Zygmunt Molik's Voice and Body Work

The Legacy of Jerzy Grotowski

Giuliano Campo, Zygmunt Molik

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781136972478
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Médias et arts de la scène
• Subtopic: Interprétation et audition

One of the original members of Jerzy Grotowski's acting company, Zygmunt Molik's Voice and Body Work explores the unique development of voice and body exercises throughout his career in actor training.

This book, constructed from conversations between Molik and author Giuliano Campo, provides a fascinating insight into the methodology of this practitioner and teacher, and focuses on his 'Body Alphabet' system for actors, allowing them to combine both voice and body in their preparatory process.

1
FIRST DAY

Acting Therapy – The Voice and the Life – The beginnings

Campo:	I’d like to start our conversation about your work and your life by discussing an episode which I find exemplary. It concerns the film Acting Therapy. It is a rare film, shot in Wrocław, Poland, in the studio space of the Teatr Laboratorium, the company you co-founded, directed by Jerzy Grotowski. It shows the activity of a workshop you and the actor Rena Mirecka led in the mid-seventies. It clearly demonstrates the quality of your work with the participants, your ability to open the participants’ voices through a personal relationship. I wonder what happened on that specific occasion, because it is visible that something extraordinary happened when you were working with that boy.
Molik:	It is a strange beginning for a book, and I like it. I agree, it is a key moment, but everything is visible there, so what can I explain? It happened in that way because I didn’t know what to do. I did everything that was necessary in order to achieve my goal. My aim was that I wanted to open his voice because I knew that he had it, but he couldn’t demonstrate it, simply that. So I did everything that was necessary, and that was all, and I can’t say now what I did, what I was doing. I did many strange things, because I tried from one side, from another side, and so on and so on and so on…until I had it. There you can see how difficult it is. But I knew what I was doing, and in fact I reached the goal.
Campo:	At first you worked with your own voice because he didn’t have any voice, and at the end he found his voice. So, what is the relationship between voice and the rest of life, why the work with the voice, and what is the voice?
Molik:	I don’t know, but I got it. Now, when I think of what I did, I can tell my work was like a shaman’s work. I worked like a shaman, trying to make the impossible possible. It looked like nothing could be done, because he was full of so much resistance in himself, not to be opened, not to let himself be opened, and so on and so on. So I tried many things, it took such a long time. Usually I never work for so long with one ‘patient’ (here I can use this term), but this time I was very stubborn and finally we got it, yes.
Campo:	When you work with other students, or actors or practitioners, do you use the same approach to open energetic channels, liberating them and trying to find something, to make something hidden appear, like you did in this case?
Molik:	No, I can never do the same, because everybody is quite different. So I never engage with different challenges in the same way. My method is to find out what is the right way to truly approach someone, and this is the only way to get results. There is no such thing as a method that I can use all the time and achieve the intended result. I must guess, I must seek, I must search a lot, and then I get it. It usually takes much less time, but this case you see in the film was a very difficult one, let me say, and that is why it took such a long time. Normally, if I try to open someone’s voice, then I do it in two or three minutes. It’s enough. I just try different positions, on the wall or on the floor, and it’s very often enough, but that time this wasn’t possible. Nothing could work, so I made a kind of quest, into the absolute unknown. It was a case I have never met in my life. Because I knew that he had full voice, but he couldn’t open it. Years later I had another similar case, where it didn’t look possible to open someone’s voice. It was near Bordeaux, Las Téoulères, a studio space in a farm. It wasn’t possible to get the voice out of someone, but finally I did it after many attempts, trying this way, that way, and so on. Finally I did it very simply, I made him run, then fall down, and then cry out.
Campo:	Cry out was an instruction that you gave?
Molik:	Yes, I just said to him: ‘Cry out now!’ And he did, and then later, once opened, it was easy. Once I had opened the voice (later on, because it was gradual) he could keep this voice. I repeated it and told him: ‘Cry out, take a breath and cry out, keep on shouting.’ And he did it, and then I just regulated it, I put it into a normal channel and he started singing with his full voice.
Campo:	That’s something he could never do before. It was the first time for him.
Molik:	Yes, he couldn’t, before he could only blab something like ‘da-da-dara-dara-ta-tari-ta-tara’ with a very weak voice and he could not give a normal voice. First he opened his voice with this shouting, when he fell down and just reacted on this ‘Ah!’ with the whole mouth open. Then I prolonged it slowly and tried with two or three breaths, and it then became normal singing. It was then just a question of regulating this energy and this opening, to keep the energy and opening at the same time.
Campo:	I see that you worked through producing shocks in him, a physical shock, this falling down, and an emotional shock, the crying out. Do you think it is possible to work directly on emotions, to lead emotions, someone’s emotions?
