Mother of Invention Acting School — Los Angeles — Blog

Oh, that’s right. I did.

Me, last June, discussing a trailer for Robert Wilson’s production of The Threepenny Opera at the Berliner Ensemble, coming to the Brooklyn Academy of Music:

I don’t see [Robert Wilson] delivering on the earthy humor, sensuality and vitality that runs through Brecht’s writing. Maybe the Berliner Ensemble will be bringing that to the table, maybe not. But I sort of think that even if they did bring it to the table, he might quash it.

Ben Brantley in the New York Times, yesterday, in a review of said production:

This allows for some grimly gorgeous scenic moments, but not for the nose-thumbing vitality that was said to have energized Berlin audiences of the late 1920s. And be warned: There are longueurs, especially in the seemingly interminable, two-hour first act

When I’m right, I’m right.

The actor is a conferrer of authority.

The actor acts out a story, a fiction, an unreal situation, in such a way that gives that unreal situation the authority of something really happening. It’s not simply a matter of being believable. The true actor is not someone that you are able to believe. The true actor is someone who gives you no choice but to believe. In the presence of the true actor, belief is no longer necessary. What is happening through the true actor has an undeniable, irrefutable, indomitable authority. The question Do I believe this? is gone. The question Do I like this? is gone. The only question left is What is this that is happening before my eyes?

Think about that for a minute. Making something unreal real. Making something that is make-believe truly matter. Making nothing become something.

Acting is an image of divinity. Of God. Of God being God. Even if you don’t believe in God. Actors imitate the act of creation, of the kind of thing we think God would do, whether we think there is such a being or not.

No wonder we all like acting so much.

It doesn’t just show us ourselves. It shows us ourselves in the act of remaking the world.

There is a Zen saying, “Before Enlightenment chop wood carry water, after Enlightenment, chop wood carry water.”

What this means to me is that gaining insight is not necessarily going to turn your life upside down. You are going to do a lot of the same things. But what it means to do them will be different.

AND: if you don’t keep doing those mundane things, you are probably going to lose your insight.

But I find it interesting to look at the two activities that were chosen to exemplify the mundane path to Enlightenment in this proverb: carrying water and chopping wood. There are many other activities that could have been chosen, washing dishes, folding clothes, etc. But in fact, we are instructed to carry water and chop wood to get Enlightenment.

Both of these activities are strenuous, and both require engagement of the abdomen to accomplish them. In a previous post on the band Blink-182, I called attention to certain gestures which illustrated the relationship between the abdominal core and the rest of the body:

You can see how these gestures have the same shape as chopping wood. They both involve a sharp contraction in the abdomen, followed by a lengthening and release in the rest of the body. The power generated in the core is allowed to travel up the spine and out the extremities.

Something analagous actually happens when you carry water, which is really just walking with a lot of weight bearing down on the collar bone, spine, and legs. In walking, as I noted in another previous post:

Each step is launched with the power of the leg and pelvis, and the other leg and torso are allowed to “fall” forward.

So when we carry water and chop wood, we are being asked to invest physically in what we are doing at the core level. We experience the alternation of the contraction that occurs to generate the power, and the expansion that allows that power to be appropriately channeled or directed outward. The hope is that through repetition of these things, we will acquire the habit of bringing our whole selves to whatever we do, and thereby gain enlightenment.

Actors need to always be aware of their cores. This awareness is what makes us compelling. And not only do we need core awareness, but we need the whole body to stay alert to the core. When I was learning this stuff, I became aware at one point that when I would direct my attention to my core, I would unconsciously tighten up my throat. Presumably I felt the need to protect myself. But as a result of that tension, the “flow” was being blocked and so the power that lives in the core was not being allowed to travel up into my skull and animate my face.

Acting from the core is not easy. It’s why we place such a premium on naming a single visceral need that an actor can pursue in a scene. That can go a long way toward getting the core activated, but it’s no guarantee, and there are constantly blockages like the one in my throat that can arise. In particular, I see a lot of actors who work from the solar plexus area, which is more superficial and much more connected to the head, to volition and the will than the core, which is the seat of primal hungers and instinctual action. An actor whose awareness rests in the solar plexus (unfortunately, this is very common) is effectively walling off the core and skating along the surface. The habitual action of carrying water and chopping wood tends to strengthen the core, and with that strength comes greater core awareness. The hope is presumably that by living from the core, which carrying water and chopping wood pretty much require, will change the habitual seat of awareness.

