Notes on Acting

Performance is a fluid artistic expression of our embodied experience, and a means by which theatre communicates its imaginative foundations. According to Tobin Nellhaus, one of a handful of theatre scholars currently exploring the intersection of cognitive science and theatre performance, “Image schemas are fundamental to acting, performance space, dramatic narrative and audience response. These elements form . . . integrated systems — performance strategies — each governed by a small set of image schemas and primary metaphors.” Building image schemas is largely the work of conceptual imagination and conceptual imagination is prompted by and understood in terms of metaphor. Thus, the importance of understanding the semantic underpinnings of image schema creation and its relationship to imagination for the contemporary theatre artist is quite significant. Lakoff and Johnson further elucidate the role image schemas play in the formulation of complex abstract concepts.

Image schemas are meaningful, and can play the role in abstract cognition that they do, precisely because of their ongoing connection to sensorimotor experience. Since image schemas are computed via structures in the sensorimotor system, they cannot be ‘‘severed’’ and still do the same computational work. They certainly take input from parts of the brain in imagination (as in mental imagery experiments) and in dreams, but their essential function—fitting what we see, imagine, and dream about in our visual system to our language—cannot be done without those computations in the sensorimotor system.

I worked with the cast of Dark Ride to create spaces that offered absolute permissions, spaces where student actors might have the experience of stillness without the bias commonly associated with not being in the moment or adhering to hard-wired notions of what that phrase commonly entails. This, I believed, might incite the desire to seek this state of stillness in space for future work. Blair rightly claims that approaching the work from

this perspective also provides the actor with a model for how to free herself from the sometimes limiting personal-psychoanalytic perspective of some American acting “methods,” because it is about how to prompt creative responses rather than excavating psychologically repressed memories from one’s emotional history. Actors must re-imagine themselves, creating new pictures of the relationship among their bodies, feelings, and intellect; they have to find new blends and compressions for understanding what it is that they’re doing.

This novel invocation of mental spaces in the service of acting pedagogy is not in conflict with training based on the procedures outlined in Konstantin Stanislavsky’s codified system for actor training. Many of the principles of Stanislavsky’s “method” still retain theoretical and practical eminence in the field of actor training in this country although they tend to be utilized piece-meal, Actors and directors have historically chosen those aspects of the system they felt were most useful in their work and most are aware of only a portion of know little of Stanislavsky’s original canon. Clurman clarifies the impractability involved with practicing all of Stanislavsky’s precepts:

The Method has never really been practiced in the United States. It is employed by some, it is taught by many, but it has never been completely employed. The reason for this is simple. One cannot wholly follow Stanislavsky’s . . . procedures under the conditions, which obtain to our stage: there is just not enough time. One has only to read Stanislavsky’s suggestions on building a character to realize how complex are his demands and what protracted and arduous effort they require.

We should return to the phrase in the moment for some clarification about its conceptual underpinnings. In the moment is an ontologically grounded metaphorical idiom for general use. Theatrically, it is frequently called on to describe the work, during a rehearsal or production, of a performer or cast that seemed particularly immersive or had the aura of a heightened sense of connection with all the scenic elements involved. General inferences suggest that being in the moment often equates to being totally immersed in the character and shares metaphoric entailments commonly associated with the theatre is magic vocabulary. John Lutterbie has elucidated a working definition that is coherent with my work when he characterizes being in the moment as “a metaphor used to define a way of being that — at least in the sense that it used in the discussions of the acting process — privileges attendance to perceptual data over the self-isolating ruminations of thought.”

Theatre artists have understood for more than a century the role of imagination and the importance of metaphor. Twentieth century theatre vernacular was strongly influenced by a metaphor system conceived of in terms of magic. This magic metaphor system can be extrapolated from one of our most common artistic metaphors when we speak of, the magic of theatre. The magic of theatre is a compressed metaphorical reference to the workings of theater and entails all of the production aspects — lighting, costumes, performance, direction — and by its use, implies amazement; something magical has taken place allowing all production aspects to merge and create production. It is a phrase common to all participants, front and back of house. Actors, directors and audience members all regularly invoke the magic of theatre metaphor which finds its expression in phrases like: “I was enchanted by the work,” “he became that character,” “her transformation was mesmerizing,” and “the play held me spellbound.” Any actor who has studied Stanislavsky has probably encountered his theory of the magic if.

