Advanced Consciousness Training for Actors

Meditation Techniques for the Performing Artist

Kevin Page

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138503854
• eBook ISBN: 9781351382199
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre

Advanced Consciousness Training for Actors: Meditation Techniques for the Performing Artist explores theories and techniques for deepening the individual actor's capacity to concentrate and focus attention. Going well beyond the common exercises found in actor training programs, these practices utilize consciousness expanding "technologies" derived from both Eastern and Western traditions of meditation and mindfulness training as well as more recent discoveries from the fields of psychology and neuroscience. This book reviews the scientific literature of consciousness studies and mindfulness research to discover techniques for focusing attention, expanding self-awareness, and increasing levels of mental concentration; all foundational skills of the performing artist in any medium.

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CHAPTER 1

A Brief History of Consciousness and Actor Training in the West

In this chapter, we look at human consciousness and how it is approached in Western actor training. We start with a self-test as an experiential example and add a little bit of history of how actor training, at least at university-based programs, has become and remained nearly homogeneous across the English-speaking world for the last seven decades. This model of actor training, which is based on a particular pedagogy developed in the 1960s, has also come to influence most of the private acting schools and private coaches, even if only by offering these private institutions something to react against. Often, private acting schools are based on the personalities and predilections of individual teachers, much like the acting studios of 1950s America run by now legendary names such as Strasberg, Meisner, and Adler. However, most would agree that at their core, these schools are teaching actors to be sensitive, present “in the moment,” and to pursue some form of “truthful” and motivated goal from their character’s perspective, all concepts easily traced back to Stanislavsky (as detailed below). As theatre director and widely noted trainer of actors Anne Bogart states: “Stanislavsky’s later work is basic and fundamental to what we do” (2006). Thus, while there are many different schools, approaches, or “flavors” of actor training, I argue that, on balance and by a vast majority, these approaches are universally related, at least in the cultural West. Like the many flavors of ice cream, they all still consist of a frozen concoction of cream, milk and sugar, regardless of added syrups or fruits.

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I also argue that this underlying similarity of technique and concept is not necessarily a bad thing. In the 21st century, we have a language for the art of performance that can be shared among artists from across the various schools, whether at the conservatory or with a private acting coach. Even when training diverges significantly from the traditional norm, most actors still recognize and speak the common language, even if it is only used to make a strong critique. The problem with actor training is that in most cases it does not go far enough in directly attuning the individual actor’s attentional control. I contend, and will discuss at length in Chapter 2, that the ability to deploy, focus and direct attention is the only “tool” that actors actually take with them on stage or in front of a camera, regardless of the style or content of the performance. Their training is in the past. So is the rehearsal. Attention is the organ of performance.

Let us begin to explore that notion with an experiential exercise, something in your own immediate experience that you can confirm or deny for yourself.

The Watch Exercise

Try the following attentional exercise. Read the instructions and have the experience before reading on to the next section.

Locate a watch with a second hand or a clock on the wall. A traditional mechanical stopwatch is best. Please avoid digital readouts (i.e., clocks with numbers). If you only have a smartphone, download a stopwatch program that allows you to view a traditional clock face with a functioning second hand. The problem with digital readouts is that they require you to conceptualize “numbers” instead of following the progress of the second hand as it makes its way around in a simple circle. Using a second hand will make this exercise much simpler. If you have no other options, the exercise can be attempted with a digital readout, but the results may vary substantially.

Sit either in a chair or on the floor, so that you will be comfortable and without distraction for at least 5 minutes. Either start the timing function on the stopwatch or pick a time on the watch/clock face to begin the exercise.

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Concentrate your attention on the second hand of the clock and think about nothing else for 5 minutes. Neither remove your eyes from the clock face nor become distracted in any way. If you find that your thoughts have wandered to anything but the clock’s second hand, you have failed the exercise and must start over. Begin . . .

How did you do? If you made it past a minute, you did better than most people that have not had specific attentional training. However, you are not most people. If you are reading this book, you are an actor or someone interested in training actors. How many scenes from a play or film are less than a minute long? An actor absolutely must have superlative control over her attention span and the precision with which she can focus that attention. There are no exceptions to this rule, regardless of training background or philosophy, attention is crucial to every mode and medium of performance. As Richard Feldman, master acting teacher at the fabled Julliard School puts it: “There has to be a level of conscious awareness about your instrument [as an actor] that a regular person doesn’t have to have” (2017). In the most general sense, the awareness of our own experience, from the internal perspective, is called consciousness, and the methods and techniques we use to exercise and expand our control over conscious awareness are at the heart of Advanced Consciousness Training (A.C.T.) for actors.

