Week 9 - Concentration

Week 9 – Concentration

Shortened attention span seems to be something we are hearing about more and more.  Whether or not you agree with the studies or theories about this, I think most of us could benefit from giving some attention to our ability (or lack thereof) to concentrate.  In an age of multi-tasking, we find ourselves increasing our potential to be distracted.  There are more and more things that compete for our attention.  In life we have to concentrate to complete any action fully, how much more do we need to concentrate on stage where we are presenting life in a condensed, intensified, and distilled form to our audience. Richard Boleslavsky begins his book  Acting: the First Six Lessons with a chapter on concentration.  In the chapter he speaks of a particular concentration that any craftsman has.  Each craft has its own medium, its own “material aim.”  For Boleslavsky, the actor’s concentration is on the human soul: first noticing the souls of others, storing up what we notice about the world around us through our senses.  Then, when we continue to study the role we are playing, our concentration moves more specifically to the working of our own soul, emotions, experiences.  The actor needs “a spiritual concentration on emotions which do not exist but are invented or imagined.”  He mentions that this ability is developed by “hard daily exercises of which I can give you thousands… if you think, you will be able to invent another thousand.”  In a sense, the individual exercise is aimed at a process bigger than itself.  The conclusions of any exercise are less important than the process of concentration involved in the doing of the exercise itself.  Yet, we must engage in some form of it daily.  While that sounds daunting, the promise of our being able to invent new exercises for ourselves is the reward.  Concentrate on the process, and you will be able to modify the particulars, use your senses, experience your soul living in a constant state of investigation.

Life story:

One of the things I wanted to be when I was a child was a painter (in addition to a farmer, fireman and Egyptologist!)  My mother painted from time to time and I noticed how quiet and still and cool she got when she played with the paint.  The works of great painters always inspired me and drew me into another space.  A few years ago I was commissioned to paint an image that would celebrate an upcoming event.  I knew that I needed time to do it and I was scheduled to go on a 30 day retreat that summer so I decided to make the painting part of my retreat.  Each part of the process:  composing the image, mixing the colors, the actual painting itself has a unique character, but a common characteristic.  I was totally absorbed.  Hours would go by and it would seem like minutes.  (I needed to start setting an alarm so that I would remember to take breaks!)  The medium itself had such a power of engaging me because I allowed it to make demands upon me.  Yet, each demand had inside of it a promise of the reward of seeing it accomplished.  It was impossible for me to get distracted if I chose something specific and manageable to concentrate on for each session with the painting.  Making those choices about the  “object” of concentration were only starting points that would then open up chains of other objects.  The temptation is to tackle them as they present themselves.  The discipline of concentration is to note what is for now and what is for later, and to find a unique joy in the ability to sustain short periods of absorption into what is right in front of us.

Work Story: 

One of my most inspiring teachers, Priscilla Smith, told our class about a theatre piece she saw about Civil War.  I believe it was one of the sections of Robert Wilson’s “The Civil Wars: A Tree Is Best Measured When It Is Cut Down.”    The piece began with a scene of young soldiers outside their tents doing everyday morning actions, drinking coffee, buttoning shirt, tying shoes etc.  One of the techniques used was to slow everything down, make it exaggeratedly slow to get the audience to enter a different state.  To go that slow demands a specific kind of concentration; taking the particular action and being able to be present to it in all of its component parts, letting go of our daily rush through things. Priscilla said that what she noticed about watching it was that she had different reactions to the piece as it revealed itself.  First it was just noticing the technique in an intellectual sense, but it remained something of an idea. Then with more attention, it became somewhat fascinating, mostly because of the concentration of the actors. Finally when the audience’s concentration was attuned to that of the actors in the scene, it elicited something quite profound and moving from her.  The concentration of their actions and the context of the war created the effect that each of these actions was happening for the last time.  There is something profound about the fleeting nature of our actions and perhaps we can make them vibrant if we consider that we might possibly be doing them for the last time, or perhaps the first time.

Further investigation:

Read Boleslavsky’s chapter on Concentration from Acting: The First Six Lessons.  Over the course of these weeks you’ll be looking at the other chapters too, so avoid the temptation to finish the whole book at one sitting… it’s meant to be sipped.

