Volume 5 Issue 10                        Jill Place, Publisher                           jill@actingintuitive.com

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Grotowski Parts Five and Six:
Voice Work and Altered States

BRANDact is BACK!
A Special Grotowski Acting Tip: Sounding Exercise ala Grotowski
Jerzy Grotowski Parts Five and Six

Dear [[FirstName]]

DO YOU HAVE A MONEY TREE?  A girl friend suggested I buy one when we were in Chinatown enjoying Dim Sim one Sunday.  They mostly have braided trunks and you can often spot them garlanded with red-good-luck envelopes in brand-new Chinese restaurants.  I bought a small one because, as she said, "your money will grow as it grows."  I stuck it on a shelf in my Wealth Center which, according to Feng Shui, is the furthest left-hand corner of your living space.  She was right . . . it's growing up a storm.  And so are my classes.  Whatever works to make your career a success! 

Here's the last two Grotowski articles on his Voice Work and Altered States in acting.  Also included in this eZine just for my subscribers is my favorite vocal exercise.  I've now done articles on all the famous acting coaches I've been blessed to know.  26 articles later, it's time for a rest!

So I'm really excited that the next article will be the first for my new column for Now Casting , 'Art and Soul.  I'm going to explore the spiritual side of acting, which is my first love.  Since you've subscribed, you'll also be getting Acting Tips and Intuitive Tricks to make your career and your acting a success.  Ideas that are available nowhere else!

And, by the way, DON'T UNSUBSCRIBE JUST BECAUSE THE eZINE COMES SCRAMBLED!   Try as I might, the program I use to publish it just doesn't suit every type of email.   Acting Magic is also available online on my home page, www.actingintuitive.com.  Simply click on the link that says "To read the latest issue, click here" to the left of my picture right under the subscription form.  Thanks in advance for your diligence!

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Sounding Exercise ala Grotowski

I can't tell you how powerful Grotowski's voice work was for me.  Even though I'm a trained singer and have done more professional singing from off-Broadway to Japan than any other type of performing, I learned so much about how my voice resonated in my body from doing his work.   Like much of acting training, you just have to do it.  So please do! 

Simply lie on the floor and take some time to notice your breathing. Then begin to breathe out with an audible sigh. Stephen Wangh in An Acrobat of the Heart says that you don't force the sound. You simply allow it to happen. When you feel that the sound is coming naturally out of your mouth, then experiment with vowel sounds. My singing coach taught me to open my throat with long vowel sounds like ae--ee--oh--aw. Then allow the long vowel sound to change naturally; don't force it. Close your eyes and see if you can picture the sound resonating along your spine. Picture the vibration in your mind. If you're familiar with the Indian concept of vibrational energy, the Chakras, you know that vibration also has color. So see if you can see any color with your eyes closed.

Return to the audible sigh. Then slowly roll onto your side while breathing in. Then sigh. On the in-breath, push up onto your knees into the yoga child's pose with your arms and sigh out. Now push yourself onto your feet and sigh. See if you can detect any tension as you move. If you do, stop and relax by stretching your tense muscles. Now straighten your legs and roll up vertebra by vertebra by breathing in and sighing out several times. If you detect any tension in your body or the breath, stop and release it. When you are totally erect, experiment with the vowel sounds again as you did on the floor but with your eyes open. When you are finished, look around and connect with the room or others in the room and make sure that you are grounded before you stop the exercise.

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Jerzy Grotowski Parts Five and Six

Voice Work

Jerzy Grotowski said in Towards a Poor Theatre that "the most elementary fault, and that in most urgent need of correction, is the overstraining of the voice because one forgets to speak with the body." When we're small children, our voice and body express together. When babies laugh, they laugh with their whole bodies. As we get older, language becomes, as Stephen Wangh says in his book, An Acrobat of the Heart , a substitute for physical expression. By the time we're adults, we've totally divorced our words from our bodies. We also shy away from variations in pitch and volume. We do this because it's the acceptable thing to do.

But, as actors, we need to find a way to reclaim our vocal expression. We have to learn to laugh with our whole bodies again. In my Method training, I learned to make full primal sounds that came from the bottom of my toes. However, getting my students to express vocally in this way, especially newbie actors, is one of my most difficult jobs as a coach.

