"TOUCHING OFF" THE SENSES WHEN ACTING

“TOUCHING OFF” THE SENSES

“Method acting” was very exciting to actors and observers.  It seemed mysterious but everyone felt it.  Quite simply, it was the “touching off” (to use the phrase often used by Alvina Krause, acting coach) of empathy by using sense memories of your own to “make it real” to you and transmit that to an observer.  We do it all the time, but not on purpose.  It is an ability evidently supported by specialized cells in the prefrontal cerebral cortex in the area behind the forehead and is mostly sight-related, part of the phenomenon of “The Gaze.”  If you have been close to someone with damage to these cells (most often because of trauma), you will have felt their coldness, their distance, their out-of-sync-ness.  The lack of empathy and thus community can lead to criminal behavior.  

II. VISUAL SENSE

Some people go through life seeing.  Some are blind (like Tiresias) but see.   In a class this size (20 people, say) 2 or 3 people see clearly.  The rest see only generalities.  Can you see color keenly?  Can you go downtown and match a color from memory?  Do you know how much yellow or blue is present in a given shade of red?  Can you remember an exact color hours later?  Ten years?  Can you remember color, form, mass, background, perspective of a scene?  Should not be a memory exercise, but an effort to experience color, to make a particular grey, say, a part of your total experience.  Some people touch colors to make them more completely their own than before.  

Store up color as a total organic response. “Now I’m in a play.  I want to tell you about a man I know.  Oh, yes! He wore very decorative sweaters . . .  I looked into space and saw the sweater again before I spoke.”  (This would be a visual image.)  Watch a person today so that you really see him -- maybe start with just his hands.  Store up your observations, because you can’t experience everything yourself.  You must known how to look outside yourself for materials to use in acting.

Watch two people study a painting.  What does each see, how does each sit, how does each study a picture?  Find a dominant characteristic in each person, in each act, in each object you study to which you can later add others.  You fix this dominant trait in your memory and recall it when you run across a character in a play who is like the person.

Side comment:  Concentration on the right thing is a great secret of acting.  Losing the sense of the great hole of the proscenium and the fact that the audience is looking at you results from concentration.  With such awarenesses there are tensions which should not be there and which cause you to use muscles you don’t need, to overwork.  When one of the people really looked at the picture, when the total body looking at it, we felt an ease.  Hence, an attitude of “I’m going to make this scene go” can, in acting, lead to bad tensions.

Side comment:  Always have a purpose for being onstage.  audience should always be able to sense why you are there, should be able to believe that there is no audience of which you are too keenly aware, that what you do is inevitable, that what you are doing has a motivation.

Our organic, physical bodies follow our thoughts.  Speaking the playwright’s lines is nothing if they don’t come from a whole chain of inner thoughts and responses. . .  Try the device of turning an actual object onstage (a patch of light on the floor, say) into something in an imaginary situation you want to create; let it be a beginning stimulus: imagine other sights, sounds, smells and respond to them.  Whatever is or is not onstage, actors have to see the things their characters would see and respond to them as their characters would; he may have to create the stimuli out of nothing.  The stimuli and the responses can’t be faked -- otherwise the body will not respond to what the senses and the mind and the emotions do.  Responses happen first inside us, then travel outward in various manifestations.  Real drama occurs inside people.  

Onstage with another actor, play into his eyes, respond to what you see in his eyes. . .  Make a first entrance of some character in some play: respond to those things in the environment that the particular character would -- and in that character’s manner; create the visual world around the character even though you are on a bare stage.  Avoid “remembered responses”  -- they must be fresh adjustments to current stimuli;  you can act “only in the present” . . . Don’t skip the little initial moment of decision, of uncertainty, before doing something; the little moment of decision is always the dramatic thing, not the big crisis; the little things take you to the big moments. . .  

Goal of early exercises: to create a stimulus with your imagination and then give us the response to it -- which, often, is what we call emotion.  Always start with something specific: give a specific response to a specific stimulus, not generalized responses to generalized things like “night” and “desert’ and “aloneness”. . .  The best actor is the one who asks the right questions to start with -- (of where he is supposed to be, of who he is, of why he is there, of what he wants, of what may happen, of what could happen, of what stimuli might be present, of what his conditioning would cause him to do by way of response, etc.)  Say: IFIFIF I were running in sand, what would it feel like?”  (To touch off imagination.)  “Is it still warm from the sun, or cold?  Gritty?  Soft?  Slippery?  Wet? Dry?  Am I barefoot?”  (If senses are responding, the body picks up the responses and telegraphs them to observers.  A spectator sees the decisions a mind in a body is making . . . When you begin right, it will be easy . . .   

