So much of what we do as artists, and specifically as actors, is to make the environment habitable for magic. We cannot predict how the monologue that we practiced for weeks or months will go once we are in the room. The scene that seemed ripe somehow deflates once it is time to perform, and we are lost as to why or what happened. The best we can do as artists and actors is to prepare enough and hope our preparation can become a home where magic can take hold. 

Lorrel Manning, a colleague and fabulous acting teacher, director, and filmmaker, says his favorite recommendation for actors is “Just Go.” He is a founding member of the Barrow Group who I took a tv/film acting class with many years ago. I loved Lorrel's ease and efficiency with which he taught camera work. He often finds that actors work themselves up so much before they do a scene or monologue that he encourages them to let go of holding on to what they think might happen and “just go”. 

After sitting through thousands of acting pieces over the years in classes and auditions within professional and university settings, I would estimate that 99% of actors begin with a preparation moment. They stand in the center of the room, try to “ground” themselves (ground is not my favorite term but more on that later), usually take a deep breath and exhale loudly all before beginning their piece. Then they act. Even before any words are spoken or action happens, the entire moment feels exhausting. So I want to offer and reiterate an alternative approach as I too have fallen into the trap of the long preparation moment many times. 

As a fellow actor, I have no desire to put actors down. This “grounding moment” is what we have been taught since we began actor training. Taking a moment to find your feet, breathe, and transition slowly into the performance space seems like a great idea in theory. However, what often happens is the pause prior to performance takes the air, the art, and yourself out of the room instead of filling the space with energy and spontaneity - nervous or otherwise.

As a perpetual lover of nature and a new gardener, I have witnessed that the ground is in constant motion. There is always something moving within and throughout the ground with an energy that surges from below which makes connecting to the earth a moving practice, not a still one.  Although the term grounded is used ad nauseam in acting spaces, there is science to support that each person, especially depending on how they identify, finds grounding differently within their specific body composition. Female identifying bodies often discover that grounding or centering happening in the hip area. Male identifying bodies find it in their chest area. So although the feet can bring more weight to a moment, without understanding how to move the energy from the floor through the body and then use the unique passages of centering within our individual bodies, the grounding moment often reads as dead weight. The energy drops into the ground instead of using the energy from the ground to expand and explode the creative moment and space. It is the energy we want from the ground, not the ground itself. We want the earth’s magic. 

Laurence Olivier once shared that one night he walked off stage and people praised his flawless and riveting performance. However, he commented to a colleague, “I know it was wonderful but I don’t know how I did it.” Granted, Olivier was a wonderful actor rooted in preparation and a well defined approach to his work.  But the magic that night was not simply his preparedness.  As Olivier’s comment seems to reveal, there was something beyond him that he and the audience were able to experience. Acting must have an element of creative magic; a mischievous little trickster or goddess or creative source as Elizabeth Gilbert describes in her book , Big Magic, that shows up when we are doing the work and allows space to let them come and make our work even more magical. 

 Actors want to feel safe while also doing the vulnerable and often scary work of acting.  I do. I want the blanket of security to know that my work is safe and ready to go at all times.  That my preparation was enough. To know all the work, time, training, coaches, and let’s be honest - ego (I am an acting teacher after all. No acting teacher wants to be a bad actor!) is going to pay off. I want to know that I will not fail or better yet, that I don’t suck. But guess what? The more I cling to the need to know that everything will go as planned, the less room I have for magic. And if I let go, almost every time, the work (I’d like to call it play) is better. So just go. And almost always, you can trust that if you have done your work on the front end, magic will appear.

