Acting Vs Theory in Performance

Lost amid the abundance of theories on acting and performance

Young actors search for the magic bullet in transforming their fumbling attempts to act and perform and maybe even gain a profession from it all; an elusive career! The most committed will seek out the insightful teachers and the best acting schools with reputations for placing actors in career boosting companies upon graduation. Some will even endure the natural anxiety and depression that comes with a lack of success or even a lack of frequency in successfully gaining employment. Others will see it all as a hobby and no more; a fulfilling addition to their real life work in some other or related field; but nothing more! But to be effective and even successful as an actor, one needs to apply some very clear and simple elements in preparation and presentation that go beyond any theoretical or abstract substance.

The Basics

Two fundamental things are necessary for effective performance:

• timing, and

• stillness.

Sure it might be assumed that one has a strong vocal quality and a life experience to imbue selected roles with truth and circumstances. And sure, you need to know the theories that give rise to various styles in performance. However, the essential element all actors need is a sense of timing and an ability to hold stillness. We then come back to the duration of the stillness held. How long is it necessary to feed a moment with power and strength by holding the moment?

So all you need is the power of stillness and the confidence to adjust your timing of speech or movement. It's simple. Deceptively simple! Silence and stillness are the two most challenging concepts for an actor's attendance.

The Application

OK. You're in a play and you can't figure out the objective of your character or your actions! Can I suggest you just go still within your rehearsal and think for a moment about what comes next. But go STILL! Find that moment where you have to really be challenged. Your timing might suggest a number of seconds before you turn to the other character or to the audience and then speak or act! This will no doubt suggest the ACTION for you and then the OBJECTIVE!

It's a case of the objective being preceded by the action. And the action is a result of stillness, silence and timing.

The Question

So what do you need to do to get that sense of stillness and timing?

For a start, you need to give up all extraneous events that clutter your ability to find stillness and personal silence. Detach from ambition. Detach from personal relationships. Recognise your destructive personal ego for what it is ... BULLSHIT! Focus!

The Deepening

Spend time in the silence and the stillness before attempting the timing of your durations and speaking. If you really feel the silence and the stillness, the timing will come. You will have processed the necessary reaction time to any event. But in that silence you need time to process what you feel or want as a character.

As an actor, you need to suffer your silence in order to discern what your character is about. Ironically, it also determines what you are about. Acting is a multi-faceted action. Yes, you need understanding of your personal instrument as Stanislavski suggests. However, you also need to know how to be still and silent in order to find the idiosyncratic elements that go beyond linear understanding of where you are going with your character. These idiosyncratic elements are the key to successful and memorable performances.

In Conclusion

So much actor training is as David Mamet suggests, privileged indulgence or at least analysis of acting rather than a specific approach. So do you want to succeed? Stephen Berkoff is a better advisor than most acting coaches that complicate the process so much that it replaces the actual moment of engagement with audiences.

Work on your ability to be still; challenge yourself to find the timing of your responses in your scenes. Just stop and BE...

Cheers

Can We Accept Our Own Betrayal While Creating a Work of Art or Theatre?

I attended a funeral of a friend some weeks back. At the end of the occasion, they played "always look on the bright side of death ..." from Monty Python's "Life of Brian". And this reminded me of the absurdity of all our existence and the weight we place on our own experience and even our ethics. The comical antics of despots in culture and nations is imaged and reflected in the comical antics of despots in families, communities, institutions and businesses of all kinds. And I wonder if so much of the rampant neurosis we see in society today is more the product of our inability to reconcile our idealistic perception of what ought to be OR what we would like to be with what actually IS! What if it is this inability to make this reconciling attribute more potent than any chemical imbalances in the brain that makes for our culturally insane society?

Erich Fromm and The Sane Society and Aldous Huxley

It is practically a truism that George Orwell's "1984" and Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World" are not futuristic works but are descriptions of much that is evident today. Orwell's world of fear as a control method and Huxley's "love your slavery" positions sum up so much of what is happening to this human frog in a socially and metaphorically tepid tank water that is continuously hotting up. Either situation is of course doomed to ultimate destruction; taking with it much of the human race! And so we "always look on the bright side of death" as the Monty Python group so ingeniously imaged in the late 1970s.

Theatre simply smiles and flicks the bird at the insanity of the brilliant personages in our society. The discourse of our intellectual gods entrenching the vaccine of indolence towards the deplorables who despise them is providing even wider schisms between the reality of what we see and know and the semantics of egoistic cleverness worthy of a Harvard Ph D! The clever ones who use language as a debasing weapon to construct totally absurd notions as absolute truths in order to placate very questionable agendas; these clever ones who have manufactured viruses to infect the most intelligent minds with perfect arguments to prove the great delusions as being necessary truths; such an intelligent and clever neurosis so obvious to the deplorable minds that cannot process the machinations of slight-of-hand academia will nevertheless create the dividing lines between Orwell's "1984" and Huxley's "Brave New World".