It is not unusual to invoke the impossible when talking about theater. Renowned teacher and actor Stella Adler, in her book The Technique of Acting, conceives of and explains one aspect of the craft of acting in terms of the impossible: “The actor has in him the collective consciousness. It’s as if all knowledge and all wisdom are contained in his mind. Through his vast imagination he inherits the wisdom of his ancestors without having had the personal experience.” In a recent 60 Minutes interview with Meryl Streep, Morley Safer, a highly respected journalist and correspondent, characterized Ms. Streep as someone with “a unique gift for not just portraying a character but literally becoming her.” We know logically that both of these statements represent concepts that are physically impossible but our imagination, coerced by prompts from several input spaces; all knowledge, all wisdom, in his mind, literally becoming, help us imagine things in terms of the impossible as Fauconnnier observes,

Blending of the impossible with the ordinary yields emergent structure. For example the power to traverse walls can be strong or weak like any other power. When it is too weak, the ““passe-muraille”” may end up stuck inside the wall. . . . When they [The blending that goes on to build these strange worlds] are part of shared . . . beliefs, such worlds are understood not as impossible fictions, but rather as the deepest reality behind our conscious experience.

Building image schemas is largely the work of conceptual imagination and conceptual imagination is prompted by and understood in terms of metaphor; thus the importance of understanding the semantic underpinnings of image schema creation and its relationship to imagination for the contemporary theatre artist cannot be overstated. For the purposes of my work on Dark Ride I began mapping out a strategy I believed would by-pass conventional vocabularies of acting pedagogy in favor of a metaphor system less ephemerally cluttered.

The primary metaphor that generally informs our cultural concept of acting is ACTION IS MOTION, and shares with all metaphors the property of highlighting certain aspects of a concept while hiding others. Often, acting requires active stillness. The act of stillness onstage can be a difficult visceral concept for student actors whose performance vocabularies largely privilege impulsivity. I often highlight for students the importance of stillness as it relates to acting with this complex metaphor: when you move time controls you, when you are still, you control time.

I grounded the approach to Dark Ride by conceptualizing an ontological image schema based on the novel metaphorical idiom point-of-stasis, which has its grounding in the primary metaphor, STATES ARE LOCATIONS. The concept, point-of-stasis, can be partially defined in terms of place and partially in terms of being and is meant as a practicable means of achieving a calm physical and mental space, available anytime, where an actor can assess or re-imagine their relation to the world of the play and the world containing the physical components and realities of the performance space.

While the point-of-stasis schema finds its grounding in the primary metaphor, STATES ARE LOCATIONS, its conceptual image basis is the spatial-relation concept of a container schema, our sensorimotor experience of a bounded region in space. This schema is conceptualized as a safe physical and emotional space where the actor has permission to go without fear, and highlights point as a place arrived at and stasis as equilibrium. It is important to clarify the idea of strategy here as something created or adopted for use as an actor’s private work, and like many strategies, what may prove useful for some students may not for others. I did not challenge choice assumptions around movement, or my perceptions of intended strategies; I made certain I fully understood the reasoning used to support them however. Spaces in the text where the possibilities for a change of strategy were strong were privileged over moments where possibilities, although available, were weaker.

I chose what I believed was a clean, utilitarian vocabulary and simply began building in the point, the container to hold the self. The first action for physically cueing the image schema was the act of stopping fully and required a personal acknowledgement of completion before moving to the next cue in the series. The next cue was the act of looking away, away from the place attention wanted to go. In the beginning the choice for away was usually down. The cue prompted for the point where stasis could be achieved. My intent was to keep the conceptual space simple, unadorned. Designed to prompt for stasis, the first breath was one deep pranayamic inhale and exhale. I conceived of the schema as then being live. The next step was deployment of an initial data set. The original data was in the form of a question or series of questions, designed beforehand to be actively and internally asked, as a means prompting for answers. Answers to the questions were allowed to drop in fully, and the incoming data engaged for prompting new emergent structure in the form of responses. The response data was reviewed for strategic possibilities. Once a strategy was chosen and fully mapped, emergence from the space was a deliberate body and concentration shift towards engagement with the new strategy. I found my original impetus for the creation of this strategy echoed in Blair:

Part of how we might nurture this understanding of the acting process is to work with intensely specific images and image streams . . . , and liberate ourselves from the tyranny of causality, logic, and “motive” (in the sometimes over- determined psychoanalytic sense) when it doesn’t serve us, guiding the actor toward understanding that every moment is poetry—a compression.

It is important to note, this approach is designed for student actors and has the capacity to highlight deficiencies or impediments for a young actor viscerally, in his/her body, that might normally take much longer; while it may be easy to understand stillness in acting on a conceptual level, it is often much more difficult to understand corporeally. Repeated practice of this strategy in rehearsal results in the process requiring less time, becoming almost automatic, and after prolonged use, habitual, prompting for experiential gestalt. Habitual use replaces the need to locate specific moments for deployment and the strategy becomes another available tool, disappearing into use.

This process was largely improvisatory; that is, once the original concept was activated, each ensuing step was informed by new emergent structure in a way that clarified obvious and active choices. I suspected this might be true although I was not wholly certain at the outset. This work requires extraordinary permissions. Most of these permissions can be conceived of as granted by students to themselves as actors. Permission to engage in the process fully can certainly be an active part of the initial data set. My task was gaining permission to first, ask for trust, and then ask for complete control of the space.