I often find that distilling abstract theories down to tangible activities and relatable experiences helps me to share acting concepts better with my students and understand them deeper myself. Tatsumi Hijikata, one of the co-founders of the movement form, Butoh, derived much of its physical vocabulary from his rural rice farming upbringing. I do the same as a kid who grew up running around barefoot in the backwoods of a small country town miles away from what most would consider civilization. I heavily utilize the metaphors of physical tools and practical knowledge in my teaching because the concepts deeply resonate with my rustic childhood. I often compare the three modes of guidance in the acting classroom - teaching, coaching, and directing - to fishing. Teaching is like catching fish. Coaching is like cleaning fish. And directing is like getting all the fish to swim in the same pond. Without a doubt, my approach as a teacher stems directly from one of the most influential teachers in my life, my pragmatic grandfather, Dorsey Wright. 

Dorsey was a strapping man with lean muscles from years of moving brick, building houses, fixing trucks, and working the land. He knew how to fix things and was as gentle as he was strong. He was also one of the best teachers I ever had. With six children, eleven grandchildren at the time, a career as a truck driver, an involved community member, and pastor of a small church, he always made time for us. To do so, he would often say, “Come on” in his booming voice, and bring us along to whatever job he was doing for the day. We were happy to do so because spending time with our grandpa was like spending time with black Santa. He had a huge laugh, worked tirelessly for the betterment of others, and always had some sort of cheeky fun up his sleeve. He was full of life, and we wanted to live everyday by his side.

He taught us from a very early age that tools could be instruments of positive change or devices of severe destruction. You had to know how to use tools correctly if you wanted a constructive outcome. When fixing a truck, we would sit by him while he worked multiple tools with his oil-stained hands. Before doing anything, he would explain what needed to be fixed and the options of how he could go about fixing it. He would hand us a tool, explain what it was, and say, “Ok, now you do it.”. We would try to make the same movements with our little hands and realize his super human strength that made this work look so easy. He would have a sly grin on his face and giggle knowing that what he asked us to do was probably not possible at our age. But he would take the tool back and continue to explain what he was doing, why he was doing it, and what would happen once he was done. He explained the reasons. He answered our questions patiently. He shared when he did not know the answer but tried to impart as much knowledge as he could about the subject so if or when the time came, we would have some real understanding of how to do it ourselves. He often shared that even if you knew how to fix something, it could still take some trial and error to see what worked in each specific instance. He was a phenomenal teacher, and I was always amazed at how I understood something so much better, even if I could not execute it yet, after spending time with him. Little did I know that the teacher in him helped to birth the educator in me who carefully shares, implements, and cautions against certain tools in the acting classroom for the betterment of my students and their personal artistic journeys. 

I spent countless hours “working” alongside my grandfather this way for much of my younger years and gathered many practical and metaphorical tools for life and learning during that time. I acquired the tools of work ethic, savvy, patience, and skill while observing him plant fields of corn by hand and then pick them all, personally gathering  eggs from the chicken coop (I was happy and terrified to do it!), and helping him build the foundation for my very own house brick by brick. However, the most miraculous thing I watched him do over a 15 year period was create our family pond. From nothing, he began digging a pond which grew to an enormous size (multiple acres at least) with massive amounts of fresh water and fish. We would fish in it often and make our dinners from that pond. We would swim in it during the summer months and skate on it during winter’s frozen spells. The pond fed our minds, souls, and bodies for my entire childhood, and the tools in his hands along with the knowledge how to use them made that possible.

For me, those years with my grandfather and subsequent years training at studios like the Barrow Group taught me that teaching is simply giving someone the tools to construct their desired creation. Tools can and should be simple and practical. Acting teachers tend to overstep by attempting to fix a monologue or scene for the student, but this has a stifling effect on student growth in the acting classroom.  Really, it should be the teacher's role to support the actor in working the monologue or scene themselves and empower them with tools and support to do that work for themselves. Even if an actor is in the process of deciding which tools to use (there are so many methods that can work, yet we cannot use them all and some are simply harmful), they are still capable of accessing their potential from wherever they are in the present moment. Teaching is about sharing pragmatic knowledge in a way that is tangible and accessible. Present tools that your students can literally see, hear, and even touch to identify how they can build something themselves and apply those tools long after they leave your classroom. Too many teachers try to engineer the outcomes for their students. They tell students that only certain tools work. I encourage each teacher to make things simple and plain. You will be amazed at how it shifts the learning and growth. All we should do is hand them the tool, let the student try it, share what we know about it, and leave it at that.  My grandfather’s literal toolbox made me the teacher I am today, and that is a lesson I will never forget.

