (2) ‘willing vulnerability’; (3) ‘playfulness’; and (4) ‘psychophysical coordination’. I’ll just focus on one of those principles here: psychophysical coordination. Psychophysical coordination is the natural and intimate dialogue between whatever we’re feeling inside and our outer expression of that feeling. And vice versa: the information coming at us from the outside world affects how we’re feeling within.
The important words here are ‘natural’ and ‘intimate’.
Acting is an intimate art that draws upon natural processes. It’s about empathy, affect, touch, sensation, interaction and what Stanislavsky calls ‘communion’. It’s about the spirit and soul – both of which are words that Shakespeare and Stanislavsky regularly use. It’s about ensemble, community and social intercourse. Given that intimacy, I naturally adapt the four guiding principles to the people in my classroom at any one time.
In the last six months, however, my tectonic plates (as I mentioned) have begun to shift. For the first time ever, I’ve found myself consciously considering the actual generation to whom I’m teaching these principles.
The challenges of the iGen and art of acting
The so-called iGeneration (a term coined by sociologist Jean Twenge) is uniquely placed in the history of civilization, in that they’ve been born into technology. The most intimate relationship they often have is with their electronic devices, and their world can shrink to the size of a cellphone. While there’s no denying that cellphone leads them to a wealth of information, they might not raise their heads and see the real clouds rather than the iClouds.
This is a different worldview from the one into which I was born. Let alone the worlds into which were born those who have inspired my practice-based research.
Shakespeare’s world was as big as the cosmos. He was born into a world that had just discovered it was round, not flat. He was born into the Renaissance of medicine and philosophy, as humanity transitioned out of the Dark Ages.
Stanislavsky’s world was equally textured. He was born into a world in which Darwin’s Origin of Species and Freud’s psychoanalysis were resonating around the globe, and mankind’s understanding of human behavior was becoming increasingly scientific. He was born into a country navigating huge social and ideological upheavals: he began life as a rich merchant’s son and ended it under house arrest in a communal apartment block.
Packer was born into a Europe on the brink of its second world war, and her pacifist tendencies have nurtured a very particular relationship to portrayals of violence. She has seen women rise to power politically, domestically and artistically, and her own sustaining of a theatre company for forty years has been a battle against many odds.
In no way whatsoever is the twenty-first-century world any less cosmic or socially complex as it was for our two dead males or our very living female. Yet the means by which the iGeneration receive their knowledge and consume information are unfathomably different. Not to mention their ways of experiencing ensemble, community and social intercourse.
The iGen’ers’ dependence on texting, tweeting, Snapchating and Instagraming as their primary modes of communication means that their words are ‘living’ in ways we couldn’t have imagined twenty years ago. The dopamine kick that floods a young brain when a post is liked or a tweet ignites a Twitter-buzz are leading to serious addictions. Or as computer scientist and social commentator Jarod Lanier calls them ‘behaviour modifications’, as we’re being manipulated by computer algorithms (not even people): ‘When many people are addicted to manipulative schemes, the world gets dark and crazy.’[25]
That crazy darkness also comes from the fact that young people are communicating through their thumbs. They’re becoming increasingly disembodied from their language, while at the same time (paradoxically) being emotionally wounded by other people’s words. As Twenge says, ‘The more they use words to communicate [on social media], the less they put their bodies at risk and the more they put their emotions at risk. It’s no wonder, then, that iGen’ers yearn for a safe space where they can be protected.’[26] For all their social media, the iGeneration is arguably one of the most socially shy generations in modern history.
So what does this mean for us as actor trainers?
It means we have students in our acting classes who may be (a) addicted to their devices for communicating; (b) disembodied from their language; (c) so vulnerable to the way in which their online words are received that they’re very averse to any situation that might make them feel unsafe; ergo (d) they’re socially shy.
You can see the issues. Acting is all about (a) communicating face to face; (b) embodying words on a deep level; (c) willingly taking on roles and situations that make us feel vulnerable in order to tell impactful stories; and (d) morphing shyness into confidence.
This in itself urges new imperatives for those of us teaching acting. And I find myself asking: ‘How can I make my classroom increasingly safe so that my iGen students can explore their connections to their own self, as much as to each other? Not least because there seems to be an increasing alienation from ‘the self’. Yet the self is the psychophysical instrument, which serve the actor throughout their professional careers. A guitarist can’t play the guitar if they don’t know how to strum the strings.
This puts us in the middle of a two-way street – as any worthwhile dialogue does. On the one hand, we have a responsibility to the craft of acting, which integrates emotions, bodies and minds. And we can’t be actors without accessing all three. So as actor trainers it’s our duty to open up dialogues about acting that ensure the psychophysical nature of our art is valued and practiced. On the other hand, we have a responsibility to a generation of students who have in many respects become markedly risk averse: they don’t necessarily feel comfortable addressing the soft underbelly of humanity that has long been the raw material of our art. So how do we navigate the situation?
iGen and the power of language
Actually I believe there are some very positive elements arising from the iGenerations’ risk aversion. Twenge writes that there’s a growing connection for young people between speech and its emotional impact. In other words, the power of language is becoming increasingly prescient for our young students. From their social media interactions, they know all too well that, ‘When safety extends to emotional safety, speech can hurt’.[27] So how can we help them frame this sensitivity to language so that they see it as a good thing? Well, if there really is an increasing sensitivity between what we say and how those words land, ‘the creation of the living word’ might actually be easier for the iGen than it has been for those of us from earlier generations. In other words, maybe we can reframe their everyday fear that language is going to hurt in terms of two of the invaluable acting principles I noted earlier: ‘dynamic listening’ and ‘willing vulnerability’.
This reframing could be particularly useful for them when it comes to handling complex scripts such as Shakespeare’s. As Twenge says, ‘Perhaps because they are so physically safe compared to previous generations, and perhaps because they spend so much time online, iGen sees speech as the venue where danger lies. In their always online lives, words can reach out and do damage even when you’re alone.’[28] So how would it be, I ask, if we let the ‘venue where danger lies’ be the theatre and the actor-training environment? How would it be if our young students allowed the potent imagistic language, say, of Shakespeare’s huge emotions to give them permission, space and structure to express those fears?[29] In other words, how would it be if as actor trainers we took the social reality that our students may be scared of language, and channeled it towards more mindful behavior and more empathic performances? Then we might even help them develop stronger actor-audience relationships and become more impactful storytellers…
iGen and empathy
Both Shakespeare through his plays and Stanislavsky through his acting ‘system’ strove for dramatizations that created emotional, empathic responses in their audiences. Tina Packer herself has always argued that the function of the actor is to speak the unspeakable in the safety of the theatre; the catharsis of collective witnessing can heal both the speaker and the spectator. Which is to say that theatre is supposed to get our mirror neurons firing. As actors we want our spectators to empathize with the characters, to see different worldviews, to broaden their perspectives. If we can achieve that new awareness in our audiences, they might leave the theatre as more understanding, compassionate and accepting social beings.
If, therefore, there is a reluctance – even a resistance – in young students to experience narratives that may unsettle them, maybe we can help them as actor trainers to reset the start button. What if they came to celebrate the role they can play as social storytellers? What if they found that enacting unsettling situations – within the safe structure of a script – enables them to become richer contributors to their broader society? And maybe even heal others by taking them on cathartic, therapeutic journeys?
iGen and emotional safety
To a large degree this issue involves the kinds of scripts we use in our classes to explore human relationships. The best dramas – be they Sophocles’ Antigone, Lynn Nottage’s Ruined, Shakespeare’ Othello or Sarah Kane’s Blasted – are about dysfunctional (often violent) relationships. When we have the chance to play these roles, we can embrace psychophysically diverse perspectives and, in so doing, we can help our audiences to address some of those dysfunctions. And yet navigating this kind of material is tricky for the iGeneration who uphold that ‘it’s harder to protect your mind than your body.’[30] Or as Twenge cites one of her nineteen-year-old subjects as saying, ‘I believe nobody can guarantee emotional safety. You can always take precautions for someone hurting you physically, but you cannot really help but listen when someone is talking to you.’[31]And this translates even to reading ‘emotionally unsafe’ words, let alone hearing them or saying them. Indeed, I’m increasingly aware that colleagues teaching violent plays in script analysis classes offer trigger warnings about the plays’ content (just as you would with a movie). But again I ask myself, couldn’t this actually be seen as a good thing? After all, any half-decent writer wants their words to affect their audience? However, it certainly means for those of us teaching acting – where we’re in a studio working predominantly with bodies rather than in a classroom working predominantly with brains – we have an extremely important but delicate job.
We have to provide safe spaces in our classrooms where our students can (a) express their own emotions; (b) consider other perspectives through scripts and dramas that may bring out challenging emotions for them; and (c) handle, within the safe structures of a dramatic text and an actor-training environment, issues of conflict, risk and emotional discomfort.
It’s certainly a delicate task, but I don’t think it’s insurmountable. In many respects, the iGeneration get a bad press as the ‘snowflake’ generation, meaning nothing is allowed to hurt them or they’ll melt. As one eighteen-year-old subject in Twenge’s analysis states, ‘The perception seems to be that our generation is coddled and whiny and we don’t have any kind of thick skin at all. But I think they are misrepresenting things. The trend is toward greater understanding for people’s feelings and people’s health… The fact that we are trying to be more understanding of that sort of stuff isn’t bad. It’s about safety and helping those who are vulnerable.’[32] Which again could actually be a very good thing when it comes to ‘creating the living word’.
The iGeneration and the ‘creation of the living word’
I see my job as an actor trainer being three-fold:
In the work on the self, I can offer strategies for my students to dip their toes in the oceans of emotional complexity. Through that experience they may find more balance within themselves and, therefore, a broader range of emotional intelligence with which to handle the world. All this work has to be done with a sense of playfulness, or – as Michael Chekhov called it – a ‘quality of ease’.
In the work on the ensemble, I can provide opportunities for them to experience social integration, collaboration and trust as vital community building skills, as well as vocational acting skills. As Twenge suggests, ‘ iGen’ers seem terrified – not just of physical dangers but of the emotional dangers of adult social interaction. Their caution keeps them safe, but it also makes them vulnerable, because everyone gets hurt eventually.’[33] Of course we never want to hurt our students. At the same time – if they’re serious about an acting career – it’s our professional responsibility to prepare them for an increasingly cutthroat industry. On a film set, time and money dictate that actors have to leap straight into the job, however vulnerable they may be feeling or however exposed the character is; our profession requires that we let the camera see every aspect of our humanity, including the raw side. Again this work has to be done with a sense of playfulness.
And in the work on the role, we can provide scripts such as those by Shakespeare and Chekhov, writers who worked intensively with actors; who had a passion and curiosity for human behavior, and a real love for love; and whose work has endured because of their immense insights. Chekhov was a doctor: therefore, he knew he was dying of tuberculosis. He was a surgeon of the soul as much as the body, and his plays reflect his poignant understanding of humanity. Shakespeare paints on a vast canvas including jealousy, rage, vengeance, violence as well as profound and tender love. It behooves us not be put off by the fact that both Shakespeare and Chekhov are dead European males, as they both offer the actor complicated scenarios and violent disagreements (ergo, important training material). I’d argue that it’s vitally important for young actors to experience the articulacy of these extraordinary writers, especially for what Twenge calls ‘a generation that believes someone disagreeing with you constitutes emotional injury.’[34] While of course we also want to use contemporary texts by writers of all ethnicity, cultures, races and gender identifications, we wouldn’t want to throw out the baby with the bath water.