Another device:  vocalize what you see; let someone ask you specific questions about colors, sizes, dimensions, textures, etc. of what you see to help you further crystallize, concretize images that are to be stimuli . . .  One must be able to keep responses coming, flowing from one to another. . . Not everyone must feel the same, behave the same; our conditioning and the circumstances of the moment cause each of us to respond to stimuli in our own ways . . . everyone needs to find ways to “get themselves going” when responses to stimuli are needed. . .  Do not try to create too much for people out front in first “scenes” (first class exercises) and take plenty of time. 

To further test your ability to see, recall, observe, Observe smoking habits of people in general and then of one person in particular; not yourself.  Observe someone else in the same situation who does not smoke to see what behavior they substitute for smoking.  See if you can reproduce those actions without smoking actually.  Let us hope you continue this type of observation and recreating of it forever. 

In responding  to imaginary stimuli, it isn’t necessary to stare and stare, or to stop and think.  Just look at an object you imagine as being there and see it.

Side activity:  Walk around edge of stage.  First thing to be a walk: get your balance, so that you aren’t bent over; body should be erect with head up.

A smoking exercise:  Performer and audience should be able to answer the question: why does this person smoke?  AK notes that the smoker’s focus was really on a letter she was reading; much of cigarette was being allowed to burn away; cigarette and holder were just part of hand, accustomed to be there.  Another question to ask: what character in drama might smoke this way?  Women look for someone who smokes like Hedda Gabler; someone like Candida who doesn’t smoke but does other things in place of it.  Men look for smokers like Stanley Kowalski or Biff from Salesman.  This is the beginning of characterization, which must start with observation, or else you end up with something false which people won’t recognize as being true.  When you observe people, always get at the why of behavior.  They take refuge in objects -- use them to reveal or conceal.

Why does Hedda smoke?  Sadie Thompson?  They’re not types.  Look for specific people.  Kowalski’s no type, even if Brando tried to make him one.  In Kowalski’s case you’re looking for someone with strong animal responses; stalking a prey, peacock-like, etc.  Stanley erotic?  What’s left for Blanche?  Dramatists never put two similar people together in a play.

AN OUTLINE OF BASIC ACTING CLASS AS TAUGHT BY ALVINA KRAUSE

David Press has sent two documents from the bibliography at the end of his doctoral thesis about Alvina Krause’s teaching methods.  I’m typing them into the blog called “Krausenotes.blogspot.com”  but I’m doing it a bit at a time.  They'll appear as individual posts on this blog, but as a continuous document on the other one, so it's easier to download.  This is the course as I took it in 1958-59 and is evidently an account written out by AK for the use of John Van Meter who was taking on the teaching of the course.   (The illustrations are from Google Images and have no relation to the text.) 

People who have taken the course will recognize her “Socratic method” of asking questions, then answering them herself!  She’d get into a kind of soft-voice rhythm that was almost hypnotic -- then stop, pace, turn sharply, and demand attention -- sometimes by doing something unexpected, like striking something -- or someone.  “Now why did I do that?”

OUTLINE OF YEAR-LONG BASIC ACTING COURSE AS TAUGHT BY ALVINA KRAUSE AT NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY IN THE 1960-61 ACADEMIC YEAR.

FALL QUARTER:

Not AK, but a good actress

Includes orientation to Acting and Theatre, the training of the actor’s senses, a study of the nature of Responses in human beings; training in observation, training in concentration, training in improvisation.  The class work is offered in conjunction with lab periods in which students work on voices and movement, discuss plays they have read outside of class.  All of the work of the course is intended to supplement reading on and about the theatre which students have previously done or are currently doing or will do.  Discussion with other students in the lounge and over coffee is expeced to further develop ideas which are brought forth in class.  The student keeps a journal, the daily entries of which record his awareness and give him a means of holding conferences with his instructor.

I. ORIENTATION

Beginning acting is devoted to a study of the actor and his instrument, which is himself -- his senses, intellect, emotions, talent and its development, and a consideration of whether they should be used in the theatre.  There are two subsequent courses: Analysis and Performance, which centers on the written play, and Styles, which concerns the actor and style in acting.

