See this as the aim of your effort to describe and redescribe something into existence. The act of speaking and describing connects you to all those who have spoken before. You are a spokesperson for those who have gone before, who are now dead.
Much description is in fact an act of redescription. The Greek artists and dramatists, for example, were not attempting to create anything new. Rather they meant to reconsider and rearticulate what already existed.
Their great works of art and literature were an attempt to reimagine and retell the stories passed down to them. We too are the inheritors of a rich history of human achievement and folly.
There is really no need to come up with anything new. Redescribing what you have inherited will engender all the novelty and originality you crave. Is it possible that art is more than personal expression?
If you recognize that your voice contains all the voices that came before you, then you will realize that when you speak you do not speak alone. All the people who made your presence possible on earth speak with you. When you begin to recognize and understand where your voice comes from and begin to explore this, you will realize how immense that voice really is.
My personal challenge is to access the voices of certain giants. I chose, for example, Bertolt Brecht and Gertrude Stein as my art parents. I choose literary voices, scientific voices, and historical events to which I want to be connected. The art of theater is about living outside your own skin and identifying with the ancestors who empower you to speak.
And this is why the theater keeps on compelling artists and audiences to gather together. We are asked to stand up in the present moment and to speak courageously for those who came before, to speak against the familiar currents, from a state of imbalance and as articulately as we can manage.
O And so each venture Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate With shabby equipment always deteriorating In the general mess of imprecision of feeling, Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer By strength and submission, has already been discovered Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope To emulate—but there is no competition— There is only the fight to recover what has been lost And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions That seem unpropitious.
But perhaps neither gain nor loss. For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business. Anne Truitt O To create demands a certain undergoing: surrender to a subconscious process that can yield surprising results.
And yet, despite the intuitive nature of the artistic process, it is of utmost importance to be aware of the reason you create.
Be conscious about what you are attempting or tempting. Know why you are doing it. Understand what you expect in return. The intentions that motivate an act are contained within the action itself. You will never escape this. The creation ultimately always betrays the intentions of the artist. This secret cause determines the distance that you will journey in the process and, finally, the quality of what is wrought in the heat of the making.
For example, listen to a song. Among the questions you need to ask: Who are your colleagues? When does the art happen? Where does your work belong? Why do you create? How do you proceed? Who are your colleagues?
It is not theater that is indispensable but: to cross the frontiers between you and me; to come forward to meet you, so that we do not get lost in the crowd—or among words, or in declarations, or among the beautifully precise thoughts.
Jerzy Grotowski O Look around you right now and see who is there. These particular people around you at present are the key. They are your collaborators for now. They will serve as mirror, engine, necessary resistance, and inspiration. They are your material and your means. With them, you begin to generate work. Without them, you are nothing.
In the process of working with these people in your present circumstance, you will meet other people, and the circle around you will expand, alter, and redefine itself again and again. The temptation to wait until the perfect situation and the right people are in place before you make your best effort is simply avoidance. Do not wait. Your dedication to the given circumstances, right now, will eventually bring you closer to others who share your own belief and commitment.
If you do not commit fully to the people with you now, like-minded others will never show up. Learn to love, admire, respect, and appreciate the people with whom you work. These colleagues, partners, and coworkers provide the necessary keys to your own development and growth.
An attitude of respect will prevent the specter of neediness from raising its ugly head. Neediness is never attractive and rarely productive. An audience will sense the underlying desperation and neediness. Are needy people ever really attractive?
Are you drawn to a person who tries too hard to be liked? Is a painting that longs for acceptance ever truly compelling? Is a piece of music that aims to sell a car something that will develop a love of music?
While it might be fascinating to watch desperate performers on a reality TV program trying to be the most interesting in a group, there is something of a freak-show quality to the event. This tautology might be entertaining for a while, but it will be quickly forgotten.
Should an actor reach out to the audience or should the audience be drawn to the actor? Which is more attractive? How the actor and audience converge reflects radically different artistic intentions. One of the remarkable characteristics of the paintings of the seventeenthcentury Baroque-era painter Rembrandt van Rijn is the way each work beckons the viewer to come close. It does not aggress.
