Reflections

In the silence I saw

That there is a ‘will' and an ‘intent' in this virus and it is changing humanity. 

Its unfortunate habit of seeking out the weak and the elderly is appalling and merciless and its killing of over forty medical staff who have died in the line of duty is very tragic. Back in 1917 a virus targeted the fit and the health.

 But I also think that it is society that is the patient here. For we have neglected the ‘elderly’ and the ‘weak’ and focused on wealth and ownership, reproducing the original dominion of man over nature as symbolically represented in Genesis. But a society can not exploit forever and we have no dominion, separate from nature.

Society like a body has become acid and needy, fearful and isolationist and unwilling to change, whilst exploiting nature and natural resources as if it (nature) were a slave. 

We have entered her virgin jungles and disturbed something of nature that fights back, with Sal forces. But we are nature itself and what is done to her is done to us. We have brought vast swathes of life to extinction, polluted the oceans with chemicals and plastic, slaughtered and encaged the wild things. Engaged ourselves in civil society and meaningless jobs. All for worthless trinkets. 

Every idea and every thought  has its capacity for viral infection of others, therefore we must always act with the purest of hearts.

Friends across Britain sat in weekly silent meeting 'together and apart'. Doors closed and hearts open'. On Friday as we went about our daily isolation we came together and I felt its force.

Together we focus the light into the darkness and seek to welcome nature into our hearts (for we are this virus in more ways than we can know) and seek peace with it and our actions.

We are nature and her balance. We  have the capacity for compassion and loving kindness. This is the path to restoration.

In Peace and silent togetherness apart

Potential being

Potential Being

I see we are this thin ego of gossamer.

Performing ourselves on a tragicomedy stage. When you are alone do you act for God? Or do you act for your parents or for self love?

Do I perform for the Monkey, like a monkey clashing cymbals for praise and an odd coin?

I am not the same minded as many but as an actor I seem to enter the alternate universe and become my potential being.

This is what drama can do for students, allow them to become their potential.

In todays world that opportunity is so rare. We do not believe we can transcend ourselves!

Theatre is an act of education. A rebellion of the self. It is a deeply political act and a process for human development.

My whole educational career has been about qualifications. It should never have been this. Human development is the purpose of education and theatre is deep human penetration to potential. But politicians want industrial subjects, not Engaged rebellious humans!

The teachers hand is open

Acting is like going to pieces without falling 

The first year of a london drama school is often about deconstructing the potential artist. You tend not to get praise and only hear negative feedback and are often not allowed to perform to an audience! 

The net effect of this is to get the potential artist to dig down into themselves and make the change. The change is an abandonment of the cliché of what you think acting is and an acceptance of the purity of ‘objective’ acting and ‘character acting’ and your own imagination incarnated.

The first year of the profession after training is the same. Small parts, with little recognition. No help and no guidance. For the attention seeker acting can be very bad news! The only shield you have is your self-motivation and creativity. You must:

Do your voice warm ups every day

Do your physical warm up before rehearsals

Action and research your text? Read Read Read!

Apply the System

Explore your text and character?

Do not wait to be told because, you never will be! 

It is vital that you find the impulse to act from yourself. 

That you act for the character and the text, not for praise

You ask me then what is the point of a teacher? The teacher points out the techniques you should use, to clear away bad acting and create the new. The teacher gives you the excises you must develop. Constructs the path and waits for you to be ready for the next stage. The teachers job is to guide you. To guide you to the self-training. You are the instrument, you know the truth about how you act. Your job is then to employ that on a daily basis. 

You must find the creativity in yourself and the application of technique must be your choice and your choice alone. Do not seek the praise of the teacher or the director. (you probably will not accept it anyway) Seek the approval of your fellow actors the audience and yourself. Never wait for direction but offer what you have to rehearsals. The director is a painter, they need something to paint with! 

This is a very tough profession with some dodgy teaching in it. Real actors make themselves. A real course gives you real skills and the space and freedom to find this. Always fall back on technique always do it because you have a passion for it, not to please teacher, parents or partners. If you do not know how well or bad you are doing ask us but we will say, why do you feel you are not doing well? 

Imposed strictness is for the lazy and unimaginative. Self-discipline is the sign of the true artist. And at HE it is also the criteria for a distinction.

Ask yourself what is it that stops you being the actor you want to be? 

What one thing is it? 

AND what is it you can do about it? Then do and do and do.

Do you not think that finding that out must be your top most goal? 

If it is your voice? Work on it every day, if your lack of expression and range, explore the System until it works for you.

