Stage Presence

Jane Goodall

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781134156481
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Artes escénicas

Focusing on examples of live performance in drama, dance, opera and light entertainment, Jane Goodall explores a characteristic as compelling and enigmatic as the performers who demonstrate it.

The mysterious quality of 'presence' in a performer has strong resonances with the uncanny. It is associated with primal, animal qualities in human individuals, but also has connotations of divinity and the supernatural, relating to figures of evil as well as heroism. Stage Presence traces these themes through theatrical history.

This fascinating study also explores the blend of science and spirituality that accompanies the appreciation of human power. Performers display a magnetism of their audiences; they electrify them, exhibit mesmeric command, and develop chemistry in their communication.

Case studies include: Josephine Baker, Sarah Bernhardt, Thomas Betterton, David Bowie, Maria Callas, Bob Dylan, David Garrick, Barry Humphries, Henry Irving, Vaslav Nijinsky and Paul Robeson.

1
THE SUPREME ATTRIBUTE

According to current opinion in the profession, ‘presence is the supreme attribute for an actor’.

Patrice Pavis, Dictionnaire du Théâtre

(Paris: Messidor, 1987)

What is it that makes a performer compelling to watch? We might explain the fascination in terms of the performance itself as a display of exceptional talents, but history is full of examples of stage celebrities who gained pre-eminence in spite of quite obvious deficiencies in looks, technique or discipline. Even where supremacy in skill is unquestionable, we may still find commentators struggling to describe how there was something more than this in the performance, something experienced as uniquely powerful, perhaps even transcendent or magical. It is the ‘x’ factor in the actor’s art. As Joseph Roach summarises: ‘Poets have It. Saints have It. Actors must have It’.¹

‘Its’ supposed indefinability is part of its fascination, and lends a mystique that escalates the cultural values associated with performance. Roach does not directly correlate ‘It’ with presence, but surveys a range of attributes and associations of ‘this hard-to-define quality’: it is radiance, genius, ‘a singular chemistry’, what Stanislavski calls ‘stage charm’, charisma, magnetism, attraction, an ‘uncanny appeal’. Seeking to push beyond this kind of scatter-gun evocation surrounding ‘a census of worthies’, Roach calls for a theory that technically explains the special powers they possess. For this, he goes to Zeami in the Noh tradition, before returning to a range of commentaries from European traditions and offering an interpretation based around paradox and opposition. ‘Actors with It’, he suggests, ‘have eyes that focus both outward and inward because there is much of importance to be seen in each direction’.² Such an approach is subtle and probing, and avoids trying to nail down the factors in a way that denies the mystery and multi-dimensionality of the nameless quality.

Since my concern is with a quality that does have a name – and one that carries complex cultural resonances – my work here has a rather different orientation. Part of the task is to offer some steer-age between the word ‘presence’ and the set of terms associated with it. I will make the case that it is to be differentiated from charisma and has a strong relationship with genius, and that the metaphors of magnetism, attraction, electricity and radiance belong to it as ways of conceptualising its dynamics. Another part of the task is to stay close to the word and to make some particular explorations of its etymological range. Though my concern is not with the un-namable, however, there is a need to address and acknowledge the claims that it is somehow ‘untellable’. The ‘it’ factor is undoubtedly part of the picture. Thomas Betterton, the first real star of the modern English stage, was praised above Vandyke and Shakespeare as a creator of human portraits:

… a Betterton steps beyond ’em both, and calls them from the grave, to breathe and be themselves again, in feature, speech and motion. When the skilful Actor shows you all these powers at once united, and gratifies at once your eye, your ear, your understanding. To conceive the pleasure rising from such harmony, you must have been present at it! ’Tis not to be told to you.³

Three centuries later, the claim of untellability is still being made in relation to the qualities of the supreme actor of the times, in this case Laurence Olivier:

The experience of seeing him on stage was quite overwhelming in a way that’s very hard to explain to anybody who hasn’t seen him. To see him as Othello, Edgar in The Dance of Death, actually, later too, as James Tyrone in Long Day’s Journey, was to experience a blast of sensuous energy, vocal and physical virtuosity…⁴

This is Simon Callow’s testimonial and, characteristically, his gift for articulating whatever is most difficult to put into words gets the better of his apology about being unable to explain. No sooner has he made it than the beginnings of an explanation are under way. It has something to do with technical virtuosity, and something to do with energy. For Colley Cibber, writing on Betterton, it has something to do with harmony and the orchestration of the senses.