So I don't understand why most acting classes today focus on just saying words. I'll never forget seeing Uta Hagen in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf. She purred, spit and trilled . . . exhibiting vocal virtuosity that ran the gamut from mewing kitten to howling banshee. It was 50 years ago but still sticks in my memory.

Since I was born and raised in New York and my parents were fortunately frequent theatregoers, I've been witness to the vocal virtuosity of some of the greatest stage actors of the 20th Century. They made me understand the importance of training the voice. So one of the things I love about Grotowski's training was the voice work he created. No other acting training I know of has such intense vocal training to reconnect the voice with the body so that an actor can fully express with both.

As in every other aspect of his work, Grotowski was also very specific about the way he trained the voice. The end result, according to him, was that "the spectator not only hears the voice of the actor perfectly, but is also penetrated by it as if it were stereophonic . . . the very walls must speak with the voice of the actor . . . the actor must exploit his voice in order to produce sounds and intonations that the spectator is incapable of reproducing or imitating."

Grotowski also said that the two main ways the voice could come totally into its power were 1) that the breath carrying the sound must escape forcefully and without obstacles, such as a clenched jaw or closed windpipe. And 2) that the breath should properly support the voice so that it can resonate from every possible place in the body. I find that fledgling actors need lots of practice to allow sound to effortlessly escape without clenching their jaws or closing their larynx. Let alone resonating fully. Many of my students tell me that, when they go to auditions, they literally "choke up". "Choking up" is a great metaphor for this lack of full vocal expression.

I'm currently working with a student to free up his vocal expression. When we began, he took in a breath by lifting his shoulders. Most vocally untrained actors breathe shallowly like this. But I worked with him to breathe more deeply from his abdomen. And, within a short time, he was able to perform what I call "Around the World" . . . resonating the sound from the front, then on the left side of this body, then in the back, then on the right.

One exercise that Grotowski describes in Towards a Poor Theatre is speaking text and gradually increasing the volume while activating vocal resonators in the following order: speaking towards the ceiling with the head voice, speaking out in front with the mouth voice, speaking up and behind with the occipital voice, projecting to the front with the chest voice, towards the floor with the belly voice, up and behind with the shoulder blades, behind with the small of the back and then towards the floor and the wall behind with the lower back. The purpose of this exercise is not only to experiment with moving the voice from one vocal resonator to another, but to respond physically to the echo that that resonator produces. In other words, the vocal effort has a physical response. Wangh says that "words are very complicated plastiques, containing not only body impulse but vibration, pitch and meaning."

I've found that touching and sometimes even lightly thumping or kneading a student at a resonator point and allowing them to actually feel their voice vibrating against my hand really helps them find their way. And also releases impulses that, as Grotowski says, "automatically carry the voice." You can do the same thing yourself or with a partner.

It's important to maintain a vocal balance between, as Wangh say "effort and non-effort". In my singing training, pushing on the voice even slightly could cause it to go expressionlessly flat. "Grotowski helped actors expand the use of their vocal resonators by asking them to imagine that the sound they were producing was emanating from 'mouths' in different locations on their bodies." The goal is to elicit strong vocal resonance from all parts of the actor's body without forcing or perverting the sound.

Wangh sums up Grotowski's voice work beautifully in his book. "Most of us," he says, "can, with some effort, focus our voices to resonate in our legs, pelvis, or foreheads. But if we seek these results without taking the time to experience the emotional connections these vibrations produce in us, we are likely to strain our voices and then quickly return to our old habits when we let up on the effort. But if we allow ourselves to experience the images and emotions we encounter as we expand our vocal range, we can begin to truly unlock our vocal blockages . . . with great safety, gentleness, and patience."

Altered States

William Shephard described his journey into an altered state while studying with Grotowski in 1970, "an essential experience," he said, "that profoundly affected my perceptions about acting and everything else for that matter." While working on an exercise under Grotowski's tutelage, he suddenly saw a two-dimensional form of a woman before him that moved around the space with increasing velocity, then halted before him and fleshed out into three-dimensional form, then dissolved to nothingness a few moments later. Shephard could even feel her lipstick-scented breath on his face. "Instantaneously," he said, "my attention shifted from an extremely narrow, intense focus to an immensely expanded one." He then found himself in the midst of a vast landscape near a viscous, multi-hued ocean. He saw a child playing in the sand and then inhabited its body . . . looking at the world through a child's eyes. And yet experiencing it simultaneously with his adult mind.

