Theatrical Teething
We had a good rehearsal tonight. We spent time doing improvisation in which we stunk, but we all stunk, and we started just a little not to care. There was a bit of singing (it was not me, so it was not so bad) and a little dancing around and then one or two spikes of something genuinely entertaining.
Then we went through some of the scenes, went over and over one in particular with myself. I deliberately played it ridiculously, going way overboard, forgetting The Character, and just reacting like a ham-actor, slap-stick stupid. It enabled me to start realising why it was wrong. Why The Character would not pull a full grimace at something hurtful, or spin around in a huff at a disappointment. In missing the point entirely, I started to see the point forming at the bottom of a murky pool, taking shape like a piece of proto-sentient putty.
What matters for the play to be entertaining is the relationships between the actors. Each of us individually is irrelevant. We can be a room full of superb entertainers, and we'll yet deliver a dull dead bore of a show. Each of us can be on the other hand a dead bore of an entertainer, but if we connect with the others, if we establish a groove, authentic interactions with the other players, then the play can live. It doesn't much matter at our amateur level whether our interpretations are correct, or if we extract the subtleties of the personalities we're portraying: what matters is whether we yield and respond to the others' talking to us, whether we look the other in the eyes when we glare and fall silent in rage, allowing a pause to gather deadliness and really feel the other person sensing our anger toward them, or our love for them, or our mild mirth at what they've just said: to give the person speaking the real sense that they're being listened to.
And for this we need to practise over and over and over and over again, with each other, and we need to push the limits, trying different things, sometimes staring at each other, sometimes turning our back. One time making eye contact, the other time looking at their feet. I think it makes sense for us to start by forgetting the audience, completing ignoring it, just playing for each other, trying to give the others the impression they are on the stage with another living being. There needs to be human connectedness first, and then we can build upon it to give the audience a show.
This is very hard to do while also improvising: we are too impeded by wanting to say something witty, to say something appropriate and 'in character', to really be with the other person. When was the last time you had a conversation with another person in which you paused and stared at the floor for 1,2,3 seconds thinking of a response to 'I went out to the orchard today, and plucked a few oranges.' We do not pause! We just respond. We are dynamic, living, warm and there is a flow between us, and when this flow is not present on stage then nothing else will breathe life into the acting.
Acting is not so different from music: it is primarily about tempo, it is not a philosophical essay in which rarified positions are posited after much deliberation. It must live and move: it must flow and the less we think about it, the less we reflect during our performance, the better.
At some point, one experiences on the stage the sudden unmistakable and sublime feeling that one is having fun, gliding through the lines and actually using the lines to respond to the others, not saying the lines to the audience.
I realise that there is a huge body of pedagogic work on the relation between actor and audience, and especially in Germany with the Brecht tradition of breaking down the fourth wall, but these are deliberations for another level of professionalism. Once one is capable of actually acting, then one can move toward these subtleties and explore the theater as an art-form and as a criticism of or comment on society. Until then though, such considerations just muddy the water, like concentrating on your correct use of subjunctive mood when you're learning to speak English.
Then we went through some of the scenes, went over and over one in particular with myself. I deliberately played it ridiculously, going way overboard, forgetting The Character, and just reacting like a ham-actor, slap-stick stupid. It enabled me to start realising why it was wrong. Why The Character would not pull a full grimace at something hurtful, or spin around in a huff at a disappointment. In missing the point entirely, I started to see the point forming at the bottom of a murky pool, taking shape like a piece of proto-sentient putty.
What matters for the play to be entertaining is the relationships between the actors. Each of us individually is irrelevant. We can be a room full of superb entertainers, and we'll yet deliver a dull dead bore of a show. Each of us can be on the other hand a dead bore of an entertainer, but if we connect with the others, if we establish a groove, authentic interactions with the other players, then the play can live. It doesn't much matter at our amateur level whether our interpretations are correct, or if we extract the subtleties of the personalities we're portraying: what matters is whether we yield and respond to the others' talking to us, whether we look the other in the eyes when we glare and fall silent in rage, allowing a pause to gather deadliness and really feel the other person sensing our anger toward them, or our love for them, or our mild mirth at what they've just said: to give the person speaking the real sense that they're being listened to.
And for this we need to practise over and over and over and over again, with each other, and we need to push the limits, trying different things, sometimes staring at each other, sometimes turning our back. One time making eye contact, the other time looking at their feet. I think it makes sense for us to start by forgetting the audience, completing ignoring it, just playing for each other, trying to give the others the impression they are on the stage with another living being. There needs to be human connectedness first, and then we can build upon it to give the audience a show.
This is very hard to do while also improvising: we are too impeded by wanting to say something witty, to say something appropriate and 'in character', to really be with the other person. When was the last time you had a conversation with another person in which you paused and stared at the floor for 1,2,3 seconds thinking of a response to 'I went out to the orchard today, and plucked a few oranges.' We do not pause! We just respond. We are dynamic, living, warm and there is a flow between us, and when this flow is not present on stage then nothing else will breathe life into the acting.
Acting is not so different from music: it is primarily about tempo, it is not a philosophical essay in which rarified positions are posited after much deliberation. It must live and move: it must flow and the less we think about it, the less we reflect during our performance, the better.
At some point, one experiences on the stage the sudden unmistakable and sublime feeling that one is having fun, gliding through the lines and actually using the lines to respond to the others, not saying the lines to the audience.
I realise that there is a huge body of pedagogic work on the relation between actor and audience, and especially in Germany with the Brecht tradition of breaking down the fourth wall, but these are deliberations for another level of professionalism. Once one is capable of actually acting, then one can move toward these subtleties and explore the theater as an art-form and as a criticism of or comment on society. Until then though, such considerations just muddy the water, like concentrating on your correct use of subjunctive mood when you're learning to speak English.
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