Yet the claim that ‘’tis not to be told to you’ is more than mere empty rhetoric. There is always a special cultural power in that which cannot be told, especially if the inability to tell is an indicator of some phenomenon beyond the limits of what is known and definable in human experience. The uncanny, the magical and the dangerous hover at the outer edges of these limits, and become part of the aura of the actor who is a strong presence. Peter Brook finds that outstanding actors ‘have some mysterious psychic chemistry, half conscious and yet three quarters hidden, that they themselves may only define as ‘instinct’, ‘hunch’, ‘my voices’, that enables them to develop their vision and their art’.⁵ Patrice Pavis is critical of this je ne sais quoi approach amongst theatre practitioners, but it has spirited advocates, like Jane Lapotaire:

You cannot teach acting, you cannot. People either have it or they don’t, it’s as simple as that. You can teach them how to speak better, to breathe properly, to analyse a text, but the actual spark that transmutes words on a page into a living, believable human being… is a process of mystery and myth that no-one can analyse. That’s what makes it so magical.⁶

Presence is a coalescence of energy, mystery and discipline. The way these dimensions relate to each other is different with every exceptional performer, but there are shared traditions and inspirations for them to draw on.

Energies

When Goethe states that an actor must always ‘remember that he is called to fill out the stage with his presence’, he begs a question: what is the actor to be filled with?⁷ ‘Energy’ is the obvious answer, but this is a word that carries its own mystique, warranting the longest entry in Eugenio Barba’s Dictionary of Theatre Anthropology. Barba measures the English word against Chinese, Indian, Japanese and Balinese equivalents to create a constellation of terms that draw in concepts of presence, power and the life force, whilst admitting that what all of these terms refer to is ‘an intangible, indescribable, unmeasurable quality’.⁸ Crossing to an Italian context, Barba considers the Latin terms anima and animus in relation to the qualities of energy that are produced by the breath:

Boccacio commenting on Dante and summarising the attitudes of a millenarian culture, said that when anima, the living and intimate wind, is drawn towards and desires something, it becomes animus (in Latin, animus means air, breath). Soft energy, anima, and vigorous energy, animus, are terms which have nothing to do with the distinction between masculine and feminine, nor with Jungian archetypes or projections. They describe a very perceptible polarity, a complementary quality of energy difficult to define with words, and therefore often difficult to analyse, develop and transmit.⁹

This difficulty may be tackled, however, and in training performers can learn to ‘dilate their daily presence’ through sensitive management of the energy fields produced from the breath. Their goal is to achieve ‘the presence of energy in action both in time and space’, an effect which Barba illustrates with three photographs of the actress Iben Nagel Rasmussen performing in a village street in Sardinia. Here, he points out, the presence of energy is evident in both static and mobile sequences, and is expressed through the dynamics of body posture: the set of the head, positions of the feet, angles of the shoulders and arms.¹⁰

Going by the entry in the Oxford English Dictionary, the geneal-ogy of the term presence in English does not include any definitive relationship to concepts of energy or dynamics but there is an implicit relationship through the verb to present, which has distinct theatrical connotations: to show, exhibit or display; to represent a character on the stage; to act or play a scene. Barba’s analysis alerts us to the ways in which theatre tends to convert presence as a state (and status) of being into presence as an act. As a state of being, its associations are metaphysical and religious; as an act, it may be associated with the practical work of performance and performance training. Both must work together, though, to produce the kinds of reactions that have created the poetics of presence in the western tradition. Energy itself must be seen as something at once scientific and uncanny, a matter of both technique and mystique.

Most programmes of stage training, like Barba’s, are concerned with the training of energy, teaching the performer to filter out tensions and impulses so as to convert the energies of everyday life into something more potent and resolutely purposed. Julie Holledge finds specific strategies for helping student actors to fill the space:

The first exercise I do… involves them walking onto a stage from the wings, finding the strongest position on the stage to stop, surveying the auditorium, and saying ‘I own this space’. The rest of the class sits in the auditorium and responds… ‘yes you do’… ‘or no you don’t’. The trick of the exercise is for the actor to control time, relax, and achieve perfect physical alignment.

From here, the detailed exploration of energy paths can begin:

I think there is a lot to be said for the emphasis on counter-tensions in the performing body, contradictions: the overt and the hidden, inner and outer. These counter-tensions that flow through the body, that are never still but constantly in motion… I think it is these transitions and juxtapositions that hold our interest.¹¹

At the level of physiological communication, this is coming close to Roach’s identification of how paradox and opposition are at the heart of the matter, but how does it sit with the high valuation of harmony in western traditions? For Colley Cibber, Betterton’s capacity to generate power is born of his extraordinary harmonic control:

When any discourse receives force and life, not only from the propriety and graces of speaking agreeable to the subject, but from a proper action and gesture for it, it is truly touching, penetrating, transporting, it has a soul, it has life, it has vigour and energy not to be resisted.¹²