The result of a disciplined and sustained A.C.T. Program, inculcated along with traditional actor training work, is an actor who is intensely self-aware and centered, with an extraordinary ability to focus attention and respond spontaneously in the present moment. Again, as Richard Feldman explains, “Full present-ness . . . and a point of focus in a field of awareness [are] of the highest, highest value [to the actor]” (2017).

Cliff-diving into Silence Exercise

This exercise will take 30 minutes and should as much as possible be carried out in a quiet space so that the participant can remain undisturbed for the entire period of the exercise. If you are in a group setting, everyone should find their own individual space where they will not have to visually or verbally interact with others during the work period.

Remove all portable electronic devices from the space, do not merely silence cell phones but fully power them down and place them out of sight so that there will be no vibrations or alerts during the exercise.

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Acquire a mechanical kitchen timer or wind-up alarm clock, preferably one that does not make an audible ticking sound. Again, you want the space to be as quiet and disturbance-free as possible.

Find a sitting position that will be comfortable for the entire half-hour. You will be sitting still and encouraged not to move or change positions, if you can avoid it, for the duration of the exercise.

Set the kitchen timer or alarm clock for 30 minutes and settle into your seated position. Breathe through your nose, keeping the mouth closed with the tongue gently resting behind the front teeth (this will keep you from overly salivating). Keep your eyes open and gently focused on a point a few feet out in front of you, but do not stare. Instead, maintain a “soft focus” of the eyes. Do not close your eyes as that may lead to falling asleep. Your goal over the next 30 minutes is to stay awake and alert, but not strained or uncomfortable.

Now, simply sit in the silence, relaxing as much as possible and avoiding movement, until the timer or alarm goes off, ending the exercise.

Again, how did you do? Was that comfortable or relaxing for you? Was it easy to sit in full, unbroken silence for 30 minutes? Or did you struggle? Were you at peace in that quiet space or did you wrestle with your own thoughts? There are no right or wrong answers, but more than likely the exercises you have just experienced have raised some questions.

The above exercises are intended to make several points about attention spans and conscious awareness that will turn out to be very important in our discussions about the actor and the actor training process. I have used these specific examples in order to make my points in your own felt experience and to make the questions that arise personal. Just how strong is your ability to focus and direct your attention? How comfortable are you sitting in silence with your own thoughts? How easily are you distracted or disturbed? Are you prone to fidgeting? If your attention span, for example, cannot be held on the second hand of a watch for 5 minutes, is it sufficient for the challenges of the stage or a film set? As Barbara Marchant, head of the acting program at Rutgers’ Mason Gross School of the Arts, describes her work with students:

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When you start with these very simple exercises where you have to be there 100% for somebody, and the exercise runs fifteen minutes . . . you can see how people waver after ten minutes . . . [T]hey don’t have the stamina to be “in there” 100%, and that’s when I say: “What if you were doing Edmund in Long Day’s Journey [into Night]?” That’s probably, if you counted them up, 60,000 moments that you have to be there for!

(2017)

The question is, what can be done to strengthen the individual actor’s ability to concentrate their attention and expand the field of experience that can be held in their conscious awareness?

That’s what this book is about.

Whether you have trained at a university or acting conservatory, or in private classes with a master teacher, or by yourself in front of a mirror, all actors must learn to control the focus, flow, and direction of their attention at any given moment, on command. Attention is literally the substance of performance. And, while many acting techniques and methods work indirectly, and sometimes directly, with the actor’s attention, I think that they all fall short of what is possible in some way, shape, or form. So, in this book, we will look at very specific techniques for training consciousness, for expanding consciousness, and for strengthening attention and its concentration/focus. These practices can be used independently from work with the voice or body, or they can be integrated into an existing actor training pedagogy. The important thing is to engage in the training, to actually do it. Exceptional attentional control is not something that can be gained from reading or analytical thinking. It must be practiced by an embodied human being over a significant span of time, just like vocal and movement training.

As I argue below, most actors in training are uniquely positioned to do this kind of work successfully. In most training programs, or serious self-taught regimes, an actor is already spending significant time “on themselves.” I will lay out a menu of practices that can be used flexibly, depending on your individual circumstances. However, I will start with the framework of actor training programs in the United States and Europe, as the practices I propose will be most useful when incorporated into a formal training environment where the individual actor can be supported and encouraged over a period of one to four years. A.C.T. takes time, there is no avoiding that fact.