It does not shout. There is little showiness. The painting does not come to you. You go to the painting. With very little outward spectacle, the work seizes your attention. And once up close, you discover something deeply compelling in the composition, in the colors, in the details, that draws you even deeper into the image.
What at first glance seems like softness or lack of definition opens up to reveal a depth and precision that touches us across the distance of centuries. An invitation is issued. We respond and move closer. The paintings are not needy. Are you attracted to people who want to change the circumstances or to those who have accepted them?
I find that the most attractive individuals are those caught up in a heat of living, deeply engaged and tempting the limits of their given circumstances. Commitment to life generates energy and an inner resolve that in turn creates a dense and attractive magnetic force. Find colleagues who are alive, committed, and engaged. To meet them, you need to cultivate an ingredient that serves as a magnet to such people: enthusiasm. At a dinner party recently, a tall distinguished man introduced himself, or so I thought, as an architect.
Later in the evening, I found myself next to him. He had left the field. Look at what they are doing! So, the question is, how to cultivate enthusiasm? I believe that you cultivate enthusiasm by planting a garden; the garden is your body through which enthusiasm can pass. You keep the perceptual mechanism sensitized and the antennae out. You let God fill your being.
Then, much like Tom Sawyer who convinced his friends that painting a fence would be the most exciting thing to do on a hot summer day, you point to a fence to paint.
You find colleagues via your cultivated enthusiasm. In order to gather colleagues, there needs to be a meeting place, a fence to paint. You approach one another in the arena. Commitments are made. Transformation has begun. And then you share this cultivated enthusiasm with the outside world. Rather, think of these functions as roles rather than specific people.
I am not a director; rather I am a person who can step into the role of director. I can play that role, see from that perspective, and act from that point of view. Being a director is a function rather than a person. It is a way of seeing, analyzing, creating meaning, and contributing to the situation. This will change your attitude to the process. This will also lead to less desperate territoriality about the possession of specific roles. The work, the play, the theme, and the creative process guide the rehearsal rather than individual egos.
What are you tempting? On the very first day of all of her acting classes, the eminent actor and acting teacher Stella Adler told a story. She described how on vacation in Florida, at a swimming pool, she watched a man try to persuade his young daughter to jump off the diving board into the water.
The little girl trembled at the edge of what seemed a great precipice as her father repeatedly encouraged her to make the leap. In the trying, we attempt a miracle. What are we tempting? It means to invite or attract. Tempting embodies risk and daring. A risk is a leap in the dark, a jump off a high diving board and a necessary ingredient in every artistic endeavor.
With no risk or leap, the available energy deflates rather than multiplies. It takes energy and courage to meet an obstacle or to tempt a miracle. Rather than looking for safety, we will attempt flight, just like the little girl jumping off the diving board. The stage is a place where the stakes are raised intentionally. A body is put in crisis intentionally. For an actor, it should cost something to walk across the stage.
In art, every task should cost something to accomplish, and the stakes can always be lifted higher. Stepping upon the stage should feel like jumping off of a high diving board at an Olympic pool.
The baseline intention to try requires you to draw away the thick veil of inertia and habit that surrounds your daily life. Equipped with the incisive blade of the intention, fueled by courage and persistence, and armed with an idea, you go to work.
With this approach, something is bound to happen. Assuming now you are now poised to leap, and that the underlying intention is to try, what next? What are you doing? Early in his career, during the apartheid period in South Africa, the playwright Athol Fugard faced a decision: what to write about. The ongoing apartheid condition interested him a great deal and became one of the possible subjects.
Another option, the Afrikaner situation, was also fraught with relevant issues and drama. Finally, after analysis, Fugard chose to write about the apartheid situation rather than the Afrikaner because he recognized that the issues surrounding the apartheid situation were larger and more complex than the problems of the Afrikaners.
Fugard chose to enter a more challenging and difficult arena. His intentions were clear. He intended to grapple with the big issues from the high-dive of the difficult circumstances in his country.
The theme, issue, or question that you choose to address is the magnifying glass that amplifies every effort you make. What are your intentions? The choice of subject, theme, or issue directly reflects your intentions and becomes the arena in which the match will be conducted.