“…(embodied training) is not about discipline or chaos but something that can create an open space of reflection and choice where the trainee can rely on her own creativity where the space for freedom widens...”

— Hannu Tuisku

The field of embodiment has exploded over the last seven to eight years. A number of studies involve the intersectionality and integration of embodied methodologies across a diverse spectrum of academic fields. In David J. Nguyen and Jay B. Larson’s article “Don’t Forget About the Body: Exploring the Curricular Possibilities of Embodied Pedagogy,” they write about embodiment’s role in fields such as mathematics, cognitive psychology, social psychology and neuroscience. In fact, embodiment has been a part of music and dance fields for decades. So, why has it taken theatre so long to catch up? And what exactly is embodiment?

The Oxford Living Dictionary defines embodiment as the tangible or visible form of an idea, quality, or feeling (Oxford). With regards to this particular definition, anything an actor feels or experiences psychologically must be visibly expressed through the body. Thus, character is created. Methods such as the psychological gesture created by Michael Chekov and Stanislavski’s physical actions explore how to bring the inside, out. However, a post-structuralist approach to acting, in a way, gives the ‘outside’ precedence over the ‘in’.

In her article, “Is Race a Trope: Anna Deavere Smith and the Question of Racial Performativity,” Debby Thompson states, “Smith, by contrast, is determined to encourage ‘other-oriented’ rather than ‘self-based’ approaches to acting (Fires xxvii). Instead of ‘finding the character within ourselves’ (as Uta Hagen puts it), actors should look for the character outside of themselves… Smith is developing ‘a technique that would begin with the other and come to the self” (Thompson, 130). In Deavere Smith’s process, the tangible outer work informs and affects the unseen inner being. The body goes first, then the mind. Through the process the two, body and mind, hopefully begin to work in harmony to effectively depict the story. 

Embodiment suggests that psychological investigation actually gets in the way of the actor. Working from an already thinking body and, perhaps, a less-knowing mind could get an actor closer to character than the other way around. The use of the physical body would immediately clarify embodiment of the character without the entanglements of “How do I think right now?” or “What should I do?” Instead, the actor begins with actions while thinking and psychology follow. However, in more recent years, even beyond Deavere Smith’s discoveries, the mind and body do not just work one in front of the other, but in tandem. Thus, popular acting idioms like “Get out of your head” or “Stay in your body” are outdated and even harmful to actor training. (Blair, 11) These directives continue to reinforce the separation of the mind and body instead of working towards their integration.  

Maurice Merleau-Ponty is mostly credited for the initial research in the field of embodiment. His book, The Phenomenology of Perception, was published in 1962 leaving many years between the creation of valuable research on the body/mind relationship and its arrival onto the acting scene. Phenomenology, the study of engagement in lived experience (Tuisku, 42) grounds Merleau-Ponty’s argument that people perceive and conceptualize everything bodily. Merleau-Ponty goes on to discuss how consciousness is embodied and there is no separation between the mind or body, whichever order you place them in. In “The Embodiment of Performance,” David Michael Levin recalls Edmund Husserl’s version of phenomenology as being “…designed to reverse the alienation and decadence of meaning and return to us our natural signifying capacities.” (Levin, 126) In short, he urges the artist to return to the innate method that ‘thinks’ without thinking – the body.

