Shorts

This is an attempt to summarize the main ideas I have been struggling with as a performer, playwright, director and teacher over many years. I try to pull back and assume a wide, more universal perspective, but occasionally my own aesthetic preferences do creep in! It is very concentrated, and admittedly not particularly digestible. I expect to be updating and extending it from time to time; ideas need to stay alive. These are my "butterflies" and "cockroaches," and it is not painless to pin them down into an insect collection like this.

• There is no single right way to make theatre.
• There is no such thing as the perfect actor.


• The work of the actor is so much a plague of mysteries, there is really no need to invent more. It is the responsibility of the acting teacher to de-mystify, and make the work concrete and down-to-earth. Nothing beats evidence. No worries, the magic will always assert itself.


• There is a difference between an artist and a teacher. A teacher must have a strong, inclusive philosophy of theatre, but a strong aesthetic will make the teacher's work narrow and less effective and, though perhaps inspiring, tend to encourage imitation. In contrast, an artist must have a strong aesthetic, but a strong philosophy can be a handicap when pursuing a unique vision, scattering ones focus and encouraging unneeded rationalisation.


• My teaching lies within the Copeau/Lecoq tradition. My underlying strategy is to build a bridge that "stretches" the student actor between two "pylons." On one end of the bridge the students are encouraged to exercise their "sincerity muscle." On the other end they are encouraged to exploit the full range of vocal and physical possibilities made available by their technical training. So there is no such thing as "over-playing." The problem is rather one of having mastered the "stretch," of providing adequate support to the quest for transformation, style and expression. The study begins with traditional naïve styles such as commedia dell' arte, mumming and melodrama that have evolved rather than have been invented, and place the actor in the central position as story teller and transformer of reality. The work continues into more sophisticated and challenging examples of classical and contemporary literature in which the actor is joined by the playwright as a partner in crime!


• Broadly, there are two approaches to an actor's work, the somatic and the cognitive. This duality is echoed in many ways throughout the profession.
• Indeed, one can recognize two parallel European traditions of theatre pedagogy that map onto this duality. One could call them the "Southern" and the "Northern," as represented by the followers of Copeau and Stanislavski.
• Where Copeau might work from expression to sincerity, Stanislavski might work from sincerity to expression. Where Copeau might say "Trust your body and you will tell no lies," Stanislavski might say "Tell no lies and your body will follow."
• It is not hard to predict, from examining their contrasting cultural backgrounds, Russian and French, which approach to theatre is the more authoritarian!


• There are two fundamental aspects of character, the genetic/developmental and the acquired. Yes, the familiar nature and nurture! Interestingly, these two sources of character also correspond to the somatic and cognitive approaches to acting.
• Similarly echoing this duality is, on the one hand, the type of actor who's characterization is triggered by an image, perhaps an element of costume, or derived from an inner musicality; and on the other hand, the actor who delves into their character's biography and system of belief.
• Of these two aspects of the actor's work, the physical and the intellectual, the physical (reflexive, spontaneous, in flow) must be mastered before proceeding to the intellectual (reflective, strategic, structured). Why? For the same reason that an acrobat should learn an open manoeuvrer or "layout" before learning a "tuck." When in physical danger our bodies tend to hunch and tuck, a natural protective reflex. However, the acrobat has to learn to suppress that reflex in a layout before proceeding to learn a tuck that reinforces it; else the layout will be much harder to learn.
• Similarly, when we are psychologically stressed, as is typical in performance, our species tends to resort to "clever brain mode." It is easy to recognize in the actor. We see the wheels turning. Play, spontaneity, relaxation, and real listening are lost and the acting becomes wooden, predictable and boring. Eventually, when student actors have learnt to trust and employ the intelligence of their bodies, they are ready to rediscover "clever brain mode," which will be of great importance in rehearsal. But not during actual performance where it needs to have been transcended, its discoveries and understandings fully trained and absorbed during rehearsal.


• Modern neuroscience tells us that we are our subconscious and that it equates closely with our bodies. Our subconscious receives vast quantities of information, makes decisions and initiates actions. Our conscious mind could never cope with such an abundance of inputs, and so only provides a narrow window on the world. It can rather clumsily attempt to intervene, but usually goes along for the ride and takes credit for the results!
• The identity - the I and the me - that generates an action is not located in a single master nerve cell. It is distributed. Exactly what the boundaries are to that distribution is open to question: Is it contained inside the skull? Does it extend to the sense organs and motor neurons? Or even to a partner's body? In any case it is not localized, cannot be located, and is the summation of a vast number of effects.
• This new, evidence based understanding has left the usual twentieth-century acting theories very much out of date.


• The body of knowledge that constitutes the art of the actor is vast and complex, and can be approached from many directions. A great deal of so-called acting training has little to do with the act of acting, but is in fact literary analysis.


• When acting teachers are not equipped with a strong pedagogical framework for articulating the material, they tend to fall back on rehearsal and production processes to provide them with a model. That is a shame. Once they have graduated, the students will be in rehearsal and production for the rest of their lives. A school should provide the unique opportunity to experiment and fail, and to study each of the many aspects of acting independently, and in a sequence that is tuned to their growth and not to the demands of the audience.
• When it does become time for the student to "learn from the audience," the acting teacher/director is confronted with three simultaneous and conflicting challenges: to continue the process of learning, to protect the students and make them look good, and to provide an entertainment for the audience. It is not easy to accomplish all three things at the same time.
• Academia is very fond of breaking education into courses and modules. But modules are an administrative tool. Learning doesn't happen in modules. Learning happens in phases, if and when the learner is ready.
• Ideally, the individual student actor should determine the pace of the education. The teacher should be a Master Follower.