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The traditional model of conservatory actor training most commonly found in the English-speaking world is a Stanislavsky-influenced system (or variant thereof) of psychophysical training with a European overlay of challenging physical exercises and dedicated vocal training aimed at producing flexible, adroit theatre actors equally capable of performing a classic repertoire grounded in Shakespeare or a piece of psychological realism (Wilson, 2017). While there are a myriad of techniques, systems, and theories available to the postmodern actor, there are still general similarities by which these techniques, systems, and theories are imparted. Even when the content is radically different from what has become, and remains, the norm since the 1960s, I hold that attentional training is still a valuable, if not indispensable, adjunct to these approaches. Actors do not take their training on stage, they take their attention into the space of a single present moment and live there, fully awake, for the duration of a performance.

Birth and Dominance of American Method Acting

Constantine Stanislavsky (1863–1938) was a Russian-born actor, director, writer, and theorist who rose to global renowned for his system of actor training and theories of stage performance at the beginning of the 20th century. His books, first published in English and only later in his native Russian, became the central theories behind actor training in the Western world for nearly a century and still hold great sway today. As we will see, a majority of contemporary professional actor training programs are still influenced by Stanislavsky’s ideas or others’ reactions to them.

In the 1920s, Stanislavsky toured America and Europe twice with the Moscow Art Theatre to great acclaim (Stanislavsky, 1948). The realistic and psychologically nuanced performances delivered by Stanislavsky’s ensemble of actors—the plays presented wholly in Russian, a language almost none of the Western audiences could understand—made a powerful impact on the theatre community, particularly in America. American theatre of the time had become dominated by star performers and was excessively commercialized. In contrast, to many of the actors native to the New York theatre scene, the Moscow Art Theatre’s tours were a revelation, an oracle of some new, vibrant potential that they felt could revitalize a stale American theatre.

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A small group of serious performers banded together and formed the Group Theatre in 1931, basing their model on what they had gleaned from Stanislavsky’s teachings and a general egalitarian optimism. The Group was an experiment not only in the types of productions that were attempted but also in the communal working standard that guided them and which, years later, would directly influence the model of American regional theatre and, by extension, actor training. The Group Theatre put the acting ensemble at the center of the theatrical event, as opposed to the starring player; and even though the Group lasted only nine years, its influence would become legendary. Three of the original Group’s members, Lee Strasberg (1901–1982), Sanford Meisner (1905–1997), and Stella Adler (1901–1992), would adopt and adapt Stanislavsky’s work to their own ends and evolve the Russian master’s system into a uniquely Americanized “Method” for acting (Zazzali, 2016, pp. 28–29).

The stories and legends about the rise of American Method acting are well-worn tales at this point and better told in other places. I will touch on only a few relevant highlights here. Group Theatre founders Strasberg and Harold Clurman (1901–1980) and original Group company actress Adler first were exposed to Stanislavsky’s work through the American Theatre Laboratory in the 1920s. Richard Boleslavsky (1889–1937), who had been a member of the Moscow Art Theatre before being exiled from Russia due to the Bolshevik Revolution, had founded “the Lab,” as it was called, and invited another prominent member of Stanislavsky’s 1923–24 touring company, Maria Ouspenskaya (1876–1949), to join him as a master teacher. Strasberg absorbed Stanislavsky’s earliest concepts from his Russian teachers and then left the Lab, adding his own ideas and interpretations to what he had learned (Bartow, 2006, pp. xxi–xxii).

Later, Strasberg would go on to found the Group Theatre as its first director along with Clurman, who became the organization’s evangelistic theorist, and Cheryl Crawford (1902–1986). The original Group included 28 actors in its working ensemble, which would perform in the company’s critically acclaimed but less than financially successful productions. The acting company was widely admired; but as a producing or...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Advanced Consciousness Training for Actors
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 A Brief History of Consciousness and Actor Training in the West
• 2 The Actor’s Instrument
• 3 Consciousness Explorers—Postmodern Practitioners on the Leading Edge
• 4 Why do Actors Need Advanced Consciousness Training or A.C.T.?
• 5 The Distracted Actor—Techno-Cultural Proliferation of Mobile-Digital Technology
• 6 What Does Meditation Actually do?
• 7 Guided Consciousness Exercises
• 8 Mantra, Movement, Chanting
• 9 Core Practice—Focused Awareness and Open Monitoring Exercises
• 10 Conscious Considerations
• 11 A.C.T. Program Design and the Enlightened Actor
• Index