Suggestions:

1. Sit in a chair and look at a spot on the wall or the floor.  See if you can focus your concentration on just that spot.  After a few minutes, open up the circle of concentration around it gradually:  a few inches, a foot, two feet, going wider and wider until you open up to your entire field of vision (even your peripheral vision) See how much you can bring into your concentration while still maintaining a soft focus on that one spot.  Then bring your concentration back to the spot gradually. 

2.  Focus on your breath.  Notice if you are taking complete breaths or not. Normally we don’t.  Gradually increase the length of your in breath.  Try this for a few minutes each day.

3. On a day when you can truly get lost in time, start working on a drawing or a craft project that will take more than one day to complete.  Note the time when you started.  See if you can continue to work on it until you are “in the zone.”  Afterward, see if you can guess the amount of time you devoted to the project.  Was it more or less than the actual time?

4. Do yoga, real yoga… not just “flatten your abs” yoga.  Be present to the breath and to your own body.

5.  Begin working on a reading a new script.  Make a list of all the distractions that come into your mind as you read it. Keep a list of all the things that potentially distract us. When you’ve made your list, categorize them into things that are easy to let go of, and things that are difficult to let go of.  Sometimes just knowing this is a help.

 6.  Watch a craftsman or an artist at work.  There is a natural focus that has within it a great deal of ease at the same time.  (Notice how infrequently they blink, and how they breathe)

7.   Take 15 minutes at the end of the day and see with what detail you can recall the significant moments of the day.  Avoid having a judgement about it.  Try to focus solely on remembering details and notice what that does to your concentration. 

A dream for the day- Happy Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day

All One Thing

As we in the U.S. celebrate the memory of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., my mind goes back two years to the passing of one of our great American theatremakers:  Ellen Stewart.  As a close friend and collaborator of Ellen's, and as one of her "babies," it was my honor to preside at her funeral in St. Patrick's two years ago.  To remember this day I thought I would share some of the funeral homily appropriate for this day:

The first tour I took with Ellen was in 1996. We found ourselves in many places, including one country where we were not even supposed to be, because of  US sanctions.  But that would not stop Ellen, nothing stopped her.  In a dark, smokey theatre, our company of  international “La MaMa kids” witnessed something incredible.  The country where we were performing that week was in the process of partitioning: drawing and redrawing borders again and again, along ethnic lines that, just five years earlier, did not even exist.  A journalist asked a question about one of the actors in the company whose surname was obviously of a rivaling ethnic group.  Ellen, without heed of danger, in the middle of this press conference, confronted the situation head on.  She said “you know very well that with a name like that, they would never let him over the border.” And then her MaMa kicked in… and she did, as she always does, something that others would never even think of doing.  She addressed the whole room and said “Now look, I remember you all when you were just one thing… and you can all start loving each other ANYTIME you want.” 
It is entirely appropriate that we celebrate Ellen's  faith on the day when we remember Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., a man whose vision, faith and personal sacrifice was crucial to the broadening  of the consciousness of our country, a man who like Ellen did what other people would not even think of doing.   It is entirely appropriate that we celebrate Ellen, whose vision, faith and personal sacrifice has transformed the theatre both in the United States and throughout the world. It is entirely fitting that we laugh, that we cry, that we sing, that we dance.  It is entirely fitting that we go forth to tell our stories to each other, to our friends, to the world, but that we never for a moment forget or doubt that these things really happened. 

--St Patrick's Cathedral, New York City, Jan 17, 2011

Thanks for reading. May the lives of these great people inspire you.  Next full post coming soon... the subject is on concentration.

Happy New Year! and a new week for the workbook

Hello Everyone and Happy New Year!
It's been great getting back to NYC after my Spring semester at Santa Clara U, and yet NYC has a way of eating up time!  I'm back to the blog after a few months and invite you to read along as it grows this year.  Here's a new week for your New Year.

Week 8 – Newness

As actors, we work to take something that we know backwards and forwards, our text, our blocking and our psycho-physical score of actions and objectives, things we have gone over a million times in rehearsal and make it seem new each time we are performing it.  Each presentation of these elements of our work must appear to an audience as if we are living it for the first time each time we play.  Audience members can tell when a performer is fresh, and when on automatic pilot.  Once I was in the audience of a long-playing one-man show and was bored to tears because I could tell the actor was just “phoning it in.”  The text was engaging because it was an adaptation of a great book, but the performer’s lack of investment was dangerously close to making me leave.  There were moments in the performance where I would wake up, because there was something the actor could actually care about.  For those brief moments I invested and I cared, because something seemed new, fresh, connected to something that was happening now.  On the other hand it is absolutely thrilling when a performer is totally present… totally committed, no matter how many times they have done a show. I was in the audience for Carol Channing’s 1500^th performance (yes her personal 1500^th!) of “Hello Dolly” and it was just as fresh as I imagine her first.  Why? She connected with this particular audience as a new lifeline, a new inspiration, a new partner.  Each moment is new in life, why not let something of the actual newness of the present moment into even the most studied of daily practices?