This is the point you should be at the end of year one. Year two is the breakthrough. 

Two actors go to the same drama school and have the same experience, only one makes it. Why? Was the training not the same? 

Was it luck or the ability to stand up and seek and find? I know which one it is and so do you.

Follow the objective to the given circumstance

And if you produce fantastic work, created by you and you turn to me and say ‘I have learned nothing from you’.

I will pause with amazement but be happy for you. Because you are on your way.

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Y Agwedd Greadigol. The key to creativity

Y Agwedd Greadigol

‎'Discipline' is a double edge sword. I find students who have been taught with too much discipline rather than self-discipline are hard to work with and it is often an excuse for creative laziness.

What is it with teachers that find the need to be seen as the font of all knowledge? You see them rule their little kingdoms (classrooms) like demi-gods or gurus. These teachers, often those with the least actual knowledge, rule with a rod of iron and any student who does not come under their spell is systematically  destroyed.  Terrible education, which many of us will recognise.

Yet some  students respond to these strict discipline gurus and regard them as good teachers and their information as truth, despite the fact that all the science of education proves it is not. Why do they see this as the way to learn? Because it is easier to live in a dictatorship than it is to live in a democracy. Easier to follow than to lead. Easy to be a sheep rather than a sheep dog.  In the end, that kind of educational rule is about creative laziness and teachers with the lest understanding, seem to be the worse culprits.

These students if they do make it out into the real world of work, are a nightmare to work with. They are hard to direct, very set in their ways unable to be creative and requiring absolute direction. The creative spark is not free and giving but clichéd and subservient. (Empty Space and There are no secrets Peter Brook)

Cymru Creadigol .

 Education must  seek to nurture self-discipline and creative independents This is what will make people employable. We do not want robots. We do not want unthinking artists and actors. It is the harder route but it is the better route by far.

 Find your element! Find your discipline! Seek your art. seek out your truth

'Truth is truth to the end of reckoning.

There are NO gurus! Only signs in the sand and those signs point to you!

The NATIV Approach

In the three stage theory of mind there are three thinkers in the head: The 'monkey' or 'Chimp', the 'human' and the 'computer'. (www.amazon.co.uk/the+chimp+paradox)
An example of this is seen in the act of driving. The 'computer' is driving, the 'monkey' is upset and agitated by news on the radio and wants to lash out and scream the 'human' takes control of the monkey and calms it down by explaining what will happen if it does so and offers alternative actions. The computer records the event and drives the car onwards with out a pause. This is, simply put, the latest understanding of brain function in 2012.

The human part of the brain is apparently a small strip of cells that sits between the Chimp brain and the emotional centers. It has been observed that psychopaths have a reduced number of cells in this area. Thus reducing the ability to control the Chimp mind. Functional psychopaths, such as a few very successful political and business leaders also display this syndrome. Their lack of empathy and lack of restraining conscience, found in the majority of us, enables them to out do others. Often they are said to have single mindedness. It is terrifying a thought that among our leaders these mutations of the mind have enormous power, with it seems little empathy or feeling for humanity. It explains a lot about the horror of our world perhaps.

The 'art' actor is not this state of mind. The 'art' actor must have empathy. Must have humanity. Must have the 'milk of human kindness' that Lady Macbeth rejects. We can not play humanity unless we understand it. BUT we also need to enter the other world. The world of the insane. As Lady Macbeth speaks her incantation to 'de humanize' herself and "stop up the access and passage to remorse". So the actor has to enter the wild Chimp mind. Can this be done and is it safe? If we understand the way the mind works and develop a process yes it is safe. It is Grotowski with understanding of the process. One such development in this area of behaviorism is NLP. This is a modern form of Stanislavski's 'given circumstance'. Enhanced and instant as he intended. Over the years I have adapted 'given circumstance' 'objective acting' and visualization mixed with aspects of 21st century behavioral concepts such as NLP and developed NATIV (1993) That is 'Natural Actors Training through Interactive visualization'. It is a posh title for updating the behaviorist assumptions made by Stanislavski, Growstowski, and Anton Chekov et al. They did not have the benefit of the modern science of the mind or a body of cognitive therapy to look to. Theirs was a shot in the dark. What we have today is access to greater or more precise tools to enhance our art.

The Anonymous Actor. The Watcher Effect

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Let us start with audience. This is a reversal of most actors training. But walk on a stage with no people sitting in an auditorium and then do the same with people and you will feel the 'watcher' effect. This is where acting starts.