Later, when he discussed the incident with Grotowski, "he suggested that the key to my experience lay deep in my personal associations; only I could decipher its meaning . . . Physically, though, I had an extraordinary sense of well-being; in fact, I felt invigorated. I felt as though I had experienced something truly frightful and awesome, managing to come out of it in one piece. As my mind gradually cleared, I remember thinking, 'Who the hell cares about acting? Who the hell cares about theatre? And what the hell have they got to do with anything that's real?!' What I had formerly accepted as reality seemed little more than a feeble veil of appearances. I had experienced something that made the entire rational-realistic basis of consciousness away like a flimsy, brittle mask. I had been in at least two places, two realities, simultaneously, and consciously interacted with a presence that I could neither control nor resist."

In contrast, I once had a private acting student who insisted that she didn't have to use her inner life at all. I gently disagreed with her. Acting gave me my identity . . . my reality . . . and my well-being. But, in order to live in this peaceful, grounded place, I had to often go to altered states, some of which were as weighty and harrowing as Shephard's. Remembering emotion and pushing your body to its expressive breaking point can often take you there. My students spontaneously break down or roll around on the floor giggling with glee only to have both the floor and the emotion abruptly become physically and sensorially unbearable. They go there too.

Stephen Wangh describes acting in An Acrobat of the Heart as "a practice that requires openness and vulnerability" and "is at once the most joyous and most terrifying of the acts to practice . . . actors are asked to present real, live human beings, beings like themselves, on stage. They are required to feel . . . and to proclaim in public . . . what most people would scarcely allow themselves to say, or even to think, in private . . . " Doing all that takes a lot of courage. And not being brave enough to use remembered emotion, spontaneous impulse and altered consciousness to make a bunch of lines spring to life cheats not only your audience but your acting. My private student, who was unfortunately too afraid to use herself, left the lines on the page. And she also couldn't wait to leave my house.

I believe that we're deeply mythical beings . . . in order to evoke profound spiritual meaning in our lives we must explore where we fit to society's underlying symbolic structure, which Grotowski calls signs. Perhaps that's why people flock to Star Wars, Lord of the Rings and the gazillion remakes of the Arthurian legend. When we do it for our own benefit, it's called therapy or self-improvement. When we do it for our audience, it's called acting.

According to Grotowski, when we commit to discovering the mythological roots behind our acting act we may, as Josef Kelera described Grotowski's amazing actor, Ryszard Cieslak, " . . . levitate" and be ". . . in a state or grace." Grotowski said that actors "must . . . accomplish an 'act of the soul' by means of his own organism." Andre Gregory described Grotowski's work as "a prayer." I don't know about you, but when I acted, I was driven to levitate, pray and accomplish acts of the soul on a regular basis. Looking back, it's the reason I wanted to act in the first place.

But, as actors, we're not interested in just experiencing "transformations of the self" as "ends in themselves." As Wangh says, "they are way stations and rites of passage through which we much proceed on our journey toward becoming an artist." As a matter of fact, Wangh explains that profound experiences like Shephard's are only valuable in our acting if we search out and find ways to create "acting containers" strong enough to hold these powerful images. "For, in order to make art out of our inner lives, we need to possess (artistic) forms that can safely contain and transform our raw emotions into art."

In other words, "containers" like the structure of sense memory and improvisation or techniques like Method and Meisner can channel altered states into profound acting. Wangh says that these "'altered states of consciousness' are, in fact, the very essence and purpose of our art." But we can only use them if we can control them. After all, acting is the simultaneous experience of total freedom and ultimate control. If done right, Grotowski says that it's also "an act of the most deeply rooted, genuine love between human beings . . . to learn with them what our existence, our organism, our personal and unrepeatable experience have to give us . . . in short, to fill the emptiness in our soul."

Worth entering an altered state for, no matter how terrifying? Worth challenging that image by finding a way to contain it so that you can use it to make the ultimate human connection? I think so.

The performing artist must be capable of risking all of himself. He must be willing and able to dissolve himself into the process of acting, to surrender; to "die" each moment and to be born fully each moment--David Feldshuh

In the Next Issue:  My Very First 'Art and Soul Column:
                                  When is Enough Enough?

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