Theatre Ventoux

ensemble: noun: a group constituting an organic whole or producing together a single effect.

A major part of the Ventoux Process (or at least from what I’ve noticed) is the cohesiveness of the Ensemble. We are all individual actors that come together and perform as a whole. Our tune-ups are done as a group, a lot of the focus work is done to make us aware of ourselves, our body is our instrument, and of those acting around us. This group is not about one actor or one performance. This group is about performing a ’single effect,’ the show.

Schedules and time constraints have made the cohesive aspect of this group more difficult, but we are all dedicated to the single effect, we all have the same goal; and regardless of what we have going on in our personal lives, we have to perform to the best of our ability. We owe the audience that and more.

The show has taken on a new life and we now know what the first layer of the show looks like, but in these next 9 rehearsals we’ll step up the intensity and see how deep we can make the layers. We are playing the same emotions as before, playing the same intent and need, but now it’s time to see how intense we can make that need. How many steps and layers into the process can we delve? That’s for each actor to decide, and I’d like to challenge myself and my fellow actors… find those 6 more changes and take it to a place you never thought you could get to. Step it up and start to play for the single effect.

Cheers.

This being my second experience with the Theatre Ventoux process I find myself taking more from the Tune-Ups than I had with “This Flattering Glass.” I really love the Tune-Ups because it gives me a chance to let my world melt away and allow for my creative process to come forth. It doesn’t matter what I come into the rehearsal space carrying or weighting on my mind, as soon as we focus on our breathing and start playing with the Space Ball, the world as I know it disappears for the next 3 hours and I am in the zone. It’s a mini vacation from my life and playing in a life I am portraying.

“Childe Byron” is an intense, touching, and kick in the pants show that is so much fun to perform. I am loving this group of actors, most of which I’ve performed with before and some I’ve never worked with before. It really is a good range of talent.

Tonight we are to be off book. The dreaded time period (I’m sure you heard the do-do-dooooooooo music and a scream in the background) as the actors rush to make sure they know their lines better than they did last night. I spent the weekend camping and sitting by the fire memorizing my script, yes even when the drinks were getting passed around, I was memorizing my script. It’s strange what we are willing to do for our art, isn’t it?

I know that this week of rehearsal will be a little clunky, but that is to be expected. We are getting off book rather quickly, but I can’t wait to get it out of my hands and really be able to act. I especially can’t wait to further develop a particular character I am playing, knowing that it’s going to be an amazing connection.

So for now, I’ll be walking around my office, waltz stepping (I’ll let another actor talk about the Waltz Rehearsal), memorizing and speaking in a British accent as much as I can.

VLB!
AL

OK, this is in response to a number of people recently asking me which books I would recommend that an actor read. I’m never really sure how to answer that question, because what lights my fire might not light theirs. What I’ve decided is that there are three distinct answers to the question, so I’ll present them all here.

Answer One
I suppose that there is a canon of sorts that every serious theatre craftsman should be familiar with just in terms of history, major movements, styles, etcetera. I have no doubt that such canonical lists abound on the internet so I won’t reproduce them here. Check out any online course syllabus from any drama class at any major university, or look at the reading lists on amazon.com. Don’t get me wrong; I’m not trying to suggest that these works are without value to the individual actor. They have great value and are canonical for just that reason. However, like so many things canonical, if not approached in the right way, they become merely relics of old ideas, read just because they happened to survive rather than to plumb their depths. I know far too many actors who have read Quintillian, and Aristotle, and Craig, and Stanislavski, and Artaud, and Brook, and Grotowski, and whoever else you might care to name, in the former manner and are no better for it except to be able to say that they have read them. By all means, read them, read them all, but read them with a drive to learn from them, not simply because someone says they’re important. Life’s too short for that.

Answer Two
Read anything and everything that fuels your individual fire. It doesn’t matter what it is: literature, genre fiction, non-fiction, comic books, bubble gum wrappers, or Congolese midget porn…whatever fuels you creatively as a human being fuels your craft and your art. Never let anyone tell you differently. If someone does, refer them to me. Better yet, just tell them what I would tell them: “Sod off!”