The Tik Tokers and Instagrammers gladly parade their never-ending despair in posts about their meaningless lives while the masters of the ruling elites cast despising glances and eye-rolling at the plain absurdity of whole generations contributing to their inevitable lemming-like plunge into nothingness! The insane society of Erich Fromm's "The Sane Society" (1955) was a companion piece to Huxley's fictional "Brave New World". Nearly seventy years later the largely hidden cultural neurosis of disorder is so evident with large scale drug companies the biggest beneficiaries of neurotic enslavement. And when it suits to label a certain disquiet or emotional response as a psychological disorder, the smart ones and the elite minds of academia are quick to find the correct label so easily contain the disturbance that can erupt if the elite were to see such response as more than some natural response to the absurdity of human condition!

Depending on where your ideological stance is placed will depend on what you consider this piece is actually talking about. While the metaphorical Nero is fiddling and the coliseum is packed for the circus, the real agendas are engaging allies and reinforcing the neurotic society in order to maintain and increase power. The political domain is of little consequence except in the construction of perpetual wars. Academia and academic institutions linked closely with the big corporations hold the real oligarchical power in the Western world. The Alliance with Jihadism while publicly opposing terrorism is the most obvious example of neurotic response! In bed with Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Pakistan and elsewhere, while bleating about the condition of Gaza, the USA and the West, and the UK, proffer financial gain over any consideration of ethics or the human condition. At the same time, the Deplorables or the Proletarians don't understand the mind speak of the elites and just know that their lives are being ignored and demolished. They are made to feel like ghosts in their own countries. Have a look at enclaves like Luton in the UK! Then have a look at peoples' experience in Alice Springs as still alien cultural precepts smugly over-ride any sense of personal belonging by indigenous populations!

So as we create theatre, does any of this ring bells? I haven't seen or heard such bells. Where are the Deplorables in all this? Simply seen as fodder for Donald Trump? Or other hard rightists in Europe? Or simply as a joke in China or Japan? Yet, do people's real lives that are disrupted by the machinations of elitist groups simply not matter.

This is the central question for theatre in this era. Yet it is not addressed nor is it contemplated as a true subject for writers. Where is the Arthur Miller who wrote "The Crucible"? Or the Ibsen who wrote "Enemy of the People"?

Do contemporary writers and theatre practitioners accept their own betrayal of their art and practice by not addressing the most pressing issues of the age? Cultural neurosis and cultural hypocrisy! Is it cowardness or self-preservation? One has to wonder if that same neurosis of "politically correct" conclusions isn't providing the straitjacket of conformity to the elitist rules dictated by unseen and covert shaping of agendas by the Ministry of Truth (George Orwell "1984"). Yet we are all so happy in a neurotic kind of way by the ease of Consumerism (Huxley, "Brave New World") that our main focus is on our sexual attraction and narcissistic feelings fuelled by drugs from the international global conglomerates!

Joe Woodward

How to Deal with the Fear of Creating Something No One Will See

Terror of one's own absurdity ...

The stage is empty. The field is cold. The city is a silent buzz of conflicting nothings and you are alone ... As the Ancient Mariner suggested: "alone, alone, all, all alone on a wide wide sea ..."

Metaphor within metaphor and the terror of being alone with one's own impulses that no one, literally no one else, is in anyway interested! The inertia ... ohhhhh ... the INERTIA of public acceptance and absolutism! The terror of attack from one's closest allies in art as the conflicting neurotics of public discourse converge in an avalanche of certainties like swarms of bees disturbed from their habitats of convenience and sanctimony! And then you write something down on a shit of toilet paper a final draft for performance ... you rehearse and you hope that someone will see, listen or observe! But what if NO ONE could give a shit and you are the lone worrier standing on a marshmallow sea of quicksand possibilities! What then? How do you feel about that isolation and confrontation with your own absurdity that just perhaps what you feel and think and create is of no significance or value to anyone else? And this is of particular relevance in theatre where the very concept is relational! It isn't a journal for personal reflection! It isn't a poetic output that in time others may find and read. It is a here-and-now creative form that requires a viewer and a performer at a given time in a given space.

The Rhino and the Seagull and Absurdism

Ionesco's Rhinoceros is alive and kicking. Many writers would generally prefer to be a Rhino than a wallowing and hopeless Konstantin Treplyov from Chekhov's "The Seagull". Pleasing and getting plaudits from official playwriting colleagues and organisations has a real appeal to anyone wanting to climb the ladder of acceptance in a field that has limited reach. One can predict the likely subjects awarded in any arena. Prizes given by the sanctioned few who appeased the dominant cultural /social milieux are predictable and the subjects of such awarded talent are obvious regardless of the actual work!

Art as affirmation of particular religions, world views, social movements or ideologies has a powerful tradition. You can probably see this on the walls of the Lascaux Caves let alone on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel! Ancient cave drawings and paintings going back up to more than 40,000 years suggest the importance given to creative presentation and representation through art. Only in more recent times has art been seen as a window to less obvious affirmations of the dominant values and consents of the supreme culturally framed artistic endeavour. It might even attack the very things you feel are most significant!