• For the actor, sincerity is not a moral issue. It is a professional skill, a muscle that can be strengthened through exercise.
• The real work of acting happens before the action, in creating an embodied necessity for the action. Once you open your mouth to speak, it is too late if you haven't already, either reflexively or reflectively, implanted the necessity for the words.
• One can't overstate the importance of truly listening to your stage partner, even while you yourself are speaking the lines.


• There is no such thing as "over-playing." The problem referred to is better described as a "lack of support."
• One never accuses a musician of being too "musical." Can an actor be too "theatrical?"
• "Passion," "style," "the level of the mask," are closely related terms that point to a charged and resonant theatricality.
• Emotions are the cheap and easy route to passion. Passion can also be neutral, as in the work with Neutral Mask.


• On stage, and even in character, the actor is always also the actor.


• There is no template from which to build the perfect actor, and no single method that can cover the great variance in talent and sensibility that one finds from one actor to another.
• Attempting to develop a one-size-fits-all unified method of acting is just as perverse as trying to do the same with an approach to living.
• Actors are different, different, different; each is unique, unique, unique.
• From a multitude of influences, every actor forges their own alloy of methods and techniques.


• Musicality is the common denominator, the integrating factor, that ties together all the aspects of acting.


• Painters possess a special sensitivity to colour, as musicians do to sound. Influence is the raw material of drama, and the special sensitivity of the actor. Beginning by exploring that sensitivity, the actors create a "music of influence" that fills the space between them: "I change you, as you change me." The actors then dance to that music, as the dancer does to the sounds of the orchestra.


• "Supertext" refers to the actor's attitude toward being on the stage, including everything from career goals, to love of the playwright's words, to surprise at where the audience laughed, to irritation with one's colleagues. It will always find some form of expression in a production, no matter how naturalistic the intended style. So it should not be ignored. In fact, in a healthy production, a shared supertext is the very source of its style. It is a micro culture growing out of the actors' attitudes and needs, not something imposed from above.
• The best directors are not generals or captains of industry. They are creative anthropologists nurturing an emerging culture that will find its expression in the individual style of the production.
• When a group of actors is onstage for the same reason, which is to say they share a common super-text, then there exists the possibility of an ensemble style.
• Le jeu and complicité - as taught by Jacques Lecoq - are aspects of supertext.
• Many acting problems can be traced to an intrusive, inflexible or inappropriate supertext.


• An actor is often asked to be the vehicle for concepts that lie distant from their own understanding. Sometimes this distance is due to a lack of age, education and experience, and sometimes because of an innate lack of capacity. In any case, when the distance is too great, as it often is with students, the acting is unconvincing.
• Which suggests there is a case to be made for being very selective about choice and timing of material for the student actor.


• Theatre is dependent on the culture that generates, supports and contains it.
• Ones own culture tends to be invisible. "Your culture is weird. But of course interesting, and yes, strangely beautiful! Our culture is just normal. If in fact we have one... I don't really see it. Actually, I don't really understand what the hell it is that so fascinates you about our culture."


• Nothing kills Art like pursuing it as an exercise in Good Taste.
• Minimalism is too often the last refuge of cowards. First simplify. Then AMPLIFY!
• Old Venetian Proverb: "If they are not crazy, we don't want them!"
• It is not the function of Art to provide a faithful representation of reality. Art concerns the transformation of reality.


• A wooden sword is more interesting, and more theatrical than an authentic metal one because it invites the audience to participate and invest in the illusion.


• Historically, literature is the child of theatre. The play existed thousands of years before the novel. Dramatic writing is much more than just a branch of literature.
• The written text is no more than the shadow of the play projected onto a sheet of paper.
• Monologues are not dramatic writing. They might be poetry. They might be rhetoric. They might be storytelling. And that can be interesting. It can well deserve to be inserted into dramatic writing. But when writers don't portray the physical, psychological and musical relationships between characters, they don't demonstrate an understanding of playwriting.


• Traditional evolved styles such as Commedia dell' Arte, Melodrama and Mumming, - as opposed to invented or imposed styles - have their core stylistic origins in specific real-life human relationships. This contributes to their authenticity, and value as teaching tools.


• It used to be that we took our psychotic problems seriously, and called it Tragedy. We laughed at our neurotic problems and called it Comedy. In the Twentieth Century we began to laugh ironically at our psychotic problems, and called it Theatre of the Absurd. Our neurotic problems we began to take seriously and called it Social Realism.


• Film is closer to the art of the novel than it is to the art of theatre.
• Film is possessed of a set of tools (montage, framing, focus etc.) that allow it to ignore, even subvert the actor's powers of stylistic transformation.
• When it doesn't try to emulate Film, theatre can empower the actor as the primary agent of stylistic transformation.


• Post-dramatic theatre is all too naturalistic for my taste, as in too much like reality, which in my personal experience already presents as a chaotic montage of images! Although it celebrates theatricality in a beautiful and much needed way, post-dramatic theatre often lacks the essential abstraction of narrative. A story does not resemble life. A story is life transformed, sliced, strung together and packaged, usually in some kind of coherent fashion. Coherent, but not necessarily comfortable. A story can leave the audience with a difficult problem. Even with an unresolvable paradox.


• Takes, as in "double-takes," are a way of sharing the character's subtext by exploiting the audience's imagination.


• To the degree that a mask differs from the wearer's naked face, so should the wearer's physical expression differ from normal every-day gestures.


• Verse, rhyme and meter are words wearing a mask.


• Harlequin is blessed with credulity. He is available to believe any suggestion, to agree to any proposition, to say "Yes!" and "Yes!" Harlequin has the soul of the actor: the ability to enter into a fiction.