I've been so lucky with
my acting training! I began class with Lee Strasberg because the
Institute had just opened here and a friend was attending. I then
spent ten years on and off working with and for Lee. I joined a
little improvisation class because another friend recommended it.
And that little class became The Groundlings. I joined a children's
theatre. And was lucky enough to spend an entire summer training
with someone who studied with Jerzy Growtowski.
Jerzy Grotowski was a
Polish theatre director who spawned a revolution in 20th Century
theatre. To some, he was the father of modern theatre. Grotowski
advocated a "Poor Theatre", one devoid of rich sets and
other theatre trappings such as costumes and lighting where the
actor honed to an ultimate expressive instument held sway. In the
early days of his theatre innovation, Grotowski put his audience
amongst his actors to play a passive role in the theatrical event.
He went beyond entertainment to cater to the spectator "who
really wishes, through confrontation with the performance, to analyze
himself". In his book, Towards a Poor Theatre, Grotowski
described theatre as an encounter.
Perhaps it is because
he conceived of theatre as encounter that Grotowski finally abandoned
theatre form, broke down the fourth wall and made the audience an
active participant in the theatrical experience. The animated dinner
conversation in the cult film classic, My Dinner with Andre,
was full of Grotowski and these radical anti-theatrics. One of the
diners, director Andre Gregory, had just participated in one of
Grotowski's life-changing encounters. Through these paratheatrics,
Grotowski returned his participants to the pre-performance ritual
and religious roots of theater.
Grotowski also spawned
a dynamic new way to train actors. He thought of the actor as "holy",
"a man who works in public with his body, offering it publicly
. . . a person who, for his art, climbs upon the stake and performs
an act of self-sacrifice". His troupe of actors, who worked
together for more than fourty years, were considered some of the
most expressive in the world. Grotowski believed that "the memory
is in the muscle" and that movement connects your body with
impulse which is the root of all true expression. Grotowski used
both severe and gentle movements as well as vocal exercises to unlock
this expression.
Grotowski was fascinated
by the power of yoga and its ability to release and channel energy
in the body. So his severe exercises, the corporels, are
patterned after active yoga exercises and are a way to reconnect
with the enormous energy trapped in the lower body. These exercises
are extremely acrobatic and demand much energy and athleticism.
The goal, however, is not to do them perfectly. The goal lies in
the effort involved. And finding a physical form to enable you to
use your body to get in touch with your inner expression. Grotowski
once said that "the real value (of the exercises) lies in not
being able to do them".
As I said, I spent an
entire glorious summer doing Grotowski work. And, boy, Grotowski
work is WORK! Training this way was truly a liberating experience
and made me a much better actor. But the corporels can be
harrowing and even dangerous! Someone in our troupe broke her neck
while doing a tiger's leap. Oh . . . did I mention that a Tiger's
Leap is where you jump over two or three people and then do a forward
roll? My fellow actor forgot to tuck. Fortunately, it was only a
hairline fracture.
So even though I find
the corporels amazing for slicing right through all sorts
of acting inhibitions, I don't use them in my classes for fear of
injury. I really don't know how clumsy me came through that summer
of Tiger's Leaps and Handstands unscathed! I do, however, use Grotowski's
more gentle movements, the plastiques. When you start to
work with the plastiques, they seem like ordinary dance or
exercise isolations. But plastiques are so much more. Plastiques
are a way to create a "psychophysical" harmony which results in
an emotional, expressive release.
You can't really experience
Grotowski's work without moving. So get up from your computer right
now and try a traditional plastique warm-up. Just stand
in an open space and breathe deeply a few times. Now begin to ask
yourself questions about your body . . . what part do you feel needs
to move now. Move that part . . . give it what it wants. For
example, your legs may want to kick, do plies, run, or jump. Your
fingers may want to stretch, point, open and close rhythmically.
If just standing there and waiting for your body to speak to you
seems a little foreign, begin with the head and give each body part
(neck, shoulders, chests, arms, etc.) down to the feet a chance
to move the way it wants. Allow each part to move fully before
moving to the next. It's that simple.
During the isolations,
you might be aware that a head moved around in every way can
be, as Stephen Wangh says in his book on Grotowski, An Acrobat
of the Heart, "an external key to an internal door, a physical
way of asking an image question like" . . . "what am I agreeing
to", "what am I negating", or a way of saying "I don't know".
Perhaps movement of one part of the body will flow into another.
Grotowski calls this a plastique "river". Respond to the
river and let your body take you where it will. Respond to
impulses that arise to move a particular body part. Work that
particular part with little and big motions for at least thirty
seconds. Or when the impulse to move that particular part dies,
move on to another part. The important thing is to commit fully
to the movement while noticing any tension or resistance. Or images
that arise as a result of the motion.
The more I did Grotowski
work, the more I realized that plastiques are very much like
the Method. The goals are the same . . . to remove acting
blocks and to make the actor more expressive. The plastiques
are like Strasberg's classic relaxation exercises done out of the
chair. And the images that arise from them are very much like Sense
Memory.
When my students work
with Sense Memory, images often arise. For example, if you're
recreating the experience of sunshine, you may instantly find yourself
on a beach at age 5 building a sand castle and feeling the sun beating
upon your back. Like Sense Memory, moving can produce images
by unlocking the memory that occurs in the muscle. Or the
actual act of performing a plastique like, for example, kicking
may produce an image of a person who makes you angry and therefore
incur anger. Images are important, as Wangh says, because "what
makes something a plastique is that the movement is specific,
that it is filled with life, and that it is related to an image".
The acting coach, Warren Robertson, once said "I often have
an actor do an Affective Memory exercise on his feet instead of
sitting in a chair . . . I'll have him lift his hand and wave goodbye,
and he will remember, without even trying, who he is waving goodbye
to. The body is a means of finding a specific feeling."
An easy exercise to connect
the body with images is one I learned from Viola Spolin called "Space
Substance". Simply walk through space changing the character
of the floor or the texture of the air. For example, walk
as if you were on hot coals, on ice, in mud. Walk through the space
as if your were walking through rain, chocolate syrup, hardening
cement. See how the image affects your body and your movement
and stimulates feeling.
One of the other things
I love about Grotowski's training was the voice work he created.
No other acting training I know of has such intense vocal work to
reconnect the voice with the body so that an actor can fully express
with both. When we're small children, our voice and body express
together. When babies laugh, they laugh with their whole bodies. But
as we get older, language becomes, as Wangh says, 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. Getting my students to express
vocally is one of my most difficult jobs as a coach. In classic
Method relaxation, making a sound that comes from your
gut helps release tension. And helps connect the voice and the body.
Most actors new to Method have a hard time making sounds. If you
do, too, try this simple exercise:
Simply lie on the
floor and take some time to notice your breathing. Then begin to
breathe out with an audible sigh. Wangh 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. Say ae--ee--oh--aw aloud. Then
take a deep breath and let out the breath on an extended "ae"
sound. Allow the long vowel sounds to change naturally to ee, oh
and aw; don't force them. Close your eyes and see if you can
picture the sound resonating along your spine. Picture the vibration
in your mind. Vibration may also have 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. 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.
I use Grotowski's plastiques and
vocal exercises in my acting classes because I find them to be an
extension of and complement to Method relaxation and sensory work.
Anything that helps actors express and connect with emotion is okay
with me. And some actors find it more freeing to work in a
more physical way than the traditional Method exercises in the chair.
Stanislavski saw his work as ever-evolving. Perhaps Grotowski
work . . . even though it's alot of work . . . will take your acting
realism to a newer, deeper level.