Life story:  The New Year is always a great time to look to establish something new in one’s life.  The common practice of making New Years’ resolutions was good for me in the past, but I found that the expectation of the resolution often had disappointment built-in.  The perfection I aimed at was rarely achieved immediately, and the negative feelings about not living up to the resolution would sometimes make me abandon the resolution completely.  A few years ago I decided to start making New Year’s “mantras” instead of resolutions.  The fun was coming up with something that had a real aim, but was broad enough to be free from harsh assessments of success and failure.  I looked at areas of my life where I wanted to challenge myself of adjust my habitual response to a situation to expand past the limits of what had become automatic for me.  For example, I can tend to rush through things when I’m overly stressed so one year I adopted “take your time” as my New Year’s mantra.  Another year I wanted to work on letting go of a feeling that I was overwhelmed with tasks at hand so I chose as my mantra “share the weight.” To my surprise, the mantra never lost its freshness and its newness because I allowed it to come spontaneously from the work at hand at whatever moment I needed it.  I had not predetermined when I would repeat the mantra, I just knew that there would be instances during the day where I would need to remember it.  Rather than a pre-determined resolution intimidating me, the specific but open-ended mantras were always connected to real moments, real desires, real needs and as a result brought forth fruitfulness in my adjusting to the moment regardless of the outcome.  Rather than demanding results, I was shaping conditions that allowed results to happen.  That never gets old.

Work Story:  One of the first productions we did with my own company Magis Theatre, was a production of  Shakespeare’s “The Winter’s Tale.”  It was a co-production with the Shakespeare Project, and my good friend Scott Cargle, organized a festival called “Play Outside”  with the New York City Park system.  The production was a remount from six years earlier with Opera House Arts in Stonington, Maine.  I was playing Leontes and was thrilled to take on this wonderfully complex role once more.  The character goes from placid to maniacal in a matter of a few pages, and you can imagine how this would require a very specific score of actions and triggers to set off a believable chain of events that would allow an audience to believe this almost instantaneous shift in the character.  Difficult enough in the quiet and dark of an opera house: add the spontaneity of the New York City Park system!  I had mistakenly begun the run expecting to be focused in the same way I was in a self-contained theatre space.  I would view outside stimulus of the audience as “interference” with my pre-determined score.  Until one day when I heard a baby screaming… and I mean SCREAMING.  It came in short bursts, usually at significant points in the arc of actions I was trying to recreate.  I felt distracted until the blocking of the scene had me facing out in direct view of the raucous infant.  To my surprise, he was glued to the performance.  His eyes wide, his fists clenched.  But not screaming…yet.  Directed outward I saw that there was a good reason why his outbursts were so in sync with Leontes’ outbursts.  From his stroller, he too was playing Leontes.  Letting this reality in for a moment no longer distracted me from my set of tasks, it fueled me. 

Suggestions:

1. Come up with your own mantra for the New Year or for a specific project you are working on.  See what you might want to fold into your consciousness, and compose a short phrase you can repeat to yourself as a friendly reminder.

2. Revisit one of the suggestions you may have tried from a previous week of the workbook.  Try it in your new circumstances and notice the differences.

3. Play a game you played as a child, or if you are a parent, uncle or aunt… teach the game to your youngster.

4. Go back to a monologue you have memorized and imagine speaking it as yourself to your best friend, your parent, your love, your inner self and see what new colors you can discover.

5.  Listen to people around you and try to note four different interesting vocal qualities.  Try to recreate them in your own voice.  Don’t go for an exact match, just pay attention to what your voice is doing in a new way.

6.  Look at the same view out your window on five different moments of the day, or five different days of the week.  Jot down the new elements in your journal.

7. Go to a performance and pay attention to the rapport between the most successful actor in the cast and the audience.