I ask the students to sit in a semi circle and place a chair in the middle. The object of the exercise is to walk to the chair in front of people with no impulse to ‘act’. Simple as this may seem, it is very difficult, for some impossible. Next we try to sit in this chair and behave as if we are alone. Again, for honest actors, this is impossible. But after a bit of work on preparation and a visualization exercise the actor enters a zone, (given circumstance) which, whilst not feeling alone, they do feel very emotionally open, vunerable. ‘Acting’ it would seem is infact an evolutionary survival technique, developed as a social tool. I used to think that acting was developed from a need to convey hunt and historical information to primordial hunter gathers. However, this exercise sees its possible root as a social defence mechanism to protect the individual’s psyche.

Therefore, if the act of standing in front of people produces deep emotional and physiological changes it is perhaps here that we should in the scientific age start, because alone we are not actors. Acting and therefore theatre is an act of duality. (Toward A Poor Theatre, Grotowski) Theatre takes place in the minds of the audience and the actors. It is the job of the actor to affect other people’s minds. The real stage is the audiences' collective mind. Now we see the beginnings of  a different approach for theatre and a new type of actor. An actor who enters your imagination. Not to control it but to interact with it, to produce a mutual interactive and a cathartic-metanoi experience.

The Anonymous Actor

Is acting an art or is it a craft? I never felt (that is, my ego never felt) that I belonged to this often class based guild of 'craft' acting and had to compensate by looking at it, as an art. By 'the craft' I mean in the first instance, 'class' or 'type' based acting. For example, classic middle-class acting - Hugh Grant, Emma Thomson, Colin Firth etc. Working class craft actors -Bob Hoskins Micheal Caine etc. And the actors who work on not class but 'inner rage' or 'near madness' - Anthony Hopkins, Gary Oldman. These fantastic master-craft actors approach all parts with the same technique - 'themselves'. When you see them you know instantly it is them and you focus on their craft, talent and ego.

Not so for the art actor - Anthony Sher for example. This actor changes according to the part. Always starting from the creation of character.( I will add more names to this as the blog develops)

It was the this 'art' that enabled me to over-come a dread of class judgement and lack of confidence. I had no desire to be me or represent my class on stage. The 'artist' was working, 'I' never did. 'I' was anonymous.

Confidence is the key to good and bad acting. Confidence can come from upbringing but it can also be a fickle mistress. I learned to work without it, or rather to use its absence to advantage and it is this that I teach today - working on the edge of confidence - the deep end, the drop off point into 'art' form. Removing or exposing the workings of the characters ego with ones own. (On the way I will explore the techniques of craft acting) The commercial profession is run by casting directors who simple do not care about your art - they don't know much about acting ether. It is more of a case of 'modeling' and it's not what I am talking about here but I will deconstruct it secrets.

Confidence has more to do with the craft. The ego performs not the character but the pathway to the 'art' is pure 'objective' acting. The power of the objective and the force of the 'obstacle' will produce the 'given circumstance'. If, that is, your emotional and imaginative response are free. In this blog I will show you how to enhance your 'art' Judge for yourself, as to how your acting improves. I will include video of actual teaching sessions of this hybrid system. Hybrid because it uses a range of modern - techniques with the original 'system' training of Stanislavski and Growtowski, replacing their now outdated behavioural techniques with cutting edge science. This is a voyage of discovery into the art of acting and the true humanity of theatre

Nor am I talking about the 'applied theatre'. often formed out of dedicated university drama departments, with the noble aim of taking practitioner led 'applied theatre' to the people. Beloved of the Arts Council because they tick the right agenda boxes, these groups often  form élites - and support theatrical ideological  gurus, such as Boal. Perhaps this applied theatre is the future but  the  'spectactor' is almost anti-art. Anybody can be a 'spectactor', the political agenda is the main criteria. Fantastic! I fully support this ethos. But it is not the 'art' I am looking for. It is a cousin, a close relative but not the thing itself. It is a craft. It is Brecht, Boal or perhaps therapy. I would not like to see either suffer and the expense of the other, they serve very different functions. Applied theatre is 'negotiated meaning' democratic agreement. Art is an exploitative interpretation by an artist or group of artists which transcends ideology. Very different.

All these questions come to this; what type of actor do you want to be and what are the fundamental areas of training you need? What in short is actors training in 2012? In this blog I am looking at new ways of training actors as 'artists'.

 

 

 

 

All things must fade into oblivion but I notice the subtle repeat in patterns. The pure equations that tip-tap like midnight rain on the floating shadow of the gossamer world



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