We should, however, become increasingly mindful of how to reframe the pedagogy of the classics. There are certainly some problematic representations of race and class in both Shakespeare and Chekhov. As one of my African-American students pointed out to me last year, it’s no longer acceptable to include on curricula Stanislavsky’s portrayal of Othello without overt consideration of the misappropriation.[35] It’s extremely off-putting, especially for a student of color, to read on the second page of An Actor Prepares about Stanislavsky’s use of blackface and his offensive assumptions about Othello’s African origins, even if he’s being deliberately naïve. My student’s observation was a valuable moment for me, proving that learning is a two-way street – whatever our generation!
To conclude…
Times may have changed but has the art of acting?
When I was an acting student both in the U.K. and Russia, we almost craved emotional discomfort. We loved rolling around in Grotowskian anguish and weeping in Artaudian despair. Throughout my career, there has been a certain cathartic pleasure in expressing through acting humanity’s emotionally discomforting experiences – within the safety of a defined script, a determined outcome and a person who says ‘cut’ or ‘curtain’ when we’re done.
I wonder if, for a while, I took that hunger for emotional boundary testing as a ‘given’ for anyone choosing to study acting. I no longer do. While I don’t currently teach in a conservatory or on a vocational program, I’ve reached out to colleagues who do, and the issues seem parallel. For many of us born before social media ruled our lives, college was, as Twenge describes it, ‘a place for learning and exploration, and that includes being exposed to ideas different from your own.’ [36] Maybe my generation and earlier generations almost believed that was the whole point of going to college in the first place. But as Twenge alerts us, ‘iGen’ers disagree: college, they feel, is a place to prepare for a career in a safe environment. […] iGen’ers’ interest in safety leads them to balk at the idea that college should mean exploring new and different ideas – what if they aren’t “emotionally safe”? And what does this have to do with getting a good job and earning money?’[37]
You can see why my tectonic plates are shifting. And this shifting began so recently that I don’t know what the landscape will look like until the rocks have settled. Though of course some of the landscape hasn’t changed. Lee Strasberg, the father of the American ‘Method’ school of acting, once said that all people should have some actor training. And I often say that my lower division ‘Introduction to Acting’ is really an ‘Introduction to Being Human’. Increasingly, I believe this is my role: to provide a safe space for my students to dare to put themselves in experientially different situations, as they explore their potential as psychophysical beings. And to put themselves in ‘emotionally unsafe’ dialogues through the safety of well-crafted texts, as they explore their capabilities as creative artists. And thus my Anglo-Russian-American approach comes into focus:
Stanislavsky’s ‘system’ is in many respects a perfect means of navigating the unsafe. It’s clear. It’s structured. It makes absolute sense. It simply takes the laws of nature and applies them to the artifice of a script. And it’s spawned three generations of extremely successful actors. Many Oscar winners are steeped in the psychophysical training of Stanislavsky, which imbues them with the willing vulnerability to take emotional and relational risks in the roles they play.
Shakespeare’s plays are in many respects a perfect way of navigating the complexities of human relationships. Each character does whatever they do – be it love, hate, revenge, excite, fight, make peace – to the nth degree. All within a clear structure of the macrocosm of a five-act play and the microcosm of an iambic pentameter. Indeed, Tina Packer – with her Anglo-American training – is a fervent believer that the structure of Shakespeare’s verse is in fact the liberator of big and passionate emotions and the safe container for the exploration of those emotions.[38]
Film acting in many respects is a perfect medium for experiencing intense ‘moments of absorption’ in complex human action within the tightest possible acting structure: the close-up. And the American film and television industries lead the way in such emotional accessibility.
As we train young actors, we can mindfully use specific methods to bring structure to the inner and outer chaos that is the world of the iGeneration. As Twenge concludes in her book, ‘iGen’ers are scared, maybe even terrified. Growing up slowly, raised to value safety, and frightened by the implications of income inequality, they have come to adolescence in a time when their primary social activity is staring at a small rectangular screen that can like them or reject them. The devices they hold in their hands have both extended their childhoods and isolated them from true human interaction […] they are both the physically safest generation and the most mentally fragile.’[39] And these are the students in our midst. And we are their teachers. We’re experiencing these seismic shifts together. And the emergency kit at hand is the art of acting.
In and of itself, acting provides the physically safest place for us as human beings: we more or less know what we’re going to say and we more or less know the circumstances of the situation. It also asks us to be our most psychophysically fragile: it demands we allow the spectator into our soul and use our language to affect our listeners. Ambitious as it may sound and in a world of alternatives facts – where ‘Truth isn’t truth’ any more apparently[40] – it seems as though acting may be the last bastion of ‘the creation of the living word’. As we train our students and we practice our art, I believe it’s an ambition worth pursuing.
Bibliography
[1] Barrett, E. & Bolt, B. (eds.) (2010), Practice as Research: Approaches to Creative Arts Enquiry, New York: I. B. Tauris.
[2] Hodge, A. (editor) (2010), Actor Training, second edition, London & New York: Routledge.
[3] Gomez, M. (2018), ‘Giuliani says “Truth Isn’t Truth” in Defense of Trump’s Legal Strategy’, New York Times, 19 August, 2018.
[4] Gorchakov, N. M. (1994), Stanislavsky Directs, trans. Miriam Goldina, New York: Limelights.
[5] Knebel, M. (2002), On the Active Analysis of Plays and Roles, Maria Knebel, in unpublished translation by Mike Pushkin with Bella Merlin.
[6] Lanier, J. (2018), Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now, New York: Henry Holt & Company.
[7] Lindsay, B. (2016), ‘Why (and Where) You Should Study Shakespeare’, Backstage, 23 February, 2016.
[8] Linklater, K. (2006), Freeing the Natural Voice, expanded edition, London: Nick Hern Books.
[9] Merlin, B. (2001), Beyond Stanislavsky: The Psycho-physical Approach to Actor Training, London: Nick Hern Books.
[10] Merlin, B. (2014), The Complete Stanislavsky Toolkit, revised edition, London: Nick Hern Books.
[11] Merlin, B. (2016), Facing the Fear: An Actor’s Guide to Overcoming Stage Fright, London: Nick Hern Books.
[12] Merlin, B. (2018), Konstantin Stanislavsky: Routledge Performance Practitioners, revised edition, Abingdon & New York.
[13] Ramirez, A. (2016), Mente Revolver unpublished script, https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6097248/
[14] Twenge, J. M., (2017), iGen: Why Today’s Super-Connected Kids are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy – and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood, New York: Atria.
[15] Shakespeare & Company website www.shakespeare.org.
[16] Shakespeare & Company archive, ‘Guideslines to Dropping In’, unpublished document.
[17] Stanislavsky, K. S. (1980), An Actor Prepares, trans. Elizabeth Reynolds Hapgood, London: Methuen. (Original year of publication 1937)
[18] Stanislavsky, K. S. (2000), Creating A Role, trans. Elizabeth Reynolds Hapgood, London: Methuen. (Original year of English publication 1961)
[19] www.nytimes.com/2018/08/19/us/giuliani-meet-the-press-truth-is-not-truth.html
Endnotes
([1]) Merlin, B. (2016), Facing the Fear: An Actor’s Guide to Overcoming Stage Fright, London: Nick Hern Books, p. xxviii.
([2]) Barrett, E. & Bolt, B. (eds.) (2010), Practice as Research: Approaches to Creative Arts Enquiry, New York: I. B. Tauris, p. 4. (My emphasis.)
([3]) The year’s training is detailed in Merlin, B. (2001), Beyond Stanislavsky: The Psycho-physical Approach to Actor Training, London: Nick Hern Books.
([4]) Twenge, J. M., (2017), iGen: Why Today’s Super-Connected Kids are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy – and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood, New York: Atria.
([5]) Stanislavsky, K. S. (2000), Creating A Role, trans. Elizabeth Reynolds Hapgood, London: Methuen, p. 262.
([6]) Stanislavsky, K. S. (2000), p. 100. (My emphasis.)
([7]) More details of these four stages can be found in Merlin, B. (2018), Konstantin Stanislavsky: Routledge Performance Practitioners, Revised edition, Abingdon & New York: Routledge.
[8] Stanislavsky cited in On the Active Analysis of Plays and Roles, Maria Knebel, in unpublished translation by Mike Pushkin with Bella Merlin, 2002, p. 7.
[9] Ibid., p. 19.
([10]) Ibid., p. 8.
([11]) Stanislavsky, K. S. (2000), p. 101.
([12]) Stanislavsky cited in Knebel (2002), p. 93.
([13]) Carnicke, S. M. (2010), ‘The Knebel Technique’ in Actor Training (ed. Alison Hodge), second edition, London & New York: Routledge, p. 103.
([14]) Linklater, K. (2006), Freeing the Natural Voice, expanded edition, London: Nick Hern Books.
([15]) The three areas of work of Shakespeare & Company – performance, training and education – over their forty-plus years of existence is detailed in their book, Shakespeare & Company: Training, Education, Performance by Merlin and Packer, (forthcoming Routledge, 2019).
([16]) Stanislavsky cited in Stanislavsky Directs (1994), Gorchakov, N. M., trans. Miriam Goldina, New York: Limelights, p.94.
([17]) I detail Kamotskaya’s processes with silent études in Beyond Stanislavsky: The Psycho-physical Approach to Actor Training (2001), London: Nick Hern Books, and in The Complete Stanislavsky Toolkit (revised edition, 2014).
([18]) ‘Guidelines to Dropping In’, unpublished document, Shakespeare & Company archive.
([19]) ‘Why (and Where) You Should Study Shakespeare’ by Benjamin Lindsay, Backstage, 23 February 2016.
([20]) Ibid.
([21]) Ibid.
([22]) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6097248/
([23]) Ramirez, A. (2016), Mente Revolver unpublished script.
([24]) Twenge, J. M., (2017), iGen: Why Today’s Super-Connected Kids are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy – and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood, New York: Atria.
([25]) Lanier, J. (2018), Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now, New York: Henry Holt & Company, p. 11.
([26]) Twenge (2017), p. 178.
([27]) Twenge (2017), p. 156. (My emphasis.)
([28]) Twenge (2017), p. 156. (My emphasis.)
([29]) This is indeed the work that Shakespeare & Company has been doing for decades through their training and education programs, under the inspirational and indomitable Directors of Training Dennis Krausnick and of Education Kevin Coleman.
([30]) Twenge (2017), p. 157.
([31]) Aiden cited in Twenge (2017), p. 157. (My emphasis.)
([32]) Ben cited in Twenge (2017), p. 163.
([33]) Twenge (2017), p. 167.
([34]) Twenge (2017), p. 167.
([35]) Independent study with fourth-year student at UCR Foleshade Ayodele, October 2017.
([36]) Twenge (2017), p. 173.
([37]) Ibid.