Nguyen and Larson describe a similar concept when they write, “Bresler (2004) defined embodiment as ‘integration of the physical and biological body and the phenomenological or experiential body’ indicating ‘a seamless, though often elusive matrix of body/mind worlds, a web that integrates thinking, being, doing, and interacting within worlds.’” (Nguyen and Larson, 333) Thus, to embrace embodiment as pedagogy, you must embrace the whole person - who an actor is, what they bring to their work, and their world - in and out of the classroom. Even in pedagogy, the mind, body, and being cannot be separated. 

Nevertheless, it is Hannu Tuisku’s definition of embodiment in his work, Developing embodied pedagogies of acting for youth theatre education: Psychophysical actor training as a source for new openings, that provides the most life and breadth to what embodied training can and should be. He writes, “By ‘embodied pedagogy of acting’ I mean an approach to acting and training actors that, based mainly on the traditions of psychophysical actor training, emphasizes the centrality of the actor’s sentient body in the theatrical event, the notion of a human being as a comprehensive body-mind entity, and the diversity and complexity of subjective experience that ultimately remain beyond reach of verbal definitions, necessitating consideration of a non-representational aspect in training.” (Tuisku, 17) Thus, an awareness and collaboration with phenomenological and corporeal dramaturgy perspectives are necessary aspects for any pedagogue wishing to apply embodied methods into their classroom. There must be a ‘letting go’ of conventional methods of connecting with students and the artform from the start.

Tuisku expands later with a broadened, student focused perspective writing, “…(embodied training) is not about discipline or chaos but something that can create an open space of reflection and choice where the trainee can rely on her own creativity where the space for freedom widens... the trainee has a larger scale to operate than that perceived by conventional text-analysis, and she can move beyond the categories prescribed by language.” (Tuisku, 64) Once again, the embodied classroom does not descend into chaos, as many teachers would assume, but elevates the ethics of the classroom and the student/teacher relationship to provide a safer, freer, and wider space for artistic creativity for both the student and the teacher. This type of classroom lives in the grey area and necessitates a balance of teaching, learning, and being. 

Sources

1. Blair, Rhonda. “Acting, Embodiment, and Text: Hedda Gabler and Possible Uses of Cognitive Science.” John Hopkins University Press, Theatre Topics Volume 20, Number 1, March 2010. 

2. Levin, David Michael. “The Embodiment of Performance.” Skidmore College. Salmagundi, No. 31/32, 10th Anniversary Issue (Fall 1975-Winter 1976) pp. 120-142. 

3. Nguyen, David J. and Larson, Jay B. “Don’t Forget About the Body: Exploring the Curricular Possibilities of Embodied Pedagogy.” Springer Science & Business Media, New York, NY. February 1, 2015. 

4. Oxford Living Dictionary. https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/embodiment.

5. Thompson, Debby. “Is Race a Trope: Anna Deavere Smith and the Question of Racial Performativity.” African American Review Vol. 37, No. 1 Spring, 2003, pp. 127-138. 

6. Tuisku, Hannu. Developing embodied pedagogies of acting for youth theatre education: Psychophysical actor training as a source for new openings. University of the Arts, Helsinki, Theatre Academy, Performing Arts Research Centre, Helsinki, 2017.

Embodied practices for actors does have its limitations.

First and foremost, not everyone is talented.

The culmination of embodied techniques in the acting classroom does not guarantee that an actor will be more talented or even good at acting. Nor does it ensure that a bad professor will become a better professor. Embodied acting techniques will only take what is already there and make it better.

I was once on vacation at the beach with some family and friends. One of our family friends asked, “Can you really teach people how to act?” I immediately replied, “No. I can only give them the tools to maybe learn how to act.” I explained how I teach techniques and tangible aspects of the craft but cannot by pedagogy alone make anyone an actor. Some people just are. Others learn. And some never will get the gist because maybe they are meant to do something else. None of that is up to me. My job is to simply teach. I cannot work miracles and neither can embodiment.

