Stephen Wangh

Four hundred years ago, Hamlet expressed his consternation at the art of acting:

Is it not monstrous that this player here,
But in a fiction, in a dream of passion,
Could force his soul so to his own conceit
That from her working all his visage wanned,
Tears in his eyes, distraction in his aspect,
A broken voice, and his whole function suiting
With forms to his conceit; and all for nothing!

And ever since, performers and audiences have argued about how it is that actors manage this feat. At the core of the argument lie two related questions. The first is: Must actors really feel the emotions which they portray? And the second is: Do they achieve their portrayal by controlling the external expression of emotion or by inducing the internal experience?

… At the beginning of the 20^th Century, Konstantin Stanislavski sought to solve this dilemma by concentrating primarily upon the actor's inner, psychological life. But he later realized that by concentrating so completely on the actor's mind, he had ignored the actor's body, and in his later years, Stanislavski developed a system of what he called "physical actions." In Creating a Role, which was not published in English until 1961, Stanislavski writes: "In every physical action, unless it is purely mechanical, there is concealed some inner action, some feelings."

The actor Vasily Toporkov, who worked with Stanislavski during the 1930's, describes his late work this way:

Konstantin Sergeyevich directed our attention to what is the most tangible, the most concrete in each human action; its physical aspect. Especially in his last years, he gave the greatest importance to this aspect of the life of the role, beginning his work on a character with it. Diverting the attention of the actor from 'feelings,' from psychology, he directed it toward the carrying out of purely physical actions. In this way the actor could penetrate in a natural way into the sphere of feelings.

During the 1930s, Michael Chekhov who had been a member of Stanislavski's First Studio, brought his own version of Stanislavski's physically based techniques to New York. Chekhov (nephew of the author Anton) had worked closely with Stanislavski's protégé Eugene Vakhtangov and developed an approach to acting based on what he called the "psychological gesture." Also at that time, Sonia Moore, who had studied with Stanislavski during his last years, reported that Stanislavski was teaching actors to access their emotions by means of muscular choices. But, in spite of these developments, the influence of Lee Strasberg and the "American Method" remained pervasive in drama schools in America through the 1980s, and the reputation of Stanislavski as a teacher of inward, mental techniques continued to be promulgated.

During the past twenty years, however, even some of Strasberg's own students have been rediscovering the physical counterpart of emotional life. In 1988, acting teacher Warren Robertson said:

I often have an actor do an Affective Memory Exercise on his feet instead of sitting in a chair. And at moments I'll have him try to integrate feelings into his body. 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.

… Polish director Jerzy Grotowski picked up the investigation where Stanislavski had left off. Jennifer Kumiega, who chronicled Grotowski's theater work in her book The Theatre of Grotowski, put his conception this way:

We do not possess memory, our entire body is memory, and it is by means of the "body-memory" that the impulses are released.

It is not sufficient for [the actor] that he be able to put on the image of every one of the passions that fall within the reach of his author, if he have not, beside this, the power of throwing himself readily and easily out of one into another of them.

John Hill, The Actor, A treatise on the Art of Playing (1750)

A circus acrobat practices the elements of her trapeze swing for years. For hours and hours she practices the timing, the mid-air twist and the grasp of her fingers around her partner's wrists. Eventually all this practice gives her confidence that if she swings at the right moment and twists precisely and grasps hard when her partner's wrists appear in the air in front of her, she will not fall. But even after all this practice, each time she performs, there is still the moment of giving herself up to gravity and momentum: the moment of letting go of the trapeze sixty feet above the floor and daring to fly.

To be an actor is to be an acrobat of the heart. No matter what training technique you practice, whether you use a "psychological gesture" or a "sense memory" or a "plastique," all your technique can do for you is to get you ready for the moment of letting go. You can control each element of your preparation, you can concentrate on memories or images, you can tense or relax your body, and you can practice your gestures–but all this preparation is just that: preparation. The moment itself is not in your control. In fact if you try to control it, you will "push" or "act the emotion" or fail to breathe–and one way or the other, you will "fall" out of the moment itself.

Once the acrobat lets go of her trapeze, she again has choices to make. She cannot alter her momentum as she flies, but she can make use of it. She can choose to do a double flip or she can choose to execute a twist. And the same is true for the actor. Once the emotion is flowing through you, you can choose to express it with a different tone of voice, or you can alter your timing, or your gesture pattern, or your blocking. In fact such choosing–vocal precision, timing or character work, stylization or even song–can, like the acrobat's flip, make the acting moment even more exciting. But the inner emotional life which vivifies your acting is not something you can control. Like the acrobat's momentum, it is not something you are doing; it is something that is happening to you.

He who claims to teach Art understands nothing whatsoever about it.

Eleonora Duse, in Antologia del grande atore

In Japan there is a saying that it is better to spend three years looking for a good teacher than to occupy the same period of time doing exercises with someone inferior.

Yoshi Oida, The Invisible Actor

In his book, Impro, Keith Johnstone writes about teachers and teaching:

People think of good and bad teachers as engaged in the same activity, as if education was a substance, and that bad teachers supply a little of the substance, and good teachers supply a lot. This makes it difficult to understand that education can be a destructive process, and that bad teachers are wrecking talent, and that good and bad teachers are engaged in opposite activities. (I saw a teacher relax his students on the floor, and then test for relaxation by lifting their feet eighteen inches into the air and dropping their heels on the concrete.)

Of course, if your teacher drops your heels against a concrete floor, you can't avoid feeling the pain, and the pain is a pretty strong signal that something is not right.

But not all bad teaching is so obvious. If your teacher smiles sweetly while subtly insulting your work, it may be harder for you to perceive what is happening to you.

As a student, you put yourself into someone else's hands, and you grant that person the power to make judgments about your work. If the subject you are studying is intellectual, a good teacher can make you feel intelligent, while a poor teacher can make you feel stupid. If the subject is artistic, a good teacher can make you feel safe, creative and self-confident, while a poor teacher can leave you heartbroken.

Of course, one of the things which will help you feel creative and self-confident is the technique itself. It must be a system which makes sense to you, one which you can use on your own when the teacher is not present. It must also offer you tools which speak to the needs you have at this particular point in your training.

But in the end, it is not the technique which will sustain you. Any technique you learn will tend to fall away as you create your own way of working by combining the lessons you have learned with your inner instincts–just as the chrysalis falls away from the wings of the emerging butterfly. Yoshi Oida puts it this way:

It doesn't really matter which style or technique you learn. In fact, you could train in disciplines as different as aikido, judo, ballet, or mime, and gain equal benefit. This is because you are learning something beyond technique. When you study with your master, the skills are only the language of understanding, not the purpose.

So, the most important thing about choosing an acting teacher is not the technique he or she teaches but whether you feel safe and inspired working in his or her presence. There may be some exercises you do not like, and there may even be days when everyone else in the class seems to be having a good time while you feel like you're just not getting it. That's to be expected. But, it is absolutely essential that, even on those bad days, you feel safe in the work, safe enough to keep working and safe enough to talk to the teacher about your experience. That's the bottom line.

At its heart, acting training is a via negativa, a way back toward freedoms we enjoyed years ago. It is a route no one can chart for us, a course we must find for ourselves. The best pilot for this journey may not be the one with the finest maps, but the one who instills in us the courage to find our own way, the teacher who reawakens our joy in the process of discovery itself, and reminds us that theater is, as Max Reinhardt wrote:

the happiest loophole of escape for those who have secretly put their childhood in their pockets and have gone off with it to play to the end of their days.