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 1500th performance (yes her personal
1500th!) 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.
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