Answer Three
These are specific books that have directly influenced my thoughts on theatre and acting, or have had a direct influence on my acting. They are all theatre related and in no particular order.
The Actor’s Eye by Morris Carnovsky: An artistic treasure trove that so clearly crystallizes what we are trying to so as actors. Unfortunately out of print.
The Intent To Live by Larry Moss: An excellent, if somewhat indulgent, primer on the basics of Stanislavski, and much more accessible than the translations of Stanislavski.
The Actor and the Target by Declan Donnellan: Provides some nice refinements to the System’s basics as well as proposing some provocative new ideas.
Stanislavski in Focus by Sharon Carnicke: Clarifies a number of misconceptions and places them in their histroical context. Makes one wish for newer translations of Stanislavski’s work.
The Empty Space by Peter Brook: The only book listed in everyone’s canon that really did anything for me.
Playing Shakespeare by John Barton: Indispensible if you’re planning to take on the Bard (and if you’re not, what the hell’s the matter with you?)
Speaking Shakespeare by Patsy Rodenburg: See above.
Improvisation for the Theatre by Viola Spolin: The introductory material alone is worth the cost of the book.
Book on Improvisation by Stephen Book: Takes everything you ever knew about acting and turns it inside out. The ideas and the work are immediately applicable and up the stakes like nothing else I have come across. My Bible.

The following books, also in no particular order, are not theatre specific, but I cannot emphasize enough their impact on what I belive and do.
Freedom from the Known by Jiddhu Krishnamurti: Just when you thought you knew what inspiration was….
Zen in the Art of Archery bu Eugen Herrigal: This is what training is like.
The Book by Alan Watts: Will teach you everything you ever need to know about being part of the whole.
Living Without a Goal by James Ogilvy: Will teach you everything you need to know about being in the moment.
Dune, Dune Messiah, etc by Frank Herbert: Not the stories, the epigrams.
No Boundary by Ken Wilber: Blows away all of the excuses.
Finite and Infinite Games by James P. Carse: Nothing is the same after this….
The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran: The most sublime statement of Love and Divinity ever penned.

So there it is.
Happy reading.

etonne-moi!

Thanks to all of you who took the time to respond to the last post.
Good thinking, all!
I’d just like to toss out a few thoughts of my own in response to your thoughts.
I’m sure there are those audience members who go to a play or movie looking for the acting, just like there are those who go to see a magician who are looking for the trick. They miss the point. It’s about losing yourself in the experience. If you want to see how the acting is done, get off your dead ass and do a show. Brecht was seeking a very particular effect for a very specific ideological reason, which is all well and good if you want your theatre to be political. But the theatre isn’t about politics, though it can be political; it’s about entertainment. And remember that to entertain means ‘to hold among’ or ‘to hold the attention of.’ That’s what the acting has to do before it does anything else: hold the attention of the audience. Utlimately, why the audience is there and what they are looking for doesn’t matter. We do what we do and gift it to them, and, like any gift freely given, they are free to do with it what they will.
As for Meryl, well, she’s just damned awesome isn’t she? And it doesn’t matter one bit whose thoughts you’re seeing, though in truth it’s both: it’s really the actor’s, but within the imaginary circumstances of the play/movie which you have suspended your disbelief to enter, it’s the character’s. All that matters is that you see it and believe it. When it’s good, it’s transcendent.
In general I’m in agreement with what Adam said except for one thing: how you, the actor, would respond in a given circumstance is irrelevant. No playwright wrought you. If personalizations, and what ifs and magic ifs and adjustment work for you as an actor and the audience believes your behavior, then rock on. However, for most, I find this approach to be self-indulgent. Often it leads to the actor simply being himself on the stage saying a different person’s words depending on the play…which is pretty damned dull after a few shows. I don’t care about and don’t want to see how Larry, Richard, Mel, Kevin, and Ken react to the appearance of their dead father…I want to see how Hamlet, as interpreted by those artists, reacts.
In the end it’s all just attitude-driven bullshit…and that’s what makes it so damned fun!
Coming Next: The Actor’s Essential Reading List.
Watch for it!!!