The crafts and disciplines of acting in our own time are very different, but Cibber’s impression that the whole is more than the sum of the parts, that it has to do with orchestration and flow, is not so distant from the description given by Holledge. The cumulative effect of training and technique still cannot produce that ‘vigour and energy not to be resisted’, unless there is a quicksilver physical intelligence at work through the live unfolding of the performance on stage. Actors will talk of ‘sparking’ during the course of a performance, but sometimes the intelligence and spontaneous life are drawn from a molten quietness. Janet Suzman finds this in Marlon Brando:

With acting at its best… there’s a kind of inner burn which can’t be taught, and which a talented performer will have, where the detail with which you illuminate your character’s life seems preordained and infinitely natural.¹³

Not all energies are equal, and if, as Patrice Pavis reports, presence is regarded in the profession as ‘the supreme attribute’, some attention to the notion of supremacy is also called for. The energies of electricity and magnetism provide an image repertoire for eighteenth and nineteenth century writers. In the twentieth century, radium became the favoured metaphor. Jean-Paul Ryngaert claims that presence exists ‘not exactly in the physical characteristics of the individual, but in a radiating energy whose effect one can sense even before the actor has done anything or spoken, in the intensity [vigueur] of his being-there.¹⁴

Julie Holledge recalls an interview with Canadian performer Pol Pelletier, ‘who swore that her performing energy had cracked the back wall of the theatre’. This suggests a supernatural force few would even attempt to wield, and Pelletier is an unashamed absolutist in her philosophy of training. Her ‘Six Laws of Theatre’ – the laws of exaggeration and imbalance, the law of the spine, of the expense of energy, of no mind and, lastly, the law of the link in which all is brought into flow – are designed to be all-encompassing. As she avows in her solo work Joie (1992): ‘Changer le Monde. Oui, j’ai cette prétention’. (Change the world. Yes, that’s my bid.) In her off-stage persona she is equally trenchant. ‘My goal, really, is not only to give people aesthetic emotions, but to chemically and energetically transform them’.¹⁵

Michael Chekhov devised a series of physical and psychological exercises to promote awareness of radiation. Typically, these include expansive movements combined with mental images of power emanating from a concentrated core within the body. ‘Do not cut short the stream of power generated from the center’, he urges, ‘but let it flow and radiate for a while beyond the boundaries of your body and into the space around you’. The instruction to ‘let it flow’ is alternated, however, with statements indicating that a conscious act of will is involved: ‘send the rays of your body into the space around you’ and ‘while radiating strive to go out and beyond the boundary of your body’. The power in the body is inexhaustible, and accumulates through expenditure so that by practising radiation as an active, decided process, the actor will gradually ‘experience more and more of that strong feeling which may be called… presence on stage’.¹⁶

To an extent, then, the qualities of presence and even radiance can be developed through training, yet certain performers seem to explode beyond the reach of what training can do for other artists in their field. If we think of Olivier or Nijinsky or Bernhardt as supreme exemplars of theatrical presence, this is because their performances inspired reportage that enshrines a blazing after-image of their original impact. Nijinsky was the ‘vivid, radiant boy’, who in challenging the limits of human physical capability, also presented a metaphysical challenge to the limits of human being. Dancers before him had been described as etherial or transcendent, but Nijinsky set a precedent for the dancer in whom physical and metaphysical forcefields converged. Such a convergence is especially spectacular in dance, though the power that triggers it is often perceived as an inner stillness, as in Lincoln Kirstein’s description of Suzanne Farrell during her time as a star of Balanchine’s New York City Ballet:

Like other powerful artists she invests her own mystery, an enclosed alchemy of power, vulnerability, the control and conscious manipulation of tension. When she dances it is not only a body in motion but an apparatus analysed and directed by operating intelligence. It is as if some sort of radium slumbers but is always present and ready in her corporeal centre; when ignited, it grows to white heat. It enables her to transcend occasions, patterns, appearances. It commands recognition but is not always easy to read. Balanchine has been able to provide a habitation in which this core is fired, or can activate itself.¹⁷

After his reference to an ‘alchemy of power’, Kirstein resists the temptation to push his imagery towards the mystical and supernatural, grounding it in an almost mechanistic terminology – ‘apparatus’ and ‘operating intelligence’ – so that he can draw out the poetry through an evocation of how radium actually behaves.

There is something intrinsically mysterious about radium, so for a culture oriented towards scientific and technological modes of understanding, it seems the perfect successor to notions of magical agency. This may be partly because it is a more recent discovery than magnetism and electricity, which, while their powers were first being learned, seemed like realisations of the supernatural. Dialogue between the performing arts and the energy sciences has a long history, and the chapters to come will explore it further, but the balance between science and supernaturalism never stabilises. A strong inclination one way or the other will sometimes occur in surprising contexts. Brando may have impressed some with the mystique of his ‘inner burn’ but he himself insisted there was no mystery about acting; his interest was always focused on the technicalit...