([38]) Shakespeare & Company’s Month-Long Intensive Training uses a very clear structure (crafted and honed over forty years) to take all its participants on immensely deep, personally therapeutic and artistically expansive journeys of risk, joy and playfulness. (They run a similar course for undergraduates and young professionals called the Summer Training Institute).
([39]) Twenge (2017), p. 312.
([40]) https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/19/us/giuliani-meet-the-press-truth-is-not-truth.html
An Anglo-Russian-American Perspective on Psychophysical Acting
Paper delivered at the 2nd Shanghai Theatre Academy conference on Actor Training, November 2019
Bella Merlin, PhD.
ABSTRACT
The ‘creation of the living word’ was a phrase used by Russian acting pioneer Konstantin Stanislavsky (1963-1938) to capture the dynamic connection between actor, script and moment of performance. In this paper, Dr. Bella Merlin (actor, writer and professor) addresses through four different perspectives how we aspire as actors to create the living word. As a researching practitioner, she interweaves (1) her Stanislavsky-based Russian training, (2) her work with British-born director Tina Packer (co-founder with voice guru Kristin Linklater of Shakespeare & Company, Massachusetts), (3) her recent film acting in Los Angeles and (4) her teaching of young American actors born into technology (the so-called ‘iGeneration’). In Part I, Merlin takes a semi-objective look at Stanislavsky and Packer: first, she traces the evolution of Stanislavsky’s psychophysical Active Analysis and, thereafter, makes links with Packer’s contemporary rehearsal processes. In Part II, Merlin adopts a more subjective, practice-based approach: first, she assimilates the language-based ‘system’ of Stanislavsky into the visual realm of film and, thereafter, applies her evolving Anglo-Russian-American perspective to the classroom. This paper is a conscious ‘work-in-progress’ – i.e. it is a provocation as much as a definitive solution – in which Merlin ultimately invites the reader to consider how actor trainers can help a generation of risk-averse young people become willingly vulnerable and emotionally accessible actors.
KEYWORDS
Practice-based research. Stanislavsky. Active Analysis. Tina Packer. Shakespeare. Shakespeare & Company. Film acting. Contemporary actor training. iGeneration. Alejandro Ramirez.
AUTHOR INTRODUCTION
Bella Merlin is an actor, writer and professor of acting and directing in the Department of Theatre, Film and Digital Production at the University of California, Riverside. She trained at the University of Birmingham and the Guildford School of Acting, U.K. and the State Institute of Cinematography in Moscow. With a PhD. from the University of Birmingham, she has spent twenty years combining a professional acting career with teaching and writing. Her acting in the U.K. includes two seasons at the National Theatre, London, with Out-of-Joint director Max Stafford-Clark; as well as extensive appearances in regional theatre, television, film and radio. In the U.S.A. her theatre roles include Margaret (Richard III Colorado Shakespeare Festival), Nerissa (The Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare & Company) and The Queen/Arviragus (Cymbeline, Shakepseare & Company), all directed by Tina Packer. Other roles include Trinculo in The Tempest (dir. Allyn Burrows, Shakespeare & Company), Arkadina in The Seagull (dir. Katya Kamotskaya, UC Davis) and Night and Dreams: Beckett and Schubert at LA Philharmonic directed by MacArthur Genius fellow Yuval Sharon. Film roles include Jenny in Alejandro Ramirez’s Mente Revolver (Revolver Mind)(winner of the first-prize Alambra del Oro at the Granada International Festival Cines del Sur, 2018). In addition to numerous chapters and articles, book publications include: Konstantin Stanislavsky (revised edition, Routledge: 2018), Acting: The Basics (revised edition: Routledge 2018), Facing the Fear: An Actor’s Guide to Overcoming Stage Fright, Nick Hern Books, 2016), The Complete Stanislavsky Toolkit (revised edition, Nick Hern Books, 2016), With the Rogue’s Company: Henry IV at the National Theatre (Oberon/National Theatre, 2005), and the forthcoming Shakespeare & Company: Training, Education, Performance with Tina Packer (Routledge, 2019). Some of these publications have been translated into Chinese, Italian and Russian. She is married to award-winning actor Miles Anderson, and lives in Los Angeles, U.S.A.
INTRODUCTION
A Practice-Based Perspective
I write this paper as a practice-based researcher.
So what does that mean?
Essentially, practice-based research is research ‘based in action rather than theory to solve a problem. It operates from the inside out’.[1] So, I may ask a question such as ‘What does it mean to be emotionally available as an actor?’ Or ‘How can I apply text analysis to the visual media of film and television?’ I then address those questions by analyzing my practice-based experience as an actor, rather than as a scholar, historian or critical theorist. While that analysis is certainly endorsed by scholarly reading, the primary source material is the human experience of performance.
Practice-based research has been gaining traction in the United Kingdom, Australia and Canada since the 1990s; it’s gradually finding validation in the United States and slowly in Europe. (I’m curious to hear from my Chinese colleagues how it’s perceived here at STA and generally in Asia.) Usually in the creative arts – to cite theatre scholars Barrett and Bolt – practice-based research is ‘motivated by emotional, personal and subjective concerns’.[2] From that perspective, it’s hard to engage with acting processes and actor training without tackling head on the emotional, the personal and the subjective. And perhaps one of the most prolific practice-based researchers in contemporary acting was the Russian pioneer, Konstantin Stanislavsky (1863-1938). Throughout his life as a director, actor and actor trainer, he grappled with the intricacies of acting to find and fashion a reliable methodology – i.e. a ‘system’ – that could be used by all manner of practitioners with all manner of plays. The one realm to which he didn’t apply his practical research was film. Not only was film very young in its evolution during Stanislavsky’s lifetime, but also he didn’t actually believe that it was going to endure! Ergo, he spent little time considering it and had no experience in film acting.
In 1993, I undertook a graduate acting course at the oldest film school in the world – Moscow’s State Institute of Cinematography (VGIK).[3] My main acting master Albert Filozov (1937-2016) was steeped in the heritage of Stanislavsky and equally celebrated for both his film and theatre work. On the very first day of classes, I asked Filozov what the difference was between stage acting and screen acting. His reply was simple: in terms of creating a character, the process is very similar. In terms of delivering the final performance, the technical aspects differ in size and amplitude. For stage, you radiate your performance out to the back row of the auditorium. For screen, you draw the camera into the eye of your mind.
This advice has been immensely useful to me during my professional life. However, I’ve recently found myself questioning the psychophysical nature of acting in general. My own career over the last decade has taken me from the U.K. (where my work included two seasons at the National Theatre, London) to the U.S.A. There my acting over the past couple of years includes Mente Revolver [Revolver Mind] by Mexican filmmaker Alejandro Ramirez and two seasons with Shakespeare & Company, Massachusetts (founded in 1978 by voice guru Kristin Linklater and award-winning actor-director Tina Packer). So, I’ve been navigating scripts as linguistically rich as Shakespeare and as dominantly visual as film.
While I’ve been acting, I’ve also been teaching undergraduates in the Theatre, Film and Digital Production Department at the University of California, Riverside. In other words, I’ve had the opportunity – in a variety of completely different spheres (i.e. theatre, film and teaching) – to explore through practice-based research the various emotional, personal and subjective questions that I’ve had about the nature of acting. At the heart of those questions is really: What does it mean be an actor in the twenty-first century? What does it mean to devote one’s professional life to using other people’s words to create a living experience? How might I be able to link the various experiences I’ve had – professional and professorial – to begin to answer those questions?
In effect, I’m trying to pull into focus some sort of Anglo-Russian-American perspective. In fact, this paper is my first attempt to articulate that perspective, which combines embodied knowledge from my Russian training with twenty-plus years of acting in Britain with my recently acquired understanding of Tina Packer’s American-based processes. In formulating this Anglo-Russian-American perspective, I address four key practice-based research areas, all of which concern the relationship between truth, emotional accessibility and the ‘creation of the living word’. Framing them here as questions, those areas are:
- Heritage: How did Stanislavsky’s practice-based research bring him to ‘the creation of the living word’?
- Stage acting: What does it mean to ‘create the living word’ with particular reference to Shakespeare & Company and its founding artistic director Tina Packer?
- Screen acting: How do we adapt Stanislavsky’s text-orientated ‘system’ to the visuals of film?
- Actor training: What challenges do we face teaching a generation of young actors born into technology – the so-called ‘iGeneration’?[4]
The structure of this paper basically falls into two halves. The first half is essentially objective, as I analyze the work of Stanislavsky and Packer.
The second half is more subjective, as I focus on my experiences of film acting and teaching. This two-part structure actually reflects the process of practice-based research: i.e. we take established methodologies; we pass them through our individual acting instruments (our selves); and we see how that might create new knowledge and perspectives.
So let’s start with Part I and Research Reflection #1…
PART I: OBJECTIVE RESEARCH: ANALYZING THE WORK OF OTHERS
Research reflection #1: Stanislavsky and the ‘Creation of the Living Word’
Stanislavsky devoted his life to finding ways of harnessing the ephemeral muse of inspiration so that actors could reliably deliver true-seeming performances every night. ‘Truth’ is always a tricky word in the blatantly artificial environment of the stage (and screen). After all, an audience knows that the circumstances enacted before them are not ‘for real’: there are pre-determined outcomes to the events that everyday life can never guarantee.
So the perennial challenge for us as actors is how to take our audience on a credible journey whereby they might actually believe in the possibility of what they’re watching. This is particularly the challenge with the psychological realism that tends to dominate western theatre and film, whether we’re talking superintendents or superheroes. How can we convince our audience that what we’re saying as actor/characters is the spontaneous expression of feelings provoked by the chain of fictional events? To do that, we have to ‘own’ the words and Stanislavsky called this process ‘the creation of the living word’. He likens the process to the organic growth of a plant. The living word is ‘one in which the roots run down deep into one’s soul. They feed on one’s feeling; but the stem reaches into the consciousness where it puts forth luxuriant foliage of eloquent verbal forms, conveying all the deep emotions from which they draw their vitality.’[5]
‘Creating the living word’ is no easy task. All too often as actors we simply don’t sound as connected to our scripted words as a plant is connected to its roots and foliage. But why is it so difficult? Because – as Stanislavsky said:
between our own words and those of another, the distance is of most immeasurable size. Our own words are the direct expression of our [present-tense] feelings, whereas the words of another are alien until we have made them our own, are the sign of future emotions which have not yet come to life inside us.[6]
Until we’ve made a deep organic connection to the script – until those words actually cost us something emotionally, physically, spiritually – they’re nothing but the two-dimensional blueprint of feelings we may possibly experience at some point in the future. You can test this out for yourself right now. Take Hamlet’s words, ‘To die, to sleep; To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub’… How much imaginative and psychological focus does it take to really consider the words ‘die’, ‘sleep’, ‘dream’, ‘rub’? ‘Sleep’ and ‘dream’ might be reasonably easy as most of us do them on a nightly basis. ‘Rub’ becomes harder, as we might not know exactly what it means? In this context, it could mean ‘issue’, ‘challenge’, ‘nub of the matter’, or ‘friction’. (After all, when we rub something, we create friction.) When it comes to the word ‘die’, that’s even harder. Death is the eternal mystery that few can fathom. So for us to ‘create the living word’ of ‘die’, we have to invest some serious time, imagination and openhearted vulnerability.
