METHOD ACTING ISN'T ENOUGH

We all want to work. We all want to be paid to pretend and play and tell stories. The world is drenched in popular culture that entertains or bores to the degree that popular culture always has. However, the scale and availability of entertainment is unparalleled throughout history, and is only set to expand: According to projections, in 2026, the Global Entertainment and Media Market will generate a revenue of close to 3 trillion dollars. $3,000,000,000,000 - just in case you want to know what that looks like.

There’s a Mullah Nasrudin story that recounts how one night, a neighbour came upon the Mulla, hunting around in the dirt beneath the streetlamp outside his home. 

“What are you looking for?” the neighbour asked. 

“The key to my house” replied Nasrudin. The neighbour kindly got down on his hands and knees and joined Nasruddin’s search.

After a time the neighbour asked “Do you remember where you dropped the key?”

Nasrudin, without looking, waved his hand behind him, “In my house, I lost it in my house.”

The neighbour stood up in shock - “Then why on earth are you looking out here?”

“There’s more light here”, Nasrudin replied without a pause.

I have just finished reading “Actor Training”, a fascinating collection of summaries of key practitioners edited by Alison Hodge. A decent range, I believe: 

Stella Adler; Eugenio Barba; Augusto Boal; Anne Bogart; Bertolt Brecht; Peter Brook; Michael Chekhov; Joseph Chaikin; Jacques Copeau; Philippe Gaulier; Jerzy Grotowski; Maria Knebel; Jacques Lecoq; Joan Littlewood; Sanford Meisner; Vsevolod Meyerhold; Ariane Mnouchkine; Monika Pagneux; Michel Saint-Denis; Włodzimierz Staniewski; Konstantin Stanislavsky; Lee Strasberg

Broadly speaking, acting techniques fall into two camps - those taught in discrete classes independent of where that technique may be used, and those techniques that are built around a theatrical philosophy, manifested in performances by the practitioners. When was the last time you heard of a theatre company looking to reinvent acting and theatrical form, through experiments with actor training?

They exist, perhaps more in University settings where there is time, facilities and a BA paper to write. But this is not the general experience of what is available to the majority of actors in this post lockdown world.

In Islamic mysticism, the wisdom and degree of trust you can place in a spiritual master is indicated to some degree by the teacher’s Silsila. Who taught the master, and who taught the master’s master and so on. A spiritual genealogy. I am sometimes reminded of that when I hear actors place absolute faith in one particular approach to acting - normally something that is an offshoot of the primary source of acting Method in the west - Stanislavski.

In America you start with Stanislavski, then perhaps go to the first pope Lee Strassburg. But there is a break in the church. Stella Adler and Michael Chekov go back to the source for a short time and come back with the New Testament. Job done, we are told. Although Meisner is perhaps the Calvinist… Lee Strasberg was no fool - in fact the American Method gurus knew that for their own approach to be marketable and coherent they needed to define themselves as a brand. In comparison, one of the few inheritors of Stanislavski’s last iterations of his acting method, either fled or were caught in a Soviet Russia and had to hide the knowledge. Maria Knebel would take selected students into another room to tell them in private about the work of Michael Chekov, for fear of deportation, or worse, from the communist authorities.

In contrast, as film became the predominant form of entertainment in North America for three generations, it is hardly surprising that Stanislavki’s Method was bent towards the screen. This meant an internalised, physically muted style, finding truth in a personal version of realism, that worked well in close up. Actors were not expected to transform, so much as interpret characters through the lens of their own experience and within their own physicality. It is true that in some cases this led to extraordinary performances that shook the viewers, touched by the subtle realism achieved by dramatic films that were groundbreaking in the 70's and 80’s.

However, all institutions were once born of revolutions. The successes of the application of early Method in the heyday of the film industry in the west, in my opinion, has ossified into a semantic based approach to character analysis and performance. Stanislavski was testing and developing his new approaches in rehearsals towards a performance, right up to his death. This despite being confined by Stalin, to his house, whose rooms doubled as his theatre and acting lab. He simply couldn’t stop exploring. This is in stark contrast to the arguments between American titans Strasberg and Adler, over which collections of techniques were more effective. Whilst they were arguing over Pepsi or Coke, Stanislavksi and his heirs continued to invent new types of drink. OK, I am pushing the whole “brand” angle, but this is a blog, not a degree paper, thankfully.

Actors are faced with a choice. Get training in one or more of the widely accepted and proven techniques - thereby the easiest to find - and leave it at that. OR, include seeking out validated new approaches that challenge the assumptions of the acting technique “industry” in its current form . What does that mean? I realised as I read the book, that we are faced with the same challenge of every master practitioner of the past 100 years.

  • Are audiences passive receivers or participants?

  • What is the role of the actor in society?

  • What is the purpose of storytelling - in any medium?

  • To what degree can we be “replaced” by the character, or to what degree the character is a version of us?

  • What makes the performance truly compelling? Is physicality the way into a character or is it mental analysis?

  • How do you combine mental approaches with physical ones?

  • Does acting have a spiritual dimension?

The fact is that each generation should stand on the shoulders of giants and attempt to answer these questions all over again for themselves, using all the information of the day: Combine what we know and what we have been taught, with the knowledge we have such easy access to on behavioural and neurological studies and evolving psychological theory. Technique will evolve and itself will be superseded in its time.

The question that I was left with on closing the book was “where will the next acting technique find its expression?” Theatre? Film? Game?

It is true that the biggest sector of the entertainment industry is videogames - of which narrative video games are only a part. However, as Gilles Monteil noted in our book Performing for Motion Capture, “There is no school for Mocap”. You may disagree that one is needed, and believe a course, or courses, should simply help actors adapt their existing toolset: after all , “acting is acting” as Richard Dorton would say.

The Mocap Vaults, for whom both Richard and I teach in North America, provide a series of sequential workshops with a clear syllabus spread across time. Instead of an intensive one-week course, we see the passage of time between classes as something that allows the actor to integrate and train in the skills and techniques we have demonstrated are required for the medium. Many of these skills were taught in previous generations before the domination of “the talkies”, some I teach are drawn from recent behavioural science. The enormous range of techniques and demands of mocap acting is unlike any other medium I have worked in. Yes, acting is acting - but Mocap is TOTAL acting. Environments, props, costume, physicality, psychology, motivation, storytelling, are all created in an empty volume. It is a Peter Brook Empty Space where anything you can imagine, any transformation into any world can be made visual, three-dimensional, if you have the budget!

As mocap and virtual production begins to be used for film, TV or theatre, the actor will need to have skills to match the need. However, pursuing these skills demands moving out of the familiar light of American Method, Film, and mental-linguistic approaches, to the the less familiar ground of forgotten corporeal skills and an adaptation of modern day revelations.

In short, you are the master of your training and vocation. Don’t settle. Respect the masters but don’t be imprisoned by them.

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THE ART OF LISTENING - IN CHARACTER