Michael Chekhov's Acting Technique

A Practitioner's Guide

Sinéad Rushe

• Publisher: Methuen Drama
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781472503473
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Acting & Auditioning

Intended for actors, directors, teachers and researchers, this book offers an exceptionally clear and thorough introduction to the renowned acting technique developed by Michael Chekhov. Sinéad Rushe's book provides a complete overview of the whole method, and includes illuminating explanations of its principles, as well as a wide range of practical exercises that illustrate, step by step, how they can be applied to dramatic texts.
Part One provides an outline of the ideas that underpin the work, which help to prepare practitioners to become responsive and receptive, and to awaken their imagination. Part Two charts a journey through the foundational psychophysical exercises that can both orient an actor's training routine and be applied directly to the development of a role. Part Three focuses on more specific and elaborate methods of scene work, characterisation and the art of transformation. Drawing on the full range of Chekhov's writing in English and French, this book also examines unpublished material from the Dartington Hall archives and features interviews with actors who have worked with the technique, including Simon Callow and Joanna Merlin. It illustrates Chekhov's approach by referring to Rushe's own productions of Nikolai Gogol's short story Diary of a Madman and Shakespeare's Othello, as well as characters and scenes in Sarah Kane's Blasted and the contemporary American television series Breaking Bad.
Michael Chekhov's Acting Technique is an accessible, comprehensive and contemporary point of reference for those already trained in the method, as well as an initiation and toolkit for practitioners who are just beginning to discover it.

PART ONE

PREPARATION

1

The Ideal Centre ¹

‘Spend your power lavishly; it is inexhaustible, and the more you give, the more it will accumulate in you’ (TA, 9).

Imagine that in the middle of your chest, about two inches deep below the surface near the heart, and connected at its base to your solar plexus, there is a ‘centre’. Think of it as moderate in size, neither very big nor small. Sense that this place is the source of all your vitality, a sort of launch pad for your power. Consider your whole body as if ‘centralized’ around this dynamic point (LP, 84), a locus of potential and possibility. Allow an image to emerge and notice any sensations that arise in the body. You may imagine it as warm and glowing, or have a sense of something vibrating; I like to think of it as a bubbling source under pressure which contains a hidden, almost thermal energy. This energy could escape, dissipate or explode but imagine that you can contain, channel and direct it. Allow your mouth to fall slightly open, tongue sitting in the bottom of the mouth and jaw free. Focus on a specific place or object in the room and imagine that the very act of looking begins at the invigorating source. As you observe, picture the source pulsating with life and allow it actively to clarify your vision.

This is Chekhov’s ideal centre. There is no set way to begin exploring the Chekhov technique, but I like to start with the ideal centre because it gets to the nub of the question of impulse. For many years, I remained puzzled and sceptical when I was directed to follow my impulses as an actor. Frankly, I didn’t know what that meant. What were my impulses and where did they come from, in fact? The command to act on them only served to shut me down and left me lamenting my lack of spontaneous inspiration.

My encounter with Chekhov’s notion of the ideal centre, together with a feeling of ease and receiving, both of which we will look at in subsequent chapters, was immensely liberating because on the one hand, it proposed a concrete process to draw on as a point of departure and on the other, it opened up a direct way for me to listen to my own inner life and to perceive my breathing, sensations and feelings. I realized that to follow an impulse you have to hear it in the first place; in other words, you have to be able to listen, both to yourself, your partners and the world around you. Nobody had ever really taught me how to listen with my body or whole being, as it were. There was an assumption that I already knew how to do that. Yet my experience in directing and teaching has proven that it is what performers tend to do least well, or forget about the most often.

Clearing a space

The ideal centre promotes two important beginning points for developing an ability to listen: a sensation of inner spaciousness along with a feeling of calm. Anyone who has practised techniques such as meditation or yoga will recognize something of this feeling. Screen-writer Julia Cameron describes a similar sensation: ‘Art is an act of tuning in and dropping down the well. … As artists, we drop down the well into the stream. We hear what’s down there and we act on it – more like taking dictation than anything fancy having to do with art’ (Cameron 1993, 118).

On the simplest level, the ideal centre creates first and foremost a tangible sense that we have an inner life. It cultivates the idea that as actors we are never empty inside, we are never starting from nothing, or certainly, we shouldn’t be. We need to be in touch with our inner world because our aim in performance is that there is always something happening internally, an alert, aware state of being from which impulse is born and through which we communicate. When we’re working on a play or character, any inner emotional ‘fullness’ is determined by the relationships and circumstances within that story; the ideal centre, however, is a condition that we need to be in touch with prior to determining such specifics. It prepares us for them.