Molik:	No, by emotions nothing was possible. It had to be as it appeared, as it appeared to me, it must be a physical shock, no emotions. I didn’t try that way because I saw his voice was physically blocked in the throat, since he produced a sound like ‘aargh’.
Campo:	The crying out came as a consequence of the falling?
Molik:	It was like accumulating energy and then exploding. He did it rapidly when he heard me say ‘Cry out!’ It was a simple, unconscious reaction, and then he could do it consciously, but first it had to be unconscious. Just as if I had a piece of metal which stayed in the fire, and when touching him with it, he would cry out, but since I didn’t use such a thing, I made him run and then fall down.
Campo:	This makes it clear that there is a deep connection between the physical shaking, the physical shocks and the voice, that stressing the body physically opens the channels to liberating the voice. I have always thought that even if the use of the voice is part of the physiology of the body, it is also evident that voice is also a link to something other than the body, and that is why working with voice can be so powerful. So, in this case you were working with voice through the body, in order to open something in a wider sense. It is an opening of the self. So there is something that opens which is not purely physical What is opened, precisely?
Molik:	The larynx is opened.
Campo:	So it is something always and exclusively physical.
Molik:	In the end, yes, but just in the end. Anyway, the difference between the first case and the second case that I just told you about was that for the first boy I took almost a half an hour – of which fourteen minutes are visible in the film – and for the second boy I just decided what to do after three minutes of trying this way and that way, and I made him experiment with this running and falling down, and then telling him ‘Shout’.
Campo:	What happens when you work on voice with someone who is already open? What happens, what is the effect of working with the voice? Have you seen many differences between your approach to someone who is very experienced and professional or an amateur or someone coming from a very different experience, who never had any experience in theatre? Must they be approached in very different ways, or is it always a very personal relationship?
Molik:	It is very different but I don’t make any distinction between amateurs and professionals, because I am working on the organism. On the whole organism. And in the first phase I leave behind anything that is connected to their experience. I mean, when I start working with the voice itself, I make no distinction between an amateur and a professional. It’s the same, the organism is the same. Later on we do professional work. Monologues and songs. But the first two days everybody does the same. Only singing together. And if there is a problem with someone who has no voice, because he can’t be opened, I must do that individual work, but only with these people. When I see that someone isn’t able to sing at all, and can just express this sound ‘agh’ stuck in the throat with a low voice, then I move on and do individual work.
Campo:	The organism is the same for everybody, yes, but still, your experience comes from theatre, so how is art involved in this process? Your life was, is, a life in art, your techniques, your approach, come from art.
Molik:	Concerning those, we have to talk about something else. Until now we’ve been talking about the voice itself, but now I’ll tell you some more and quite different things. First of all, we must find the Life. Then, only into this Life can you try to put, if it is possible to say this, the open voice. Then, from this open voice, we must move from the simple vocalisation to something like a song. Then you put the text. So this is the way I work, and for that reason I always start from a physical practice. Then, if the body is already open, and very gently at first, I try to start working on the voice, first only singing together, then listening carefully and fixing the harmony. This is so as to not have chaotic singing, but to try to find, together, a choir, a chorus, that just sounds good. I often hear someone just shouting something like ‘Uah! Uah! Uah!’ and that’s not what I’m looking for. He has to make a good contribution to singing together. Like a chorus. This different energy is sometimes very like singing, sometimes it’s full singing with everything fully open, but for the first two days the point is just to work on the breath, on the respiration. Afterwards they can go more into the unknown, when the Life has been found. Everybody finds the Life in the self. The Life is something connected with everyone’s life, his memories, or even his dreams. This is what I call ‘the Life’. It’s difficult to explain. The Life, when it’s found, has its physical and vocal shape. Then it’s not magma any longer. When we are singing together we have just the material, a kind of raw matter, materialising in this common area. After a few days, two or three days, everybody starts to go on an individual quest. Into the unknown. I’m not going to explain what the unknown means, but such a thing exists, yes, and so it is possible to find it. Someone finds it on the first day (I mean on the third day, because that is the first day of seeking, of this kind of research), someone finds it on the third day, and of course someone else at the last moment, on the fifth or the sixth day In this kind of singing the unknown now materialises in the self, in the physical shape, in the body, and also in the voice, because the voice is a vehicle. It brings the Life up from the world. The Life itself....