For Athol Fugard, the apartheid situation posed a much larger problem and arena. His intention, to encounter the problem, became the point. Intentions are also reflected in aesthetic issues. Kinetic art, he suggests, moves you. Static art stops you. Which do you intend? O A true artistic image gives the beholder a simultaneous experience of the most complex, contradictory, sometimes even mutually exclusive feelings.
It is not possible to catch the moment at which the positive goes over into its opposite, or when the negative starts moving toward the positive. Infinity is germane, inherent in the very structure of the image. Andre Tarkovsky O It is easy to elicit tears.
If you want to make people cry, if that is your intention, this is fairly simple to accomplish, because the theater is a storytelling medium where emotions can be easily manipulated and massaged. The question is, what is the value of these tears? What are you doing with the audience? Are you after a Pavlovian response that is quickly forgotten or a complex recognition that sends reverberations into lives?
I weep easily. But what is the value of my tears? Are the tears about compassion or are they an automatic affective response? Do they wash a stained conscience or cleanse or lighten a heavy heart? Or do the tears merely reinforce self-pity? What are the intentions behind the trigger? And what about laughter? Again, is it possible to create a moment on stage where everyone in the audience feels exactly the same thing at the same moment, or to set up the circumstances that unlock diverse associations in every single audience member.
One trigger is fascistic, making the respondent feel small and manipulated, closing people down. The other trigger is humanistic, encouraging disparate responses, opening people up. Personally, I find it more interesting to trigger associations in the audience than psychologies.
The way to do this is to set up oppositions rather than answers. And in the space of this opposition there is room for the audience to dream. I am after diverse responses. I want individuality in the audience rather than conformity. I am trying to find moments on stage that are simultaneously surprising and inevitable. I am aiming for line drives rather than home runs, consistency rather than flash-in the-pan theatrics.
I am attempting to bring thought, conscience, and perspective to event. I want to make theater that would look ridiculous on film or television. The intentions in an artistic process are also reflected in formal choices. And yet, our profession often confuses languages and ends up using the descriptive language of television on the stage rather than the expressive language that the theater does best.
Look around you right now. Are you reading this book in a room? Are there other people present? You can stage a description of this moment, which is what television does best, or an expression of it, which, although it might look ridiculous on television, theater can achieve very successfully.
For the camera, it would probably be most effective to replicate exactly what surrounds you now, the same spatial relations, objects and shapes, identical gestures and furniture.
For theatrical expression, which can encompass subjective, emotional aspects of this moment, shapes can shift and metaphor arise. For example, for an expressive, poetic, subjective staging of this moment, you might be sitting precariously on a high narrow stool grasping a gigantic, bright yellow book while your right hand shakes uncontrollably.
Which do you intend, a description of the situation or an expression of it? Description is prose. Expression is poetry. The theater is one of the few art forms that moves easily between poetry and prose.
But it is imperative to choose which language you intend to use at each moment. Is your intention to describe or express? Prose and poetry transpire from different parts of the brain. Try to remember a nursery rhyme. Notice that your eyes move up and to the right some people to the left in order to recall it. To access poetry or rhyme, we switch brain function. We log on to a different part of our brain. The left hemisphere is usually linked to prose.
The right hemisphere is related to rhyme and poetry. Most pedestrian movement is prose while dance is poetry. Speaking is prose while singing is poetry. To switch modes, you switch brain function. But you can choose.
You can access both sides of the brain to write in the languages of the stage. The composer John Cage suggested that if you want to see theater, sit on a park bench and put a frame around what you see. Your intention makes it art. Art is intentional pressure. The intention of making art creates a pressure. Pressure creates intentional art. For John Cage sitting on a park bench, the pressure of his attention makes what he sees art. In a pressurized environment, the molecules begin to move and alter what is observed.
The director spent hours telling the actors exactly what to do. The actors learned their blocking from the director. The air in the rehearsal hall felt stale and heavy. No art was happening as far as I could see. I guess that the actors assumed that the art would start when the audience arrived.
What is a rehearsal? When does the art start? Does art happen only with an audience present? Is rehearsal a place and time to practice moves or is it a site of collaborative conception? I believe that it is possible for art to occur in the rehearsal room. A director can bring an intensity of gaze that forces the actors to create in the present moment. By treating the time and the space in an intense and demanding way, a rehearsal room can become the site of creation, where flight occurs.