To help actors ‘create the living word’ Stanislavsky went through four major stages on his life’s journey as a practical researcher.[7] Those four stages were as follows:
Stage One: The Director-dictator (1891-1906)
In rebellion against the old ‘star system’ of acting – whereby any authentic storytelling was subordinated to the flashy performances of celebrity actors – Stanislavsky foregrounded ensemble interaction. However, he was only a young director in the late 1800s (first at the Society of Art and Literature and then at the Moscow Art Theatre): he had few tools in his kit. So the best he could do was to dictatorially determine all the actors’ moves by writing them down in detailed production plans. These moves were then rehearsed onto the actors almost as if they were marionettes. Thus it was that his acclaimed production of Chekhov’s The Seagull was staged in 1898: a huge success for the audience but a trial for the actors, who were robbed of their own input. The last thing they were able to do was ‘create the living words’.
Stage Two: Round-the-Table Analysis (1906-early 1930s)
This led to the second phase of Stanislavsky’s research, which followed a period of study and deep contemplation in 1906. He truly wanted to recruit the actors’ creative input, so now in rehearsal, he assembled all the actors together around a table for lengthy periods of shared text analysis and discussion. Thereafter, he would encourage them to get up on their feet and put all this research into their performances. It was impossible: their heads were like stuffed potatoes. They were no more ‘creating the living word’ than they had with the determined production plans. Stanislavsky could see the gaping chasm between his actors’ intellectual understanding of a role and their psychophysical embodiment of that understanding. The actual act of sitting at a table with their pencils in their hands and their scripts in front of them was a comparatively calm procedure. Yet the characters they were playing might be involved in physically vigorous or psychologically febrile circumstances. Stanislavsky was aware that ‘A calmly seated figure will get in the way of us finding out how [the character] really feels […] and, without this knowledge, the text will have a dead sound.’[8] He was right: the text was far from living. Because of this gap between psychology and physicality – between dead sound and living word – Stanislavsky came to realize that you can’t entirely trust the psychological suggestions you come up with when you’re sitting round a table. Your understanding of a situation (and the character within that situation) will only be complete once you’ve explored the dramatic actions physically. As Stanislavsky put it: ‘the separation of the mental life from the physical life does not give the actor the possibility to sense the life of the character’s body, and therefore he impoverishes himself.’[9] Yet again, he had bypassed the living word – and this time by deadening the body.
Stage Three: The Method of Physical Actions (1930s)
The third phase of Stanislavsky’s practice-based research came towards the end of his life. By now he understood that we can only ‘create the living word’ when we’re navigating the plays’ given circumstances through our bodies and with our partners. This caused him to analyze deeply his whole rehearsal process. With his newly grasped insight, he disbanded the long discussions and instead he directed his actors like so:
You are looking for your little son who ran off somewhere while you were in the shop. Get up from the table and imagine that this is the street and your fellow actors are the passers-by. You have to find out from them whether they have seen your son. Act! Perform this action! Not only in words but physically. You will see that as soon as you include your body in the work, it will become easier for you to speak on behalf of your character.[10]
In other words, living bodies in action create living words.
This rehearsal process – that shifted from discussion to immediate, active embodiment – became known as the Method of Physical Actions, and at its heart lay improvisation. Stanislavsky had come to realize in his practice-based research that to ‘create the living word’:
Our own words are needed in the first phase of physical embodiment of a part because they are best able to extract from within us [the] live feelings, which have not yet found their outward expression.[11]
Through our physical embodiment of a play we can begin to connect to the writer’s text in such a way that it’s vivid and unique to each of us as actors, and will therefore make an energetic impact on our audience.
The basis of the Method of Physical Actions is that one simple action leads to the next action, which leads to the next action, which leads to the next, and so on. By following simple actions, we can achieve complex psychological objectives. So: ‘I open the door, I switch on the light, I walk to the refrigerator, I take out a bottle of wine, I uncork the bottle, I turn on some music – so that when my husband gets home from work the atmosphere will be relaxing and we’ll have a lovely evening.’ Simple achievable actions to attain my psychological goal.
Stage Four: Active Analysis (The end of Stanislavsky’s life and beyond…)
Stanislavsky’s experimentation didn’t stop there. When the Method of Physical Actions became formalized by state, he evolved his practice into what became known as Active Analysis. The basic principle of Active Analysis is similar to the Method of Physical Actions, in that you initially improvise a scene in your own words. The key difference is that the emphasis lies less on the specificity of action, action, action! It lies more on the non-linear, more chaotic interweaving of feelings, actions, imagination and energetic exchange with your scene partner.
The basic steps of Active Analysis are (1) you read a scene; (2) you discuss the scene; (3) you improvise the scene; and (4) you discuss the improvisation, noting where your improvisation strayed too far from the text and where it unlocked new discoveries. Through repeating this simple four-step sequence, you progress from knowing little more than the delicate outline of a scene to being dead-letter-perfect, without ever taking the paper-and-glue script onto the rehearsal-room floor.
Each improvisation – or étude – becomes more fully-fledged and embodied, and grows closer to the actual script. The image I use when I’m directing using Active Analysis is that the play is a trellis; my actors are the ivy, winding their way around the trellis; and as the director I’m the gardener. In rehearsals I tend to the tendrils of the actor-ivy, ensuring they grow freely and healthily, but don’t wander too far from the trellis of the play. The improvisations follow a simple outline or ‘map’: as one character’s inciting ‘action’ in a scene rubs up against another character’s resisting ‘counteraction’, an ‘event’ occurs. The unbroken chain of events that comprises the whole play’s structure is unlocked by the actors in the course of their improvisations. Each time a scene is re-read (Step 3) and the improvisation is discussed (Step 4), deeper and deeper text analysis is applied, using the usual tools from Stanislavsky’s ‘system’. These tools include ‘objectives’ (or ‘tasks’), ‘given circumstances’, ‘moments of decision’, ‘syntax and punctuation’, and the ‘inner psychological drives’ (i.e. thoughts, feelings and actions).
Through the four-step process of Active Analysis, the line of thought (embedded in the playwright’s text) and the line of action (discovered through the actors’ improvisations) are uncovered and interwoven into the fabric of the production. Thus characterizations and ‘blocking’ emerge organically from the synthesis of text, actors and their live interaction. In other words, the final production ‘finds’ itself through the improvisations, rather than being imposed by a director from the outside.
Active Analysis also foregrounds some of the less used, but incredibly useful, aspects of Stanislavsky ‘system’. These include: Here, Today, Now (i.e. whatever is happening right this moment within each actor and between the actors is the raw material with which to fashion the performance). And grasp (i.e. the power of the actors to seize all the sensory information coming to them from their eyes, ears, noses and touch that cause these words to come out of their mouths). And of course the pause: Stanislavsky was insistent that ‘The actor always cheats you during moments of surging temperament.’[12] (I.e. he acts up a storm, but he doesn’t necessarily feel anything.) ‘To really measure the power of the actor’s excitement,’ continues Stanislavsky, ‘we must direct our attention to how he takes in the facts and events, how he evaluates the thoughts of his partner; we must watch him during his moments of absorption’. (This is particularly relevant to screen acting – as we’ll see – where close-ups are all about these ‘moments of absorption’). Perhaps most significantly for our discussion here, the improvisations unlock the potency of verbal action. All too often as actors, our haste to learn our lines as quickly as possible diminishes our experience of how our words actually land on our listeners. In fact, how our own words land on us! Words can change the world. Words have active power. Experiencing that power is ‘the creation of the living word’.
Active Analysis is the final legacy of Stanislavsky’s transformative work. His protégée Maria Knebel (1898-1985) ensured that the legacy continued. Knebel (herself an acclaimed actor and director) worked closely with Stanislavsky during the last years of his life, and in 1954 she wrote a doctoral dissertation on Active Analysis, which placed her as ‘its definitive spokesperson’. As American scholar and proponent of Active Analysis, Sharon M. Carnicke writes, ‘By the end of the twentieth century, Knebel had come to be seen in Russia as the most clear-sighted witness to Stanislavsky’s last experimental work.’[13] The way in which Active Analysis unites an actor’s mind and body, intellect and intuition, really is the culmination of Stanislavsky’s practice-based research as he strove for ‘the creation of the living word’.
Harnessing the dead, twentieth-century, Russian male perspective with the very much alive, twenty-first-century, British female perspective, I now turn our attention from Stanislavsky to the pioneering actor, director and trainer Tina Packer.
Research reflection #2: Tina Packer and ‘the creation of the living word’ on stage
Tina Packer co-founded Shakespeare & Company with internationally acclaimed Kristin Linklater in 1978 in Lenox, Massachusetts, U.S.A. In the preceding ten-year period of the 1960s and ’70s, English-born Packer and Scottish-born Linklater had each crossed the Atlantic on individual missions to conjoin British acting technique with American emotional availability. They were both in their own ways committed to ‘the creation of the living word’ – Linklater through freeing the natural voice,[14] and Packer through embodying Shakespeare’s language.
Packer trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) in the 1960s and then acted at the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) at the start of her career. And her understanding of the primitive, atavistic resonances of language – for actors and audience alike – is visionary. But it has come after a good deal of her own practice-based research. Moving from the RSC to television and film in the 1970s, she rapidly experienced a disconnect between word and effect: the words that she and her fellow actors were speaking came all too easily, the emotional content seemed all too glib. Her frustration with the acting industry in Britain at the time was significant enough for her to seek out Linklater in New York City in 1972. Within a matter of years Packer had convinced her to cofound a theatre company dedicated to breath, word, image, emotion and deep communication, using as its source Shakespeare’s language.
Throughout the course of Shakespeare & Company’s forty-year existence, Packer has committed herself in equal measure to professional performance, actor training and education (including rigorous scholarship as well as schools programs and community outreach). She would seem to be the first woman in history to have professionally directed and/or acted in every play in Shakespeare’s canon, completing the cycle with Cymbeline in 2017. Like Stanislavsky with his ‘the creation of the living word’, authentic communication has been at the heart of Packer’s life-long, practice-based research.[15]
In fact, my experience with both Stanislavsky’s Active Analysis and Tina Packer’s directing process has revealed some interesting Anglo-Russian-American correlations. These correlations come as no surprise. After all, RADA’s acting program in the 1960s – where Packer graduated with honors – had certain Stanislavsky-based underpinnings. And Kristin Linklater worked at NYU in the 1970s alongside the luminary, American trainer Peter Kass, whose teaching incorporated the profoundly psychological aspects of Stanislavsky’s ‘system’. Furthermore, William Shakespeare’s theatrical canon springs from the Renaissance when science and the arts were all seeking the ‘truth’, with vast expansions in philosophical thought about the meaning of life. To ask our own questions about that meaning, let’s head into the rehearsal room…
‘Working the play on its feet’: Packer’s process of actively analyzing
Just as Stanislavsky overthrew his early practice of spending weeks sitting round the table analyzing a script, Packer eschews traditional table work. She believes that it locks actors in their heads while the table visibly ‘cuts their bodies in half’. Her heart-felt aversion to head-led text analysis comes from hours of such experiences in her early career at the RSC. Lofty discussions led by Oxbridge-graduated directors had caused creative spasticity in Packer (just as they had with Stanislavsky’s actors).