Actors must develop objectivity about his work, must know why he is good or bad, must be able to repeat night after night what he does, so as to give the audience its money’s worth.  Acting is an art; it is not an accident.

It is sad at 18, 19, 20 to discover you are not what you want to be -- an actor.  It’s tragic at 40, 45, 50 to wake up to the realization that you’re in a profession you never belonged in; then you may not go back.  But it’s not tragic to find out now.  Nothing you learn now will be harmful or wasted.  It can be used in any profession or in life.

People say acting cannot be taught.  I agree.  I merely set forth principles.  I criticize.  I lead you.  In the last analysis you must be self-teachers.

Theatre is not one art: it is a conglomerate art that turns what the playwright has said on the page into something more meaningful than life itself, whether it makes the audience laugh, cry, or think.  Your goal is to illuminate the life, not to show off or get rich.  It is to create art.  All of the intuition in the world is not enough; what you know, do, must be put into meaningful form which illuminates, communicates, says something.  It isn’t enough for theatre to be exciting, it has to mean something.

http://www.theguardian.com/stage/video/2014/may/20/michael-gambon-interview-by-michael-billington-video

Theatre is a great profession, a great art; it requires greatness of the people in it.  Everyone can read; but can you make a word say something else besides, say, “dirty”?  Acting isn’t speaking a line or moving as directed.  It is much more.

The difficulty in acting is that the actor is his own instrument; he acts with all he is.  You have to look into your souls.  You act with all that you are:  all you have experienced, sensed, read, come to know up to this instant.  When Antigone says:  “I am the last of my line” on her final exit, what do you have in you that will illuminate this line?  When Lady Macbeth says:  “Will these hands ne’er be clean?”  what is in you to show us a woman who can never look at her hands again?  Look for what you have in you that indicates you have or will have the capacity to play Macbeth.  Theatre involves a development of all you are.  What you are can be added to that you can interpret life.  Participate in the world: don’t shut your senses up too much.

There is no one single method of acting or teaching acting, as far as I can see.  We have all been seeking THE Method; some think they have found it.  I hope we keep seeking.  What you learn here you will adapt to your own uses; challenge these ideas until you can accept them or discard them.  It isn’t enough to talk about acting, to know it -- you must be able to do it.

A performance onstage is not life.  It is an insult to an audience to ask it to believe this.  A performance is scenery, lights, illusion which are intended to make an audience laugh, think cry.  You don’t live a part, you give an audience an illusion of life.  Our job is to make the illusion believable.  A performance is never complete until it is before an audience.  The audience reaction is a part of the performance.  Acting is a communicative experience.  Acting is not done for the joy of the actor, but is done for the audience.  We believe or reject what we see onstage according to the degree that the illusion approaches a likeness to life.  Actors must learn to be lifelike.

Drama lies not in words but in the pauses between words when something is happening to you; it lies in what we do to each other.  What is drama?  It is what makes you smile when you don’t mean to.  Acting is responding, is reacting to a stimulus or stimuli.  Part of a response maybe be words, but how much can words say?  Some experiences are too deep for words, or too sudden.  Melodrama is words and actions without motivation; motivation lies in the responses to stimuli which, in turn, touch off words.  We response to a smell, a sound; the stimulus has to come first and then echoes our particular response.  Responses onstage are not memorized things, but are freshly experienced each time the stimulus comes.

Acting is creating the behavior patterns of an individual in given situations -- the playwright’s situations.  Behavior patterns come out in response to stimuli about you.  Behavior patterns are total things.  No two people respond to stimuli in the same way; how you respond is you.  Has everyone felt jealousy?  Well, have you felt Othello’s jealousy?  Let’s hope not; he killed his dear wife.  Many good actors and actresses draw from stored-up memories, impressions.  The words on the page touch off something in hearing, tasting, smelling.  You create out of what you have seen, heard, imagined, tasted, known.  To create Lady Macbeth’s bloody hands, start with something you know.  Shakespeare will give you more things to build on.  The process of using memories, if well done, is unconscious.  Directors can’t give you the truth great acting must have.  Aspire to be great.

If the stimulus is real (i.e. if you respond to the right things in the stage situation with your senses and make the appropriate associations out of what you know about your character and about life) the emotion you want will follow automatically.  You don’t create emotion -- it follows by itself on the heels of the stimulus.

First quarter is devoted to training senses, storing up impressions.  Cleopatra’s jewel box is a tawdry thing supplied by props.  But you have to touch it as it it were the real thing.