The assumption that a rehearsal is where the director tells the actors what to do while the actors store up that information is simply an avoidance of the actual crisis of effort and concentration needed to make art. The art happens in the midst of flight. It does not happen from a state place of equilibrium or balance. I watched her sitting onstage while others performed. She looked rather plain and ordinary.
And then came her moment. She stood and launched into vocal flight. She leapt into thin air with no guarantees. And the flight magnified her effort and made her magnificent. She became a magnified presence, gorgeous and attractive, a human being in flight via the voice.
She carved the song in mid-air. Lauren Flanigan understands on a conscious level that the art happens in the midst of a leap, from imbalance, this site of temptation. The leap itself is an unconscious act of faith made possible by the consciousness of intention. The art happens when you intend it to happen. It happens when you leap with intention. Asked to choose the play, I carefully considered the context of the theater and its audience.
What play would speak to a subscription audience in the basement of a mall? The play sprang from the biting pen of a very smart and angry woman who climbed her way to the top of the heap at a time when women were expected to be wives and not much more. The play is vicious, poignant, and very funny, which seemed appropriate for a San Diego Rep audience. The characters in The Women are rich, spoiled housewives and their female servants.
During auditions, I found sixteen fierce, diverse, energetic, talented, and expressive women who would look fabulous in s clothes, and we dove happily into rehearsal. Everything went well until the second preview. In the culture of theater, second previews are known to be sobering, and this second preview proved to be no exception.
The audience sat lifeless and unresponsive in the basement of the mall and provided no energy or engagement. I watched sixteen glorious women enact the hysterically funny story with nothing coming back at them. I became, perhaps understandably, depressed. That night I took a red-eye flight to New York and sat stunned and miserable in the plane and considered the dilemma.
What would I do when the next regional theater with a subscription audience asked me to suggest a play? What nonthreatening light fare is there left for me to direct?
I will find my own audience. This worried me. At the time, I was just getting to know Mr. One day at lunch, hearing that we might be doing a run-through of Orestes that afternoon, he asked if he might attend the rehearsal. The actors, hearing that Suzuki would be in rehearsal, grew nervous about the presence of this man they both feared and admired. I, too, became a little apprehensive. As we began the afternoon rehearsal, Suzuki padded into the back of the rehearsal space and sat quietly, not even watching, mostly reading along in a translation of the play on his lap.
As the run-through progressed, I watched the stage in great dismay. All I could see were the mistakes and flaws. With the run-through over, Mr. Suzuki thanked me sweetly and padded out. I called an end to rehearsal and we all went off rather depressed. How strange, I thought.
Joe Subscriber see here? What an interesting cultural difference and a contrast in intentions! American culture is based upon a tradition of populist thinking. We intend that the lowest common denominator can understand and appreciate everything. I thought that since my theater audience cannot be found in a mall in southern California, I would have to look elsewhere. But this turned out to be an error in thinking. You do not have your own audience; rather you address a specific component of the human experience in every audience.
I did not need to move to Saratoga Springs and wait for my audience to arrive; rather, every audience can be my audience, and I am speaking to a very specific part each person. An audience quickly senses the intentions of the creators. An invitation is issued early on in a production, and audiences are free to accept or reject.
They sense which part of their experience is being addressed and what part of their brain and imagination is meant to play along. And this, in turn, I ask of the audience. I ask for them to attend with heightened sensibilities and discrimination. This is now my conscious intention. I work internationally because each and every time I leave the country I am confronted with my own assumptions about what the theater means and how it functions.
When in Japan, around Tadashi Suzuki, the lessons are particularly poignant. I am faced with these assumptions because his notions of all these aspects of the theater are different than mine. The differences in assumptions are personal and they are cultural. And so, in Japan, I must continually examine my inherited assumptions and decide what I want to keep or discard and what I want to reexamine. My intentions are brought into question. Your lifetime is the process of locating them.
You cannot predetermine who they are or when or where they will show up. You clarify your intentions and then do the work. The depth of your reasons for action influences the quality of the act as well as the energy of engagement.