Therefore, the very first rehearsal in a Packer production typically involves ‘working the play on its feet’. This exercise is just like Stanislavsky’s call to arms of getting up and looking for your lost son, and finding ways (as Stanislavsky put it) ‘to speak on behalf of your character’. The major difference is that the richness of Shakespeare’s text – with his philosophical, psychological and spiritual understanding of human behavior – is so dense and immense, that the words themselves are the merger of actor and character. When we allow the images that Shakespeare conjures up to resonate around our skulls and bones and imaginations and autobiographies, we find we don’t need to speak ‘on behalf of our characters’. Our characters actually speak on behalf of us – if not on behalf of humanity. The words and structures used by Shakespeare are far richer and more liberating than anything we could possibly think up ourselves. So Packer in no way invites the actors to improvise the text. She does, however, invite to the party their bodies, hearts, energetic connections and emotional imaginations. So everyone is playing on the impulse – from the very first time these actors with this text meet in this space. Here’s what she does:
With the cast, crew and creative team seated in one large circle, the actors involved in a particular scene stand up inside the circle and ‘work through the scene on their feet’. If characters are mentioned who aren’t directly present in the scene, the speaking actor indicates or addresses the actor playing that character wherever they’re sitting in the circle. In this way, a visual, energetic connection is made with that real-life person, and there’s an embodied understanding of what it means to be talking about that character in their absence.
While ‘working the play on its feet’, actors are invited to make bold choices and take big risks in what Packer describes as ‘No blame, no shame’. In fact, her primary condition could easily be that of Stanislavsky who said, ‘Don’t fix anything before the scene. This is the surest way to deaden the scene and your parts. The true adjustment will come on the stage as a result of the correct state of the actor in the character, from his desire to fulfill the problems of the part in the given circumstances.’[16] Because everyone in Packer’s cast knows that these won’t be their definitive interpretations, anything goes. As long as they’re listening to each other, connecting with the images, following their impulses and not hurting each other, themselves or the furniture, whatever happens while they’re ‘working the play on its feet’ constitutes valuable raw material.
If the actors know their lines, that’s great. If they’d rather have their scripts in their hands, that’s fine. It’s even possible to request that an assistant director feeds them the lines from the side. It’s not about memory-test or performance. It’s all about immediate, embodied connection with the other actors, as well as with the circle of audience. This playful and daring first pass through a play has many psychophysical resonances with Stanislavsky’s final practices, not least in terms of discussions.
Analysis through discussion
Although Packer eschews the long, heady text-thrashings that she’d experienced at the RSC, script analysis still happens, of course, but in more subtle and surreptitious ways.
Just as Active Analysis involved ‘Discuss the scene’ (Step 2) and ‘Discuss the improvisation’ (Step 4), in-depth discussions are a vital part of Packer’s rehearsal process. A believer in the power of collective knowledge, her epithet is, ‘I listen to what you’re saying; I hear what you’re feeling; and from that I create wisdom.’ In other words, her staging of a production comes from deep witnessing of and listening to the whole team’s thoughts and discoveries. Just like Stanislavsky in his later practices, Packer is not an auteur-director with a predetermined vision of a production. A play reveals itself to her as the company share their experiences. So even after the very first (joyously chaotic), ‘working the play on its feet’, she invites observations and revelations from everyone in the circle. These discussions create a symbiotic, two-way process, whereby the layers of the onion are contrapuntally peeled away to reveal the play and added on to create the production.
Packer’s original practice of ‘dropping in’ and its resonance with Stanislavsky
The next stage in Packer’s rehearsal processes also bears striking similarities to some of Stanislavsky’s processes, though with a markedly different and original set-up.
Stanislavsky’s Active Analysis usually begins with silent études. I experienced an adaptation of silent études in Moscow under my acting master Katya Kamotskaya.[17] In Kamotskaya’s adaptation, the participants in a scene would stand at some distance apart and – maintaining eye contact throughout the exercise and prompted by their basic understanding of their character’s goals – they would silently find a point of contact. This contact might be a handshake, an embrace, a gentle shove, or none of the above if contact proves impossible for the actor/characters as they silently pursue their objectives. It’s extraordinary how much powerful, instinctive and emotionally rich information can be unlocked about the scene and the characters’ relationships through this simple exercise. The actors don’t have to remember any lines: they simply and silently pursue their character’s basic need in the scene. In this way, the merger of actor with character is seamless: the actors themselves have often noted afterwards how they’re barely aware of where their own personalities ‘ended’ and the character’s motivations began.
Packer has an exercise that is similarly rich, and yet completely different. Working with Shakespeare’s plays, Packer’s imperative is obviously and necessarily language driven, so silent études wouldn’t really serve her purpose. However, she has developed an original practice – evolved and refined over the years – that achieves equally profound energetic and emotional accessibility, with no psychological trawling. It’s called ‘dropping in’.
Here’s how it works. Let’s suppose we’re ‘dropping in’ the dialogue between Hamlet and his mother Gertrude in the ‘closet scene’ (Act III, Scene iv). The physical set-up for ‘dropping in’ involves the two actors sitting ‘eyeball-to-eyeball’ (as Packer describes it), knees interlocking, hands lightly resting on their thighs, their bottoms snug into the back of their chairs and their feet on the ground so that their spines are long and their bodies supported. Since the very early origins of (what would become) ‘dropping in’ were developed in collaboration with Kristin Linklater, breath is extremely important. The actors should allow their breath to fall deeply into their relaxed bellies. Meanwhile their jaws are loose and their lips are lightly open.
At the side of each actor sits a dropper-in, who prompts the actors with words from the text. All each actor has to do is literally and metaphorically allow a particular word to ‘drop in’: that means ‘drop into their imagination’, and ‘drop into their bodies on the breath’. So, the dropper-in takes the opening lines of the dialogue and ‘drops in’ (i.e. speaks aloud) the first impactful word (e.g. ‘Mother’). The actor repeats that word. The dropper-in then says the word again, followed by a free-associating question, and ends by repeating the word. As the actor breathes in, they allow the word to drop into their bodies (imaginatively and breath-wise). And on the outbreath they utter the word, infused with whatever resonances are provoked for them by the dropper-in’s question. Here’s an example, drawn from Shakespeare & Company’s ‘Guidelines to Dropping In’:[18]
Dropper-in: Mother.
Actor/Hamlet: Mother.
Dropper-in: Mother. Do you love your mother? Mother.
Actor/Hamlet: (breathes in.) (On the outbreath, says) Mother.
How the actor says ‘Mother’ will be informed by whatever thoughts arise in spontaneous response to the question ‘Do you love your mother?’ These thoughts can come from anywhere: there’s no need to censor anything, as there’s no right or wrong response. So the thoughts might be related to Hamlet and Gertrude; or they might be related to the actor himself and his relationship with his own mother; to some residue of an image seen on the news that morning of an immigrant child reunited with his mother; to a memory of himself as a three-year-old child with his mother; to a fleeting thought of what it will be like at his mother’s funeral; to a imagined glimpse of what it was like at Gertrude’s wedding to his uncle; to a sudden quizzical possibility that the actress sitting in front of him playing Gertrude might actually be his mother. Whatever. It really doesn’t matter. The point is to stir deep, atavistic resonances, to forge actual in-the-moment connections, to inspire potential directions in which the scene might go. In other words, to incarnate a whole heap of possibilities that a head-led, round-the-table analysis or a solitary navigation of the text might not have thrown up.
The whole scene is explored like this. And afterwards the actors discuss whatever arose for them during the ‘dropping in’. This paper doesn’t allow for a truly in-depth navigation of this dynamically fruitful process. Suffice it to say it’s an exciting way to research a text and it throws up unexpected and emotional findings. The main points to remember are (a) no one can get anything wrong: the droppers-in are simply free-associating, and the actors are simply harvesting ripe fruits for future rehearsals; (b) the final interpretation of the scene might bear no overt signs of any of the discoveries made during the dropping-in session, yet the residue of them will be in the DNA of the scene somewhere (be it in the relationships, the shared moments, and the often highly-charged emotional journeys); and (c) words hold lots of unexpected information and possibilities, so no one particular interpretation need be fixed like a butterfly on a board.
For all its simplicity – just as Stanislavsky’s silent études seem so simple – ‘dropping in’ is incredibly rewarding and the pay-offs for the actors are huge. In terms of learning lines, building relationships, subtly unlocking imaginative backstories, and creating an energetic experience of the language, it’s paradoxically very time-efficient. And it’s the absolute ‘creation of the living word’, its roots plunging deep within the actors’ psychophysical selves. The text becomes clear, necessary and blooming with luxurious foliage!
But why do Shakespeare in a televisual age?
My students sometimes ask this question – before they’ve actually taken a Shakespeare course, that is! Once they do, they quickly discover its usefulness. Given how limited our twenty-first-century range of language has become (sometimes as little as 280 tweeted characters) the vast canvas on which Shakespeare paints is invaluable. Indeed, the American theatre magazine, Backstage featured an article ‘Why (and Where) You Should Study Shakespeare’ (listing Shakespeare & Company amongst its eight recommended places). In the article Benjamin Lindsay writes ‘Once you can do Shakespeare, you can do anything.’[19] If an actor has tackled a Shakespeare comedy or tragedy, he argues, they’re more than equipped to do a television sitcom or Game of Thrones. Lindsay cites Scott Kaiser (Shakespeare scholar and director of company development at Oregon Shakespeare Festival) as saying, ‘A lot of Shakespeare really translates immediately into the other mediums if you can work those muscles. If you can run a 26-mile marathon, you can certainly run the 5K.’[20]
The way in which Shakespeare’s imagery works an actor’s imagination provides unmatchable training, not least because the Elizabethan theatre barely used any scenery. It didn’t need to. Shakespeare lived in an aural age where ‘the creation of the living word’ was second nature. There were no advertising hoardings, television commercials, newsfeeds, smartphones and tablets providing constant visual stimuli. So: ‘Being on an empty stage,’ says Kaiser, ‘and having to imagine an entire world around you [uses] exactly the same muscles as standing in front of the green screen and imagining everything that’s going to be provided for you digitally in postproduction’.[21] So you see, movie actors need Shakespeare training! Which brings us to my third research reflection – screen acting.
In Part II, we move into a more subjective realm, as I continue pulling into focus my Anglo-Russian-American perspective on psychophysical acting and ‘the creation of the living word’.
PART II: SUBJECTIVE RESEARCH: ANALYZING ONE’S OWN WORK
Research reflection #3: Adapting Stanislavsky’s text-based ‘system’ to the visual medium of film
Three years ago, the Theatre department at the University of California, Riverside, evolved into a department of Theatre, Film and Digital Production. As part of that evolution, I’ve found myself consciously adjusting the lexicon of my acting classes to deliberately embrace both stage and screen. Coming as I do from a graduate program where the world’s oldest film studios sit side by side with classrooms filled with actors working on Shakespeare, Chekhov, musical theatre, opera and myriad contemporary writers, I’d taken for granted that Stanislavsky’s ‘system’ crossed between genres. Indeed, Stanislavsky himself crossed literary genres, though – as I mentioned – he didn’t cross media: he didn’t work in film.