Sanford Meisner was one of the most influential and respected acting teachers in American history. His teaching brought a new level of artistry to the craft of acting and his work is, rightly, studied by any serious student of acting. However, like most that have a significant impact on a field of endeavor, he was reacting to weaknesses he perceived in the work of others, specifically in the teachings of Lee Strasberg. In this vein, I would like to take a look at one of Meisner’s most significant legacies, his definition of acting and react to what I perceive to be a weakness therein.

Sanford Meisner defined acting as follows: living truthfully under imaginary circumstances. At the time, this was probably the most succinct and useful definition of acting put forward, and it still serves many actors well. However, there are several difficulties with this definition which bear close examination.

Of the three essential elements of Meisner’s definition, the final element, imaginary circumstances, is the most crucial in terms of setting the context for the other two, living and truthfully. Circumstances refer to all of the elements of the play that come to bear upon its performance. Here the idea of the play must be clearly understood. The play is the imaginary reality in which the characters exist and live out their imaginary lives. The play is what is directly provided by the playwright, the perceptual concept provided by the director, and the interpretive choices made by the actors in service of the playwright and the director. Everything else, e.g. lighting, costumes, music, sound, all of the elements that can be termed production, are peripheral to the play and, while they all may, and, ideally, should contribute to its performance, are not necessary to its performance. This is the fundamental reason that theatre is infinitely generative: given the same script, every new constellation of artists will generate a different play. Indeed, even if all of the production values are rigidly controlled for and precisely the same night after night, the play itself as performed will be unique to the particular artists performing it at that particular time.

The key word in this part of the definition, however, is imaginary. Nothing that happens in the play is real. The production itself is real; the play is imaginary. No matter how natural or realistic a setting may be, it is not what it purports to be. No matter how believably the actors may behave (a point I will return to), they are not the characters they portray. The play is an imaginary reality, a symbolic construct that, when successful, points to something concrete in the lives of its audience.

Acting takes place within a set of imaginary circumstances. It takes place within a framework of fundamentally unreal, though fully realized, details that create a context within which the audience may empathetically engage the play and come away changed for the experience.

So, if acting takes place within a set of imaginary circumstances, what, exactly, is taking place? It is categorically not living, nor is it truthful.

If the actor is living the part, then the actor is not acting. Living the part is not acting, it is schizophrenia, a breakdown of the distinctions between what is real and what is imaginary. The actor is always there witnessing the acting. No matter how immersed an actor may become in a role or a scene or a play, this witness always remains. Ideally, it is this witness that guides the performance, keeping it from becoming self-indulgent. This is the danger in the misuse of Meisner’s definition, it can lead to a self-indulgent quest for the actor’s holy grail: being in the moment. With the exception of the myriad misunderstandings of Stanislavski’s seminal work in the early twentieth century, no single acting concept has been so misunderstood and led to so much self-serving work. To put it plainly: characters are never in the moment. This is patently obvious when you accept that characters do not exist, they are imaginary. The actor who destroys the integrity of a scene and claims that his actions were justified because he was in the moment and that’s what his character would have done, betrays a terrible ignorance of his part of the whole play and demonstrates a narcissistic hubris of the highest degree. It is the actor that must be in the moment, not the character. The actor, as witness, must strive to be fully alive and present from moment to moment to moment in order to guide the performance, to respond properly to subtle (or not so subtle) changes in individual performances, and to revel in the playing. It is this revelry that is the actor’s greatest pleasure in performance: the scintillant joy that comes from the playing itself, a playing that is completely imaginary.

Acting is not truthful. There is nothing of the truth about it. It is a lie. At its best, it is a sublimely well-crafted lie that the audience freely agrees to buy into. At its worst, it exposes itself for the lie that it is in performances that are unwatchable and which an audience, no matter how forgiving, cannot participate in. Like living, truthfully centers the actor on himself and on his personal reality, which is of no concern to the audience. It doesn’t matter whether or not the actor feels the living truth of his character’s circumstances, it only matters that the audience does. As Stephen Book says, “We are not paid to have an experience; we’re paid to give the audience one.” Our creative and personal payoff must be in doing that, not in flailing about in the midst of our own personal and emotional reveries, an all too common form of masturbatory acting deriving from the actor’s mistaken belief that it’s all about him.