There are ways to exercise the core without actually carrying water and chopping wood, as I have enumerated here.

But I think the proverb points out another important truth for actors: the need for continuous practice. Acting is a neuromuscular activity at bottom. The mind has a role to play, but the muscles and reflexes involved need to stay active and alert. So, effectively, an actor who has stopped training has stopped acting. You don’t learn to act and then no longer need to practice. In the words of acting teach John Gronbeck-Tedesco: “Athletes, dancers, and singers never outgrow their need for the basic conditioning that makes their crafts possible. Neither do actors.” Even after you get enlightenment, you still need to carry water and chop wood.

Actors whose awareness is firmly grounded in their core can actually “throw away the ladder” of action/objective apparatus, because all of that understanding now lives in their bodies. But reaching that peak is no mean feat. A lot of water will have been carried and wood chopped for that to come about.

So get going!

This post displays a bunch of before and after pictures of people who went on a month-long Buddhist meditation retreat.

If you click through and look at all the before and after pictures, there is an undeniable change that happens. There’s greater openness, and a softening.

I think this makes a great case for actors getting strong physical training. Meditation is a kind of physical training, make no mistake about it. There is a prescribed posture, regulated breathing, etc. When we practice a movement discipline over time, it inscribes itself on our bodies, like a trickle of water hollowing out a stone. Our whole neuromuscular system is altered. “We are what we repeatedly do”, said Will Durante, paraphrasing Aristotle. In Jeremy Rifkin’s book The Empathic Civilization. which I have blogged about several times before, Rifkin explains how it is that couples who spend a lifetime together come to resemble each other. In everyday communication, we constantly mimic each other’s facial expressions, without even realizing it. It’s a kind of compulsive sign of solidarity with whomever we happen to be interacting with. If we spend the majority of our time with someone, then their facial habits become our facial habits, and ours become theirs. Over time, these habitual movements and positions of the muscles imprint themselves on the physiognomy of the person making those movements and striking those positions.

In class we learn to produce behavior by directing our minds to appropriate stimuli. But physical training, among other things, works to help the self we bring to these things become freer. more responsive, and more open. Some acting teachers like to talk about the actor’s “instrument.” I don’t like that turn of phrase myself, but in this context it is suggestive. In class we learn what to do with ourselves. Some kinds of physical training redefine and expand the selves that we are.

I’ve been at this, teaching acting, for seven years now. I feel very fortunate to have been initiated into the methodology that I teach in my classes. When I look at acting around me, in the theater or on a screen, I often see work that is responsive, free, and spontaneous. (I often see work that isn’t those things, but we’ll leave that for the moment.) But even in this free, responsive, and spontaneous work, there is often a dimension missing: call it true vulnerability, exposure, deep investment or visceral engagement, but there is often a lack of the depth that makes something transporting and memorable.

I firmly believe that the teachers I encountered at Yale were visionaries in terms of defining the need for this level of investment and creating tools that helped actors achieve this depth of expression. I see students, even first time actors, make extraordinary strides in their work by making use of these tools, even inside of one ten-week cycle. But here’s the thing, and I am getting very honest here: most of them need my help to get oriented properly and use the tools effectively, even after several cycles of the class. I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of students who have really internalized the framework I present to the degree that they can implement it themselves, and implement it successfully. Why is that? Well for one thing, it has to do with the true complexity of the activity of acting. To act any role well, there is a lot to master. But it also has something to do with the nature of the methodology: this methodology is about using the mind, particularly the imagination and the analytical faculties, to help the actor enter into and live in the imaginary world of the play. Now, my mind is very analytical: I had finished calculus as a sophomore in high school, and majored in math in college. Analytical thinking is second nature to me. But I don’t think it is to a lot of actors. Everyone has analytical ability, but I think people are drawn to acting from a desire to be seen, to engage in playful interaction with others, to express themselves. “I’m very analytical; I should try acting!” is not a familiar train of thought to many. People are often able to mobilize these analytical abilities to a degree when they learn that the task requires it, but it’s often not second nature, and will only take them so far. That’s part of why we have directors: the director (hopefully) can help the actor understand what is essential to a role or a scene, and help them mobilize that understanding in their work.