I’ve always worked in both live and recorded media so I don’t think twice about using Stanislavsky’s toolkit for stage, screen, commercials and radio. As a teacher, however, I find my student actors need overt clarification of how their training with theatre scripts is directly relevant for their work in film. They want to know why it will help them become betters actor on the camera to use the full capacity of their voice in a theatre, or to break down a scene into its ‘bits’ of action.
I’ve come to realize these questions are both a technological issue and a generational issue and, therefore, warrant some serious consideration.
How do we use Stanislavsky’s ‘system’ for film work?
When we shift as actors between theatre and film, the delivery of our performances obviously shifts (from the literary narrative of the stage to the visual narrative of the screen); so too does our analysis of the script. What do I mean by that? I’ll answer with some examples from my own acting practice.
With any role, I apply various tools from Stanislavsky’s kit, starting by breaking down the script into its bits (or beats) of action. That means I’m looking at where the inner or outer energy of the scene changes (either because somebody enters or exits, or because a major action happens, such as a gunshot is fired or a confession is made). And I’m marking that section as a ‘bit’, be it as long as two pages or as short as five lines. This activity gives me a clear guide to both the scene’s internal rhythm and external shape.
I then consider what my character wants from the scene (i.e their objective or desire). Is that desire fulfilled – do they get what they want? Or is that desire blocked in some way, so they have to adopt a new strategy? (I also consider why the writer wrote the scene in the first place? How does it forward the overall narrative of the piece?).
I then look at the clues in the syntax and choice of words. Why does my character say what they say? And what have they chosen not to say? And why? I also look at the language passed between characters, as that gives me insights into possible thought process. This is particularly rewarding with Shakespeare, where words are frequently recycled between characters, who seem to become infected by each other’s ideas. So for example when Gertrude says ‘Hamlet, thou hast thy father much offended,’ Hamlet picks up on her syntax, replying, ‘Mother, you have my father much offended.’ Not only does he recycle the verb ‘offended’, but he also recycles Gertrude’s whole sentence structure. From his wordplay we can tell he’s in a tricksy, provocative mood, so she’d better watch out!
I don’t fixate too much on stage directions, though I do consider their content and meaning. George Bernard Shaw writes short essays for his stage directions, which can give us some useful insights into both character and milieu. Chekhov provides a few select stage directions, particular ‘pauses’, which are always worth noting as pauses hold a lot of inner information. Shakespeare writes very few explicit stage directions though lots of implicit ones. And most contemporary playwrights give minimal stage directions, assuming the director and the actors will work out the visuals in rehearsal.
In sharp contrast, film and television scripts can be all about the visuals. The words of the dialogue are really just the tip of the iceberg: the real meat of the drama is where the camera will guide the viewers’ eyes. And the clues to what the camera might focus on lie in the screen directions. So as we’re preparing a screen role, we need to read the screen directions with great attention. Here’s why…
The media of television and film enable the viewer to penetrate a character’s thought processes. Because a shot might end up as a close-up on an actor’s face – which might then be shown on a forty-foot movie screen or a sixty-inch TV monitor – there’s the opportunity to suck the spectator right into the character’s mind. So analyzing the character’s thought processes is a vital part of our preparation as actors. And the way to start figuring out what those thought processes might be is to study the screen directions written into the script.
First of all, the screen directions in a film script allow us into the mind of the writer. We’re guided to what they bore in their imagination at the time they were envisaging the script. A scene may not be filmed – exactly shot for shot – as the writer lays it out; nonetheless those screen directions will be the first inroad the director has into the inner fabric of the script.
Which means each screen direction also gives us insights into the director’s potential vision. In collaboration with the director of photography, they’ll construct what’s important to the audience’s eyes. What might the camera close up on or pull away from? Will the focus be pulled between two characters in a two-shot, letting the audience know whose thoughts are most important? (Though, bear in mind, we rarely know as actors exactly what the shot contains at the time of filming. Nor is it really what we want to be too absorbed in: we’ve got a story to tell.) As I said, it’s unlikely the screen directions will be adhered to absolutely; yet, it’s vitally important as we prepare for a role that we understand the atmosphere those screen directions create, the emotional state of mind for the character, and what they really want out of the encounter. These are all fundamental aspects of Stanislavsky’s ‘system’. So let’s put it into practice.
Text analysis in preparing for a film role
Here’s an example from Alejandro Ramirez’s Mente Revolver (Revolver Mind)[22] in which I play the role of a homeless American by the name of Jenny. Having found a revolver in a trash can in Hollywood, Jenny crosses the Mexican border to sell the gun in Tijuana. She then uses some of the cash to rent a room in a cheap motel, and for the first time in many years she takes herself out for the night. On returning to her motel room in the early hours of the morning, she discovers that she has been burgled and all her remaining money stolen. Here’s the screen direction for this scene, which in Ramirez’s script comprised nothing but actions:
92: INT. CHEAP HOTEL, BEDROOM, TIJUANA, MEXICO – MORNING
There’s a light coming from the vanity. JENNY is looking for something in the drawers. Separates every item that she takes out of the plastic bags. As she goes through them she gets more desperate for not succeeding. Looks under the mattress, finds her document files, looks inside the stuffed bunny and finds the packet of cigarettes where she used to put the money, opens it, but it is empty. JENNY gets desperate and goes through the stuff again, looks to see if the money is inside the bed, goes through the bunny again, but she finds nothing and drops her head on the bed in despair, she gives herself some time afterwards, she sits down, and thinks of ‘what to do’. She leans on the wall worried, scared, and looks at the packet of cigarettes empty in her hands.[23]
In preparing for the role, I applied the same Stanislavsky-based text analysis that I would to a play:
First of all, what are the given circumstances? There’s a clear sense of atmosphere in ‘There’s a light coming from the vanity’. Although it’s daytime, the mirror light is on. So how does that piece of information play on our imaginations? To me it suggests the room is dimly lit; there’s something unsettling about the vanity light being on rather than the overhead light, as if something is in mid-action; in my mind’s eye I can see that yellowish glare of a cheap motel mirror light. Even as I read the script, my mind is filled with questions and I want to know more…
We’re then given a very precise score of physical actions in the film directions (reminiscent of Stanislavsky’s Method of Physical Actions). On the one hand as the actor, I feel it’s part of my job to have a sense in my body of this specific score of actions (almost like a choreography): after all, the writer wouldn’t have written these physical moves if they weren’t meant to be embodied in some way. At the same time, I know that the art of film acting is all about spontaneity, catching impulses as they happen, being prepared to live in the moment so that the camera can capture those moments of truth. So in my preparation I write out the score of actions like a piece of dance, and at the same time I’m prepared to ditch the specific sequence on the day of filming and go with the flow if the director wants me to. But to be that free, I need to uncover the psychophysical information contained in that score.
Action-wise, Jenny is looking for something. That’s straightforward!
Feelings-wise, it’s more complex! The repetition of the word ‘desperate’ as well as the repetition of certain actions – looking repeatedly in the bed, in the bunny, in the cigarette packet – obviously lets me know she’s in a panic. The tempo-rhythm of the scene would seem to be fast and intense, like a racing heart-beat. This is endorsed by the adjectives ‘worried’ and ‘scared’.
Thought-wise: Jenny’s mind is revolving: the stakes are high. Whatever she’s looking for (i.e. the money) is of supreme importance to her. I’m also struck by the juxtaposition of opposites in the screen directions: while Jenny is in a panic, there’s also something methodical about her actions. She separates out the articles, she knows where her documents are, she knows where she usually keeps her money, she ‘sits down and thinks of “What to do?”’ So we’re presented with a personality that, even in a life of unpredictability (as a homeless life must surely be), there’s an ordered nature to her mind. There’s a thoughtfulness amid the chaos.
By doing this sort of analysis of the script directions, I now have some basic inroads to the three ‘inner psychological drives’ of thoughts, feelings and actions for Jenny. So I can start to feel where she might live in my own psychophysical instrument.
Stanislavsky’s four pillars on the film set
As I’ve said, we have to be prepared with film and television to throw out all our preparatory work once we’re on the set. After all, acting for the camera includes following impulses in response to what actually happens there and then. This in itself can make screen acting both incredibly liberating and incredibly scary: we have to walk the knife-edge of the moment. To which end, I found myself with Revolver Mind heavily drawing on Stanislavsky’s four pillars of relaxation, concentration, imagination and observation on the film set. I’ll give you another example. (It should be noted that I had just completed Shakespeare & Company’s exceptional Month-Long Intensive training for mid-career professionals, so I was already feeling like a fine-tuned Formula One racing car!)
On the first day of filming, we were shooting a scene in Hollywood where Jenny is walking the sidewalk pushing her shopping cart. Suddenly she sees a stuffed toy bunny in the middle of the road. Almost without thinking, she runs into the road, rescues the bunny and takes it back to her cart. On the day of the shoot, it was very busy on Fairfax Avenue. Although we had police on set to stop the traffic, there were other delays as we navigated the daily life of a busy city. As I was standing on the sidewalk with my shopping cart ready to shoot, I noticed a real homeless woman walking towards me. Her energy and focus were such that it was almost as if she were trying to make herself invisible. While her eye-line was to the ground, I noticed that it shifted from one side to another in a very deliberate way. I was curious as to why. Then I realized that she was looking at the cigarette butts tossed on the sidewalk: she was trying to see if there was enough tobacco left in any of them to warrant her picking them up. In this moment, I understood the way in which the four pillars on which Stanislavsky’s ‘system’ rests all connect to provide a sound base for the actor at work. I was sufficiently relaxed to be able to take in the surroundings. At the same time, my concentration was such that I could be both in character and attentive to the world round me. (Stanislavsky calls this ‘dual consciousness’.) My observation was such that I noted what the real homeless person was doing. And my imagination was instantly able to incorporate it into my own characterization. It became crystal-clear for me that, if we’ve done the appropriate prep on our roles, we can feel relaxed on set, we can harness our focus to the task in hand, while remaining open to the world around us and letting those observations (of partner, environment and unexpected happenings) instantly feed our imaginations. In that one brief moment, I had an enlightening sense of the ‘inner creative state’ that helps us as actors in the stress and immediacy of a film shoot.
So how can I share my recent practice-based research – garnered from combining Stanislavsky and Shakespeare and contemporary film acting – with my students?
Research reflection 4: Teaching acting to the ‘iGen’[24]
You find me at a time when my tectonic plates are shifting regarding actor training.
I’ve been teaching actors now for twenty years during which time my methodology has galvanized into four guiding principles: (1) ‘dynamic listening’; (2) ‘willing vulnerability’; (3) ‘playfulness’; and (4) ‘psychophysical coordination’. I’ll just focus on one of those principles here: psychophysical coordination. Psychophysical coordination is the natural and intimate dialogue between whatever we’re feeling inside and our outer expression of that feeling. And vice versa: the information coming at us from the outside world affects how we’re feeling within.
The important words here are ‘natural’ and ‘intimate’.