Acting is not about the actor, it’s about the audience. It’s about what we give to the audience. With that undersdtanding, I would amend Sanford Meisner’s definition of acting as follows: acting is behaving believably under imaginary circumstances. Set within the same context of properly understood imaginary circumstances, this takes the focus off of the actor and puts it with the audience. It does not matter whether or not the actor has an experience or not, feels an emotion or not, believes what he is doing or not, identifies with the character or not, it only matters that the audience finds the actor’s behavior to be believable within the imaginary circumstances of the play. The audience cannot see an actor’s thoughts, intentions, backstory, emotions, magic ifs, substitutions, or objectives; the audience can only see and experience what the actor actually does on the stage. And, to be effective, what the actor does must be believable to the audience. No matter how outrageous, or subtle, so long as it is believable to the audience, it is effective. And effectiveness, as measured by the audience for whom we play (as well as by our own artistic sensibilities), is a much better and, ultimately, finer arbiter of our work than our own, all to often, self-indulgent and self-aggrandizing feelings.

Note: Since drafting this piece, I have been fortunate enough to have read Ronald Rand’s Acting Teachers of America: A Vital Tradition. In it, Julie Garfield, daughter John Garfield, graduate of the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre, and student of Sanford Meisner gave the following variation of his famous definition (attributed to Meisner, himself): Acting is the reality of doing moment to moment under imaginary circumstances.

Well, we’re finally here! It’s the week of opening and tonight and tomorrow night we are previewing the show.

Dress rehearsals are always a bit tempestuous… new playing space, costumes, hair/make up, lights, props, etc. Mondays are always the worst, Tuesdays are 10,000 times better and by Wednesday/Thursday you are just ironing out the final wrinkles and the show gels nicely.

We are at that place in time where our show will reach the beauty it is meant to be. There are always 6 more changes and I have seen some new things from the cast mates even now. It is exciting and I can’t wait for there to be an audience and to feed off their response.

This show kicks! I love performing in it, I love working with this group of people and I can’t wait to share that love with all of you!

Thank you to all!

Break legs!!!!

Alais

In talking with my cast mates and working on this show, ya’ll might not believe that our rehearsals are going as well as we are blogging. But it is! It is so nice to be a part of an ensemble and grow together and work together and be such a well oiled machine that anything can be thrown our way and we’ll conquer it, together.

There are no restrictions. We did not all agree to only reveal the good things about what we are doing… there just isn’t anything to complain about! That is so nice.

Tonight was amazing. In the scene I have with Isabel we were brought to the next level and it’s powerful. I love the transitions we have made, the places we are in and I love being Alais. She is such a fun ride. Every night there is a new step and after we got off stage, Isabel looked at me and wanted to strangle me… I loved it! I love how we have been brought to this place, this scene, and it is so real it is bringing out natural reactions and making our interactions that much more profound. Thank you Isabel for being there with me! You are truly my sister in arms!

Thank you to the cast for taking what you’ve been given and making it real!

Alais

a few random thoughts that i had during the course of last night’s rehearsal (in no particular order): oh yes…GOOD!…i told you NOT to play with the guns…YES…i really need to learn my lines…hm, it doesn’t fall out when i have it…YESYESYESYESYES…i’m so happy…damn

so tomorrow is our first full run of the show and i am deliciously intrigued to see what will happen. of all the shows i have done, this is the first in which the actors deliberately and very definitely bring new ideas and new levels to each and every rehearsal. from the foundation of their own work, to communicating meaning, to playing the language, to listening, to communicating relationships, to physicalizing emotions…every night…something new…something deeper.

and not just some of them, but every one of them. i find it impossible to single out the exemplary work that one of them is doing for the simple reason that they are all doing exemplary work. and i choose to use that word very deliberately: exemplary. each of them is working at a level that is an example to each of the others. and, oh my, how they do feed on it.

so tomorrow is our first full run…and i have the feeling that something wonderful this way comes.