The why determines the value of the what. For this reason, it is essential to examine the reasons that motivate you. Stay close to the why. Why do you choose a particular play? How heartfelt is your drive? Why is this action necessary? The why forms the pedestal upon which the work rests and not only predetermines the persistence of your action, but also guides your hand and gives force to the outcome.
My friend Morgan Jenness admired Mother Teresa, now Blessed Mother Teresa, and at difficult personal junctures, the mere thought of her provided inspiration.
One day, feeling especially depressed about her sense of uselessness in the world, Morgan heard that Mother Teresa would be in Manhattan. She dropped everything and headed to the Indian Embassy in the hope that she might appear. Standing outside the embassy, Mother Teresa did emerge, surrounded by an entourage, and Morgan managed to capture her attention.
In my country there is a famine of the body. In your country there is a famine of the spirit. And that is what you must feed. She offers their plays and their efforts the full force of her attention and intelligence. The basic sturdiness of her concern and intentions are always crystal clear and palpable. When you know what the point is, what your intentions are, then all other decisions radiate from this fundamental core, this reason to act.
I like to think that Morgan Jenness functions in the world as effectively and generously as she does because her intentions are of the spirit. Her intentions create the pedestal from which she acts. The pedestal gives her action solidity and force. It is also possible to discuss the intentions of an entire collective or collaborative team.
The members of SITI Company, for example, agree upon certain basic tenets or core values that animate action and change. We agree on the why. When you know what the point is, what your intentions are, then all of the decisions can be made based upon these agreements. Every year we reexamine the mission to make sure that it still feels right. If the mission is lucid enough, then the day-to-day, moment-to-moment decisions, however large or small, are possible because of the clarity of the central intentions of the organization.
Even questions such as where to put the garbage or how to design an office layout emerge from the central agreement shared by a group of people. A basic understanding about the intentions behind an endeavor supports collective action. Even if a member does not agree with a decision, at least there is an understanding about why the choice is made. Ownership in the why is central to positive collective action.
It was the road trips that consolidated the ensemble and brought the idea of building a theater—an annex of a seventeenth-century manor house and a historic mill near Lublin where the company resides to this day. The company trained hard, running 10 miles every morning regardless of weather conditions, combining rigorous physical and vocal training with rehearsal and production.
Besides making theatrical productions, their main work was to conduct research into folk culture and ethnic and anthropological studies. Each year, the company loaded several carts drawn by oxen and headed out to the small outposts of Poland to a find a primarily peasant audience.
Upon reaching a village, the company offered a performance for the villagers if, in return, the villagers would perform too. If the villagers agreed, Gardzienice set up to perform their show. They sang and danced for the community in the hopes that in return the villagers would share their ancient melodies, dances, and nearly forgotten stories. Documentary filmmaker Mercedes Gregory made a film about Gardzienice before she died tragically of cancer in She traveled with the company and recorded their forays into scattered villages.
At the end of a performance, the actors always turned to the audience and asked for a presentation in return. At this moment, Staniewski stopped the film, pointed at the two women, and stated emphatically that this little interaction encapsulated the reason his theater company existed. Everything that they did, all the training, all the daily sacrifices were done in order for these two women to remember a song. The intention, the why, is precise and heartfelt. They believed in the power of memory and culture.
Their findings during those experiences in the Polish hinterlands became a basis for their approach to acting and understanding of traditional folk cultures. They reached for humanitarian and spiritual values through hard work, music, movement, words, theatrical space, and an emphasis on indigenous culture. They found, cultivated, and restored expressions and techniques through the songs and dances from earlier times.
Art is an act of the spirit. Enter the email address you signed up with and we'll email you a reset link. Need an account? Click here to sign up. Download Free PDF. By Anne Bogart. New York: Routledge, ; pp. Ofer Ravid. A short summary of this paper. Download Download PDF. Translate PDF. Well, it is and it is not. Actors will definitely find it useful, although it is not an acting handbook and does not illustrate acting techniques.
In it she urges theatre artists—actors, directors, writers, designers—to make art that matters. In the introduction, Bogart expresses her urgent need to intensify the way her art affects the audience and to empower others to do the same. This sense of urgency in the face of trying times underlies the entire book. Each one of the eight chapters focuses on an element that influences the artistic process in theatre: Context, Articulation, Intention, Attention, Magnetism, Attitude, Content, and Time.
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