A curious feature of much ancient art is its placement in inaccessible locations; in some cases, almost no one other than the artist could see it! Art works in in the jungles of Borneo suggested that the inaccessibility of the works was a deliberate act. Just as the stream-of-consciousness writer might create for their own purposes, the ancient artist was creating for some higher purpose that we can only surmise!

Since World War Two, there has been an emergence of Absurdism. Most Absurdist writers concluded that no matter how sincere the intention or the effort, the likely result of any human activity is likely to be severely flawed; even eventuating in the opposite of its intent. The revolutionary person merely mirrors the tyranny of their opponent. The ideals of Modernist intent and post-modern semantics in power of any kind results in theatre and art that reflects the Rhino in all of us! The fragile and more vulnerability within artistic, philosophical and social reflection is too often stamped upon by the Rhinos of artistic and social agendas.

Salmon Rushdie and the Denial of the Obvious

In August 2022 Salmon Rushdie was attacked by a Muslim man with a knife; he lost an eye as a result and nearly died from at least ten stab wounds received while giving a lecture.

"Mr Rushdie was repeatedly stabbed in 2022 while preparing to deliver a lecture on free speech in New York. The vicious stabbing put the author in the hospital for six weeks and left him blind in one eye. The attack came after an assassination order was placed on Mr Rushdie — called a “fatwa” — in 1989 because of his novel, The Satanic Verses. His 1988 novel generated massive controversy and Iran’s former Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, declared it blasphemous because of its depiction of the Prophet Muhammad. While the fatwa was later lifted, Mr Rushdie went into hiding for a period before rejoining public life." (https://au.news.yahoo.com/salman-rushdie-first-tv-interview-005706351.html accessed 15 April 2024)

Did you hear about this? Was it headline news that a 75 year old man who had death threats made by the head of a Nation against him for writing a novel nearly forty years ago was now attacked and nearly killed?

How unpopular would it be to do a play about Salmon Rushdie! Think about this. And think about how unpopular it would be to do a play about the employees of Charlie Hebdo murdered by Islamic extremists in 2015 or the massacres in Baga in Nigeria at around the same time.

It would take a Steven Berkoff or someone with the same audacious attitude towards all his theatre colleagues, competitors and critics to take on such projects. Others would likely be ostracised or cancelled before beginning.

And think about why it would be so unpopular! I am not going to answer the question. Though I feel the answer is obvious. Such works would be against the current flow of narratives that select appropriate material. Arts practitioners know the signs and if they want to be successful and choices are made accordingly; just as Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni knew how to conform and affirm the masters of his art! There is nothing new. Yet there is a compulsion on some of us to create from the swamps and cracks in cultural perceptions. Condemned to arts cockroaches one can only appear and disappear as fast as possible.

Theatre in a Car and the Audience of Three

A 1995 Toyota Celica is possibly not the most obvious venue for a theatre show. But four 12 minute performances in each hour for four hours meant that up to 48 people might see a production in an evening. Small audiences, sixteen performances and the risk of no one showing up created its own anxiety. But between 2009 and 2014, Theatre in a Car was a regular performance at The National Multicultural Festival in Canberra. Initially the brainchild of Jorian Gardiner and with the final presentation assisted by Creative Producer, Amy Dunham, Shadow House PITS writer and director, Joe Woodward, wrote and directed theatre works designed for the small venue; later hiring larger vehicles and finally one with air conditioning. Apart from Woodward, actors in the productions included Lloyd Alison-Young, Hanna Cormick and Lucy Boon.

The point in discussing Theatre in a Car was simply to suggest that there is a possibility for small scale theatre that can even pay its way if there is creative producer-ship and innovative practice. Yes! Theatre in a Car was a gimmick. But it created curiosity and had audiences cueing up to get into the vehicle. There was an element of danger and sense of daring for both actors and audience. But it happened in the normally staid Canberra.

Without huge access to funding and to the affirmative aspects of theatre that indulges dominant frameworks of thinking, those dominant ideologies that attract the disciples of whatever mode is socially prioritised, theatre needs to find those cracks in the tables of cultural nourishment.

When I was child in the 1950s, a man would come to our house with his wife and baby child and would perform hillbilly songs with his guitar. My family provided a meal and a cosy atmosphere and a small fee. We all rugged up to listen to his stories and songs. There were six of us including my baby sister, the man and his wife and baby. It took place in Chester Road, Annerley in Brisbane.

So much theatre and theatre practice might do well to think of itself as cockroach theatre. And yes, it doesn't do much for the ego! However, it won't hurt to realise the honour in one's commitment wherever that might be. It also means that there is scope to step outside of the dominant rhino of cultural and artistic acceptance!

Also read:

https://www.shadowhousepitswrite.com/post/cockroach-theatre

https://www.shadowhousepitswrite.com/post/cressida-s-absurdist-refusal-to-bowdlerise-her-own-life

https://www.shadowhousepitswrite.com/post/theatre-vs-cultural-entrapment

https://www.shadowhousepitswrite.com/post/to-believe-is-to-kill