Sunday, January 15, 2012

As Actors Prepare, so Should Critics Learn

Every once in awhile I like to listen to a bunch of James Lipton’s interviews with theatre and film people, mostly actors. They’re all over YouTube; just google “Inside the Actors Studio.” I’ve been doing so this weekend.

What I enjoy is the nitty-gritty sense of craft, of what actors do to prepare a role. For example, in this interview, starting at roughly 17:30 or so, Jeremy Irons talks about playing twin brothers in Dead Ringers (a film I’ve not seen):


He says that, in order to differentiate the two, he thought in terms of “energy point” (his term), acting one brother from the forehead and the other from the throat—but, note, that Irons didn’t use those terms. Rather, he pointed to the points on his body. I don’t know whether or not he was using “energy point” as a synonym for “chakra,” but I’d guess the idea is the same. In any event, his remark was immediately and intuitive to me, perhaps because I’m a musician and, as such, understand something of what’s involved in performing.

Whatever you think, however you think, it all MUST come out in how you use your body. Performance is physical. It’s easy enough to talk about embodiment—such talk has been fashionable in a number of disciplines for over a decade—but you can’t merely talk a performance. You must execute it.

More and more I think listening to such interviews could be more important for academic literary critics than learning philosophy or psychology or even literary theory. That’s all abstract, learning it always moves you away from the work, from the text, off into greedy meaning and abstraction. That’s easy and, at this point, it’s in the way of making intellectual progress.

Critics need a much stronger sense of literature as craft, of texts as things constructed, to precise and rigorous, if flexible, standards. Listening to good actors talk about their craft, and figuring out how to take such talk seriously, deeply, that might begin pushing our minds in the right direction.

7 comments:

  1. I had one of the most humiliating experiences of my life with Nat Bremmer who Mr Irons mentions. He still use to come into the Old Vic in his seventies once a year to take a master class. It was a massive deal.

    We had to do a scene from Goldsmith can't remember which comedy it was. I am a juvenile lead so should have had a lead part but got cast in the most minor comic role as the fat inn keeper, which is well out of my range or type.

    I had the opening line Nat made me repeat it for 2 hours, repeatedly telling me that was awful do it again. Everyone else was furious as they just had to stand and watch while I repeatedly failed. Just before the end of class I said the line all he said was you can play that role now and that was the end of class.

    I thought I was an utter failure my class mates wanted to lynch me. It was only after that an older student noted that getting that attention from Nat was a privilege, if a somewhat hellish one at the time. He was somewhat sparing in his praise. But at the end of the day you learnt something valuable, which is a rare gift.

    I think in the bit you picked up on he may be referring (in part) to how he was resonating his voice. Its how we were taught (we were both trained by Rudi Shelly for two hours each afternoon), speak it and everything else flows and builds from that. It also changes the way you sound, focus on resonating through the chest you get deeper, through the nasal cavity gives power and strength to projection. It gives a lot of power and energy. Throat would be weaker but I have never used that one or not consciously at least.

    I hated doing what little I did on lit. at uni. I think the assumption was that because I was no longer acting I was not good at it and they did not have a clue what my skills base was with drama, they were the experts I knew nothing. Most were unaware I had spent three years training with a range of the worlds top teachers in the dramatic arts and knew nothing of the Vic's relationship with classical and restoration tradition and the skills base they had in these things.

    Training was utterly different to Uni and far more rigorous and demanding.

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    1. I've read various stories like that (your 2-hour ordeal) & don't know what to make of them. In the context of an ongoing teaching relationship it is, in part, about power. In a case like yours, mere power seems rather excessive or frivolous.

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  2. indeed not a power thing. A fair degree of the training involves how to work under serious pressure, stress affects both voice and movement to such a degree. But Nat was a gifted actor and teacher and was doing more than that.

    Its a doing thing, after writing that I went away and spent 5 mins projecting my voice in the two ways Jeremy suggested he used for the roles. You spot instantly where he is coming from.

    English lit students are taught to sit and discuss, it's not that helpful with drama when you have to stand it up on it's feet. Once you get the rhythm of the words the meaning and sense fall into place. Its the old school classical approach to text.

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    1. Did you notice any difference in the deployment of your physical equipment in the two different voices? For example, in trumpet playing, you can create differences in tone quality by varying the arch of your tongue.

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  3. p.s Don't want to give the impression that thought and discussion are a bad thing. With lit. crit. the texts seem often to recede far off into the distance horizon to be replaced by something else. Often I find myself completely uncertain as to what that something else is.

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  4. "Did you notice any difference in the deployment of your physical equipment in the two different voices?"

    Throat makes the voice much higher and very variable in tone almost faltering. I have used it to play an old senile comic version of merlin. Over exaggerated the way you can vary pitch and tone dramaticaly for comic effect and it gave a reedy elderly quality as well

    Forehead much more power confidence, authority. But it's standard with projection to make sure you're voice is resonating through the bones of the nasal passage and that part of the skull to amp up the sound.

    What you get instantly though between the two is a highly distinctive and very different sound and the potential for different emotional qualities to be expressed.

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  5. The sounds dictating the way you move. Even when you start to play with them each one has its own distinctive energy. i.e they more or less insist that you move in different emotional directions straight away.

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