Acting is an intimate art that draws upon natural processes. It’s about empathy, affect, touch, sensation, interaction and what Stanislavsky calls ‘communion’. It’s about the spirit and soul – both of which are words that Shakespeare and Stanislavsky regularly use. It’s about ensemble, community and social intercourse. Given that intimacy, I naturally adapt the four guiding principles to the people in my classroom at any one time.
In the last six months, however, my tectonic plates (as I mentioned) have begun to shift. For the first time ever, I’ve found myself consciously considering the actual generation to whom I’m teaching these principles.
The challenges of the iGen and art of acting
The so-called iGeneration (a term coined by sociologist Jean Twenge) is uniquely placed in the history of civilization, in that they’ve been born into technology. The most intimate relationship they often have is with their electronic devices, and their world can shrink to the size of a cellphone. While there’s no denying that cellphone leads them to a wealth of information, they might not raise their heads and see the real clouds rather than the iClouds.
This is a different worldview from the one into which I was born. Let alone the worlds into which were born those who have inspired my practice-based research.
Shakespeare’s world was as big as the cosmos. He was born into a world that had just discovered it was round, not flat. He was born into the Renaissance of medicine and philosophy, as humanity transitioned out of the Dark Ages.
Stanislavsky’s world was equally textured. He was born into a world in which Darwin’s Origin of Species and Freud’s psychoanalysis were resonating around the globe, and mankind’s understanding of human behavior was becoming increasingly scientific. He was born into a country navigating huge social and ideological upheavals: he began life as a rich merchant’s son and ended it under house arrest in a communal apartment block.
Packer was born into a Europe on the brink of its second world war, and her pacifist tendencies have nurtured a very particular relationship to portrayals of violence. She has seen women rise to power politically, domestically and artistically, and her own sustaining of a theatre company for forty years has been a battle against many odds.
In no way whatsoever is the twenty-first-century world any less cosmic or socially complex as it was for our two dead males or our very living female. Yet the means by which the iGeneration receive their knowledge and consume information are unfathomably different. Not to mention their ways of experiencing ensemble, community and social intercourse.
The iGen’ers’ dependence on texting, tweeting, Snapchating and Instagraming as their primary modes of communication means that their words are ‘living’ in ways we couldn’t have imagined twenty years ago. The dopamine kick that floods a young brain when a post is liked or a tweet ignites a Twitter-buzz are leading to serious addictions. Or as computer scientist and social commentator Jarod Lanier calls them ‘behaviour modifications’, as we’re being manipulated by computer algorithms (not even people): ‘When many people are addicted to manipulative schemes, the world gets dark and crazy.’[25]
That crazy darkness also comes from the fact that young people are communicating through their thumbs. They’re becoming increasingly disembodied from their language, while at the same time (paradoxically) being emotionally wounded by other people’s words. As Twenge says, ‘The more they use words to communicate [on social media], the less they put their bodies at risk and the more they put their emotions at risk. It’s no wonder, then, that iGen’ers yearn for a safe space where they can be protected.’[26] For all their social media, the iGeneration is arguably one of the most socially shy generations in modern history.
So what does this mean for us as actor trainers?
It means we have students in our acting classes who may be (a) addicted to their devices for communicating; (b) disembodied from their language; (c) so vulnerable to the way in which their online words are received that they’re very averse to any situation that might make them feel unsafe; ergo (d) they’re socially shy.
You can see the issues. Acting is all about (a) communicating face to face; (b) embodying words on a deep level; (c) willingly taking on roles and situations that make us feel vulnerable in order to tell impactful stories; and (d) morphing shyness into confidence.
This in itself urges new imperatives for those of us teaching acting. And I find myself asking: ‘How can I make my classroom increasingly safe so that my iGen students can explore their connections to their own self, as much as to each other? Not least because there seems to be an increasing alienation from ‘the self’. Yet the self is the psychophysical instrument, which serve the actor throughout their professional careers. A guitarist can’t play the guitar if they don’t know how to strum the strings.
This puts us in the middle of a two-way street – as any worthwhile dialogue does. On the one hand, we have a responsibility to the craft of acting, which integrates emotions, bodies and minds. And we can’t be actors without accessing all three. So as actor trainers it’s our duty to open up dialogues about acting that ensure the psychophysical nature of our art is valued and practiced. On the other hand, we have a responsibility to a generation of students who have in many respects become markedly risk averse: they don’t necessarily feel comfortable addressing the soft underbelly of humanity that has long been the raw material of our art. So how do we navigate the situation?
iGen and the power of language
Actually I believe there are some very positive elements arising from the iGenerations’ risk aversion. Twenge writes that there’s a growing connection for young people between speech and its emotional impact. In other words, the power of language is becoming increasingly prescient for our young students. From their social media interactions, they know all too well that, ‘When safety extends to emotional safety, speech can hurt’.[27] So how can we help them frame this sensitivity to language so that they see it as a good thing? Well, if there really is an increasing sensitivity between what we say and how those words land, ‘the creation of the living word’ might actually be easier for the iGen than it has been for those of us from earlier generations. In other words, maybe we can reframe their everyday fear that language is going to hurt in terms of two of the invaluable acting principles I noted earlier: ‘dynamic listening’ and ‘willing vulnerability’.
This reframing could be particularly useful for them when it comes to handling complex scripts such as Shakespeare’s. As Twenge says, ‘Perhaps because they are so physically safe compared to previous generations, and perhaps because they spend so much time online, iGen sees speech as the venue where danger lies. In their always online lives, words can reach out and do damage even when you’re alone.’[28] So how would it be, I ask, if we let the ‘venue where danger lies’ be the theatre and the actor-training environment? How would it be if our young students allowed the potent imagistic language, say, of Shakespeare’s huge emotions to give them permission, space and structure to express those fears?[29] In other words, how would it be if as actor trainers we took the social reality that our students may be scared of language, and channeled it towards more mindful behavior and more empathic performances? Then we might even help them develop stronger actor-audience relationships and become more impactful storytellers…
iGen and empathy
Both Shakespeare through his plays and Stanislavsky through his acting ‘system’ strove for dramatizations that created emotional, empathic responses in their audiences. Tina Packer herself has always argued that the function of the actor is to speak the unspeakable in the safety of the theatre; the catharsis of collective witnessing can heal both the speaker and the spectator. Which is to say that theatre is supposed to get our mirror neurons firing. As actors we want our spectators to empathize with the characters, to see different worldviews, to broaden their perspectives. If we can achieve that new awareness in our audiences, they might leave the theatre as more understanding, compassionate and accepting social beings.
If, therefore, there is a reluctance – even a resistance – in young students to experience narratives that may unsettle them, maybe we can help them as actor trainers to reset the start button. What if they came to celebrate the role they can play as social storytellers? What if they found that enacting unsettling situations – within the safe structure of a script – enables them to become richer contributors to their broader society? And maybe even heal others by taking them on cathartic, therapeutic journeys?
iGen and emotional safety
To a large degree this issue involves the kinds of scripts we use in our classes to explore human relationships. The best dramas – be they Sophocles’ Antigone, Lynn Nottage’s Ruined, Shakespeare’ Othello or Sarah Kane’s Blasted – are about dysfunctional (often violent) relationships. When we have the chance to play these roles, we can embrace psychophysically diverse perspectives and, in so doing, we can help our audiences to address some of those dysfunctions. And yet navigating this kind of material is tricky for the iGeneration who uphold that ‘it’s harder to protect your mind than your body.’[30] Or as Twenge cites one of her nineteen-year-old subjects as saying, ‘I believe nobody can guarantee emotional safety. You can always take precautions for someone hurting you physically, but you cannot really help but listen when someone is talking to you.’[31]And this translates even to reading ‘emotionally unsafe’ words, let alone hearing them or saying them. Indeed, I’m increasingly aware that colleagues teaching violent plays in script analysis classes offer trigger warnings about the plays’ content (just as you would with a movie). But again I ask myself, couldn’t this actually be seen as a good thing? After all, any half-decent writer wants their words to affect their audience? However, it certainly means for those of us teaching acting – where we’re in a studio working predominantly with bodies rather than in a classroom working predominantly with brains – we have an extremely important but delicate job.
We have to provide safe spaces in our classrooms where our students can (a) express their own emotions; (b) consider other perspectives through scripts and dramas that may bring out challenging emotions for them; and (c) handle, within the safe structures of a dramatic text and an actor-training environment, issues of conflict, risk and emotional discomfort.
It’s certainly a delicate task, but I don’t think it’s insurmountable. In many respects, the iGeneration get a bad press as the ‘snowflake’ generation, meaning nothing is allowed to hurt them or they’ll melt. As one eighteen-year-old subject in Twenge’s analysis states, ‘The perception seems to be that our generation is coddled and whiny and we don’t have any kind of thick skin at all. But I think they are misrepresenting things. The trend is toward greater understanding for people’s feelings and people’s health… The fact that we are trying to be more understanding of that sort of stuff isn’t bad. It’s about safety and helping those who are vulnerable.’[32] Which again could actually be a very good thing when it comes to ‘creating the living word’.
The iGeneration and the ‘creation of the living word’
I see my job as an actor trainer being three-fold:
In the work on the self, I can offer strategies for my students to dip their toes in the oceans of emotional complexity. Through that experience they may find more balance within themselves and, therefore, a broader range of emotional intelligence with which to handle the world. All this work has to be done with a sense of playfulness, or – as Michael Chekhov called it – a ‘quality of ease’.
In the work on the ensemble, I can provide opportunities for them to experience social integration, collaboration and trust as vital community building skills, as well as vocational acting skills. As Twenge suggests, ‘ iGen’ers seem terrified – not just of physical dangers but of the emotional dangers of adult social interaction. Their caution keeps them safe, but it also makes them vulnerable, because everyone gets hurt eventually.’[33] Of course we never want to hurt our students. At the same time – if they’re serious about an acting career – it’s our professional responsibility to prepare them for an increasingly cutthroat industry. On a film set, time and money dictate that actors have to leap straight into the job, however vulnerable they may be feeling or however exposed the character is; our profession requires that we let the camera see every aspect of our humanity, including the raw side. Again this work has to be done with a sense of playfulness.
And in the work on the role, we can provide scripts such as those by Shakespeare and Chekhov, writers who worked intensively with actors; who had a passion and curiosity for human behavior, and a real love for love; and whose work has endured because of their immense insights. Chekhov was a doctor: therefore, he knew he was dying of tuberculosis. He was a surgeon of the soul as much as the body, and his plays reflect his poignant understanding of humanity. Shakespeare paints on a vast canvas including jealousy, rage, vengeance, violence as well as profound and tender love. It behooves us not be put off by the fact that both Shakespeare and Chekhov are dead European males, as they both offer the actor complicated scenarios and violent disagreements (ergo, important training material). I’d argue that it’s vitally important for young actors to experience the articulacy of these extraordinary writers, especially for what Twenge calls ‘a generation that believes someone disagreeing with you constitutes emotional injury.’[34] While of course we also want to use contemporary texts by writers of all ethnicity, cultures, races and gender identifications, we wouldn’t want to throw out the baby with the bath water.