So am I saying that I think what I teach is of limited value? No, decidedly not. But its greatest benefits are reaped by those who are willing to apply themselves most strenuously. For those without that plucky resilience, the technique has limits because it will only take actors as far as they take it. But make no mistake: even those who never acquire that deep mastery still benefit from exposure to it. I know this because of how often students tell me war stories about their auditioning and how the feedback that they get is that they are extraordinarily well-prepared. So even if a student doesn’t acquire the ability to fully wield the technique independently, they still have learned some very important things. A red belt is not a black belt, but it’s better than a white belt.

But this perception, that a student’s relative comfort with analytical thinking would define how far they would go with this technique, was troubling to me. I wanted students to have full autonomy, as I knew there was no way i could always be there to point them in the right direction, even if they wanted me to be. I felt myself longing for a way to cut through all the analysis, and to bring people into a more directly physical relationship with their work.

Meisner repetition work has a similar goal, as I understand it. The actor is taught to allow himself or herself to respond spontaneously to what she receives. In full-blown Meisner technique, analytical tools are layered on top of this, so this repetition is not the whole story it’s sometimes presented as. But as much respect as I have for Meisner, I have watched enough Meisner-trained actors in my time to know that while the Meisner-trained actor may be responding authentically, there are different degrees of authenticity, different depths from which the impulses may originate, and that few Meisner-trained actors (in my experience) learn to listen and respond with their cores, with the deepest parts of themselves, and that is what I am after.

At various junctures in my training and experience, I had encountered actors who were trained in Grotowski’s techniques, and I found them to have this ability to engage viscerally without the analytical apparatus of a Stanislavsky-based approach. I have never formally trained in Grotowski, but I have done a good deal of work that I think is comparable, including Suzuki, Butoh dance, rigorous Pilates, and capoeira, all disciplines that involve extreme levels of physical engagement, pitting the will and the body against their respective limits. So, , when I saw a series of exercises described that were based on Grotowski’s plastiques in a book about acting that I came across recently, I was intrigued. I decided that in the cycle of my Advanced class that started in September, we would spend part of our time exploring these exercises.

I hesitated, because I knew there would be some difficulties. There would be varying levels of comfort with being instructed to perform various movement and assume various physical attitudes. Even though I think there is value in warming up, I forego any kind of warm-up in the Essentials class because there is something about this that takes people back to junior high school gym class, and people feel they are giving up some of their autonomy as adults in going through such regimens. But I hoped that in my Advanced class, working with students with whom I had some history, and presumably some reservoir of trust, that we could get past that hurdle.

So I forged ahead, and we worked our way through some introductory stretching and breathing work and into the exercises based on the plastiques. I am not going to describe in detail what we did right now, but suffice to say that there was a fairly complex sequence of movements that involved moving the body and making sound at the same time. Each week we added a bit more, and then one week we were ready to put the whole sequence together. We did it simultaneously, and it involved all of us moving and making sound together and separately, following a basic structure but with plenty of room to find our own path through the structure.

At the end of the sequence, the five of us gazed at each other in astonishment. “That was so cool!”, someone said, although none of us could have said precisely what had happened or what had been cool about it. But I felt totally sure that through this process, we had all begun a journey towards a new mind-body integration, the goal that was Grotowski’s as well. This was only a first step, but it was a decisive one.

In other words, I had seen a need to step out of my comfort zone, I had found a roadmap for doing so, and I had brought along some intrepid acting students as I ventured forth. And it paid off, I feel certain, for all of us. Not right away; it took faith to keep going. But in the end, this risk bore fruit. We all experienced something altogether new.

I think that what I want to communicate here is that it’s imperative that we all pay attention to the voice that emerges from time to time that says: I am going to have to leave behind what is familiar to get what I need. Heeding this voice is truly the only way that anything new ever happens.