However, if a student is not equipped to be an actor, at least in the serious pursuit of acting as an artform, the investigations of methods surrounding corporeal dramaturgy could help that student become more comfortable with themselves and who they are in the world. Tuisku mentions that personal growth is a side benefit to the approach. However, no matter how you explain it, acting is a mystical and magical profession. Richard Kemp suggests, embodiment only helps the magic to seem even more so. He writes, “When I began researching the material that I’ve described, I feared that cognitive science would remove the magic from theatre. But now, I think that it will enable theatre practitioners to be better magicians.” (Kemp, 190) We cannot make magicians, but at best, we can continue to encourage those who are not to discover where they can bring their own magic to the world.

Another limitation of embodied practice is the potential for stereotyping and oversimplification of characterization.

As a fan of investigative theatre, a lot of the techniques that generate authentic representations in this genre can easily be misconstrued. Similarly, embodied techniques rely on streamlined exercises and tools (like clenching a jaw) to transform the way a character is physically interpreted. The silent improv is often used to loosen the actors and the action on the stage. Unfortunately, without proper guidance and context, these tools can be misinterpreted and rendered shallowly.

I worked on a project during my graduate studies where I designed a curriculum or a class called Performing Ethnicity. The class was designed with many of the embodied techniques that I address in my thesis. However, similar pitfalls to performing characters of a differing identify than one’s own prove to have analogous challenges that embodied techniques could encounter in a more traditional acting classroom. The danger of minstrelsy or caricatured performances can easily be created instead of embodied representations of unique individuals or beings. Through their representation/performance of recently discovered natives, Guillermo Gomez-Pena and Coco Fusco spectacularly proved how stereotypes can be misinterpreted as an accurate depiction of culture and identity by the audience. In Diana Taylor’s “Couple in a Cage,” she purports that, “There was no more interiority to their performance of the stereotype than in the stereotype itself and nothing to know, it seemed, that was not readily available to the viewing eye.” (Taylor, 164) So, although the effort of discarding psychology in promotion of physical representation was successful in effectively portraying their ‘subjects’, Gomez-Pena and Fusco’s lack of authentic portrayals was undetectable to much of their viewing audience. Consequently, stereotypes about savages were purposefully perpetuated and not challenged by their performance (albeit to prove a point in their case). However, student actors and unenthusiastic professors of embodied approaches could easily have an analogous outcome.

One of the final and most important limitations to discuss with regards to embodiment is temperament. Embodiment is not for everyone. In the same token, embodiment is not for all professors.

There are acting teachers who like to wield power over students and enjoy the oppressive, authoritarian atmosphere they create. It is what I call an ‘old’ school approach but an approach that nonetheless continues to exist in acting classrooms today. The idea that a student must be ‘broken down’ and built up again is still common among teachers of the craft who learned similar methods in their training. Embodiment is not for these people. Even if this type of teacher wanted to integrate embodied approaches into their classroom, the desire to maintain control over every aspect of acting outcomes, training, student perception, and synthesis of the material would get in the way of the teaching practice, if not damage the student/teacher relationship all together. To be fair, I have seen teachers who structure the students’ learning in a traditional style achieve success. However, after observing talented students under their tutelage, their success in integrating their training is often short lived. They are not able to repeat or even articulate the process that they were taught. Once again, embodiment would not be a good fit for such teachers. Despite the limitation, I believe the possibilities to embodied performative pedagogy are endless.

Sources:

1) Kemp, Rick. Embodied Acting: Cognitive Foundations of Performance. UMI. University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 2010.

2) Taylor, Diana. “A Savage Performance: Guillermo Gomez-Pena and coco Fusco’s ‘Couple in a Cage’.” The MIT Press. TDR, Volume 42, No. 2 (summer, 1998), pp. 160-175.

3) Tuisku, Hannu. Developing embodied pedagogies of acting for youth theatre education: Psychophysical actor training as a source for new openings. University of the Arts, Helsinki, Theatre Academy, Performing Arts Research Centre, Helsinki, 2017.