We should, however, become increasingly mindful of how to reframe the pedagogy of the classics. There are certainly some problematic representations of race and class in both Shakespeare and Chekhov. As one of my African-American students pointed out to me last year, it’s no longer acceptable to include on curricula Stanislavsky’s portrayal of Othello without overt consideration of the misappropriation.[35] It’s extremely off-putting, especially for a student of color, to read on the second page of An Actor Prepares about Stanislavsky’s use of blackface and his offensive assumptions about Othello’s African origins, even if he’s being deliberately naïve. My student’s observation was a valuable moment for me, proving that learning is a two-way street – whatever our generation!
To conclude…
Times may have changed but has the art of acting?
When I was an acting student both in the U.K. and Russia, we almost craved emotional discomfort. We loved rolling around in Grotowskian anguish and weeping in Artaudian despair. Throughout my career, there has been a certain cathartic pleasure in expressing through acting humanity’s emotionally discomforting experiences – within the safety of a defined script, a determined outcome and a person who says ‘cut’ or ‘curtain’ when we’re done.
I wonder if, for a while, I took that hunger for emotional boundary testing as a ‘given’ for anyone choosing to study acting. I no longer do. While I don’t currently teach in a conservatory or on a vocational program, I’ve reached out to colleagues who do, and the issues seem parallel. For many of us born before social media ruled our lives, college was, as Twenge describes it, ‘a place for learning and exploration, and that includes being exposed to ideas different from your own.’ [36] Maybe my generation and earlier generations almost believed that was the whole point of going to college in the first place. But as Twenge alerts us, ‘iGen’ers disagree: college, they feel, is a place to prepare for a career in a safe environment. […] iGen’ers’ interest in safety leads them to balk at the idea that college should mean exploring new and different ideas – what if they aren’t “emotionally safe”? And what does this have to do with getting a good job and earning money?’[37]
You can see why my tectonic plates are shifting. And this shifting began so recently that I don’t know what the landscape will look like until the rocks have settled. Though of course some of the landscape hasn’t changed. Lee Strasberg, the father of the American ‘Method’ school of acting, once said that all people should have some actor training. And I often say that my lower division ‘Introduction to Acting’ is really an ‘Introduction to Being Human’. Increasingly, I believe this is my role: to provide a safe space for my students to dare to put themselves in experientially different situations, as they explore their potential as psychophysical beings. And to put themselves in ‘emotionally unsafe’ dialogues through the safety of well-crafted texts, as they explore their capabilities as creative artists. And thus my Anglo-Russian-American approach comes into focus:
Stanislavsky’s ‘system’ is in many respects a perfect means of navigating the unsafe. It’s clear. It’s structured. It makes absolute sense. It simply takes the laws of nature and applies them to the artifice of a script. And it’s spawned three generations of extremely successful actors. Many Oscar winners are steeped in the psychophysical training of Stanislavsky, which imbues them with the willing vulnerability to take emotional and relational risks in the roles they play.
Shakespeare’s plays are in many respects a perfect way of navigating the complexities of human relationships. Each character does whatever they do – be it love, hate, revenge, excite, fight, make peace – to the nth degree. All within a clear structure of the macrocosm of a five-act play and the microcosm of an iambic pentameter. Indeed, Tina Packer – with her Anglo-American training – is a fervent believer that the structure of Shakespeare’s verse is in fact the liberator of big and passionate emotions and the safe container for the exploration of those emotions.[38]
Film acting in many respects is a perfect medium for experiencing intense ‘moments of absorption’ in complex human action within the tightest possible acting structure: the close-up. And the American film and television industries lead the way in such emotional accessibility.
As we train young actors, we can mindfully use specific methods to bring structure to the inner and outer chaos that is the world of the iGeneration. As Twenge concludes in her book, ‘iGen’ers are scared, maybe even terrified. Growing up slowly, raised to value safety, and frightened by the implications of income inequality, they have come to adolescence in a time when their primary social activity is staring at a small rectangular screen that can like them or reject them. The devices they hold in their hands have both extended their childhoods and isolated them from true human interaction […] they are both the physically safest generation and the most mentally fragile.’[39] And these are the students in our midst. And we are their teachers. We’re experiencing these seismic shifts together. And the emergency kit at hand is the art of acting.
In and of itself, acting provides the physically safest place for us as human beings: we more or less know what we’re going to say and we more or less know the circumstances of the situation. It also asks us to be our most psychophysically fragile: it demands we allow the spectator into our soul and use our language to affect our listeners. Ambitious as it may sound and in a world of alternatives facts – where ‘Truth isn’t truth’ any more apparently[40] – it seems as though acting may be the last bastion of ‘the creation of the living word’. As we train our students and we practice our art, I believe it’s an ambition worth pursuing.
Bibliography
[1] Barrett, E. & Bolt, B. (eds.) (2010), Practice as Research: Approaches to Creative Arts Enquiry, New York: I. B. Tauris.
[2] Hodge, A. (editor) (2010), Actor Training, second edition, London & New York: Routledge.
[3] Gomez, M. (2018), ‘Giuliani says “Truth Isn’t Truth” in Defense of Trump’s Legal Strategy’, New York Times, 19 August, 2018.
[4] Gorchakov, N. M. (1994), Stanislavsky Directs, trans. Miriam Goldina, New York: Limelights.
[5] Knebel, M. (2002), On the Active Analysis of Plays and Roles, Maria Knebel, in unpublished translation by Mike Pushkin with Bella Merlin.
[6] Lanier, J. (2018), Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now, New York: Henry Holt & Company.
[7] Lindsay, B. (2016), ‘Why (and Where) You Should Study Shakespeare’, Backstage, 23 February, 2016.
[8] Linklater, K. (2006), Freeing the Natural Voice, expanded edition, London: Nick Hern Books.
[9] Merlin, B. (2001), Beyond Stanislavsky: The Psycho-physical Approach to Actor Training, London: Nick Hern Books.
[10] Merlin, B. (2014), The Complete Stanislavsky Toolkit, revised edition, London: Nick Hern Books.
[11] Merlin, B. (2016), Facing the Fear: An Actor’s Guide to Overcoming Stage Fright, London: Nick Hern Books.
[12] Merlin, B. (2018), Konstantin Stanislavsky: Routledge Performance Practitioners, revised edition, Abingdon & New York.
[13] Ramirez, A. (2016), Mente Revolver unpublished script, https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6097248/
[14] Twenge, J. M., (2017), iGen: Why Today’s Super-Connected Kids are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy – and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood, New York: Atria.
[15] Shakespeare & Company website www.shakespeare.org.
[16] Shakespeare & Company archive, ‘Guideslines to Dropping In’, unpublished document.
[17] Stanislavsky, K. S. (1980), An Actor Prepares, trans. Elizabeth Reynolds Hapgood, London: Methuen. (Original year of publication 1937)
[18] Stanislavsky, K. S. (2000), Creating A Role, trans. Elizabeth Reynolds Hapgood, London: Methuen. (Original year of English publication 1961)
[19] www.nytimes.com/2018/08/19/us/giuliani-meet-the-press-truth-is-not-truth.html
Endnotes
([1]) Merlin, B. (2016), Facing the Fear: An Actor’s Guide to Overcoming Stage Fright, London: Nick Hern Books, p. xxviii.
([2]) Barrett, E. & Bolt, B. (eds.) (2010), Practice as Research: Approaches to Creative Arts Enquiry, New York: I. B. Tauris, p. 4. (My emphasis.)
([3]) The year’s training is detailed in Merlin, B. (2001), Beyond Stanislavsky: The Psycho-physical Approach to Actor Training, London: Nick Hern Books.
([4]) Twenge, J. M., (2017), iGen: Why Today’s Super-Connected Kids are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy – and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood, New York: Atria.
([5]) Stanislavsky, K. S. (2000), Creating A Role, trans. Elizabeth Reynolds Hapgood, London: Methuen, p. 262.
([6]) Stanislavsky, K. S. (2000), p. 100. (My emphasis.)
([7]) More details of these four stages can be found in Merlin, B. (2018), Konstantin Stanislavsky: Routledge Performance Practitioners, Revised edition, Abingdon & New York: Routledge.
[8] Stanislavsky cited in On the Active Analysis of Plays and Roles, Maria Knebel, in unpublished translation by Mike Pushkin with Bella Merlin, 2002, p. 7.
[9] Ibid., p. 19.
([10]) Ibid., p. 8.
([11]) Stanislavsky, K. S. (2000), p. 101.
([12]) Stanislavsky cited in Knebel (2002), p. 93.
([13]) Carnicke, S. M. (2010), ‘The Knebel Technique’ in Actor Training (ed. Alison Hodge), second edition, London & New York: Routledge, p. 103.
([14]) Linklater, K. (2006), Freeing the Natural Voice, expanded edition, London: Nick Hern Books.
([15]) The three areas of work of Shakespeare & Company – performance, training and education – over their forty-plus years of existence is detailed in their book, Shakespeare & Company: Training, Education, Performance by Merlin and Packer, (forthcoming Routledge, 2019).
([16]) Stanislavsky cited in Stanislavsky Directs (1994), Gorchakov, N. M., trans. Miriam Goldina, New York: Limelights, p.94.
([17]) I detail Kamotskaya’s processes with silent études in Beyond Stanislavsky: The Psycho-physical Approach to Actor Training (2001), London: Nick Hern Books, and in The Complete Stanislavsky Toolkit (revised edition, 2014).
([18]) ‘Guidelines to Dropping In’, unpublished document, Shakespeare & Company archive.
([19]) ‘Why (and Where) You Should Study Shakespeare’ by Benjamin Lindsay, Backstage, 23 February 2016.
([20]) Ibid.
([21]) Ibid.
([22]) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6097248/
([23]) Ramirez, A. (2016), Mente Revolver unpublished script.
([24]) Twenge, J. M., (2017), iGen: Why Today’s Super-Connected Kids are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy – and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood, New York: Atria.
([25]) Lanier, J. (2018), Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now, New York: Henry Holt & Company, p. 11.
([26]) Twenge (2017), p. 178.
([27]) Twenge (2017), p. 156. (My emphasis.)
([28]) Twenge (2017), p. 156. (My emphasis.)
([29]) This is indeed the work that Shakespeare & Company has been doing for decades through their training and education programs, under the inspirational and indomitable Directors of Training Dennis Krausnick and of Education Kevin Coleman.
([30]) Twenge (2017), p. 157.
([31]) Aiden cited in Twenge (2017), p. 157. (My emphasis.)
([32]) Ben cited in Twenge (2017), p. 163.
([33]) Twenge (2017), p. 167.
([34]) Twenge (2017), p. 167.
([35]) Independent study with fourth-year student at UCR Foleshade Ayodele, October 2017.
([36]) Twenge (2017), p. 173.
([37]) Ibid.
([38]) Shakespeare & Company’s Month-Long Intensive Training uses a very clear structure (crafted and honed over forty years) to take all its participants on immensely deep, personally therapeutic and artistically expansive journeys of risk, joy and playfulness. (They run a similar course for undergraduates and young professionals called the Summer Training Institute).
([39]) Twenge (2017), p. 312.
([40]) https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/19/us/giuliani-meet-the-press-truth-is-not-truth.html