The ideal centre aims to cultivate an almost innocent state, so to speak, one that is uncontaminated by preconceived ideas, old feelings or obstructions. We clear our inner life, that is, mind, imagination, feelings, desires, of personal clutter so that a process of listening can begin. Our aim is to find a clear starting point, like a clean canvas.² It is a foundation which prepares the creative ground for an ideal artistic outcome. Everything we do on stage begins at this source and returns to it. It frames everything we do with a conscious, awake state of readiness, and a sense of potential.

The ideal

Chekhov chooses the word ‘ideal’ very deliberately, insisting that we cannot embark upon any serious artistic endeavour ‘without a spirit of idealism’ (DP, 29). Throughout his life and work he sought to define his own artistic ideal, epitomized, above all, in his vision for a new kind of theatre. At the root of this utopia is ‘the ideal artist’ who needs to be ‘like a powerful tropical plant which is full of quick, luxuriant growth’ (AIT, 103).

Chekhov invites us to get in touch with our ideals. Who and what are the great artists and works of art that inspire you? What kind of actor or theatre-maker do you want to be? Who are your role models? Which character are you aspiring to play? What do you long to create? If Chekhov admired the theatre productions of Vakhtangov, it was because he considered the latter an artist who ‘implemented his ideals step by step in the works he directed’ (LE, 25), in particular, by challenging his actors to rely less on the content given by the playwright and more on the power of their own means of expression, that is, their acting and imagination.³ Chekhov’s proposition is that we engage actively with our ideals which ‘will only take form if you are working very regularly in their creation’ (LT, 54). When we approach any role, production, scene partner, rehearsal, class, script or performance with a conscious sense of aspiration, we edge closer to a concrete realization of our ideal, even if on the face of it, the conditions we inhabit seem far from it.

While our ideals may guide us towards the realization of our more distant goals, they can and must influence our daily practice. The path begins with the concrete reality of ourselves and our body. Chekhov invites us to picture that our actual bodies, however imperfect, are already in a sense ideal, the perfect canvas for our future creations in performance. By regularly imagining that we have a perfect, well-tuned instrument, we will come to feel as if we do have one and begin ‘to make the greatest possible use of it’ (TA, 8). Chekhov invites us to embrace ‘the psychology of an ideal body, even if we do not have a physical one’ (LP, 85). As long as we resist being merely ‘satisfied with a very vague feeling’, it will inspire and guide us (LT, 55). Working with the ideal centre creates the sensation of the ideal body; our limbs begin to take on its qualities of power and vitality, activating a sense of poised confidence. It also lays a crucial foundation for the actor’s later work, the act of imagining and transforming into other bodies or characters.

Location of the centre

A question that often comes up among students new to Chekhov’s teaching is why the ideal centre is located in the chest. We know that it is common in acting traditions to refer to the performer’s centre placed somewhere lower down in the body, either around the navel, lumbar or abdomen. Japanese Kabuki and Nō performers consider the centre to be the area of the hips; Stanislavsky proposed that the centre of gravity is best experienced at the ‘lowest vertebra’ of the spine, ‘well screwed in place … where this so-called screw is strong’ (Barba 1995, 177); Meyerhold centralized the actor’s body in the solar plexus, naming it the ‘gruperovka’, the point around which the body gathers.

Why then does Chekhov insist on the chest as the optimal location? David Zinder offers the insight that when we refer to ourselves, and say ‘I’, the chest is ‘the place we invariably point to’ (BV, 120), suggesting that this area of the body symbolically carries within it an association with self. Pitches points out that Chekhov drew specifically on Steiner in placing the actor’s core in the chest because it is the location of the heart which Steiner considers to be our soul or ‘the centre of our dreams’ (Pitches 2006, 154). It is also worth noting that the ideal centre is located in the torso of the body which is what Chekhov calls our feeling centre, the core of which is the heart. Throughout his work, Chekhov asserts that the actor’s profession is based upon love and that ‘we speak of our hearts because we must appeal to ourselves as human beings’ (AIT, 71); to work as actor-artists involves open-heartedness. Situated here, the ideal centre affirms the actor’s craft as acts of empathy and generosity.

For Chekhov, the physical heart is the most important organ in the body, the ‘one organ through which all our activity goes’ and essential to ‘the circulation of the will and for efforts of thinking’ (AIT, 217). The ideal centre then is situated between the will centre which is the lower part of the body (groin and legs) and the thought centre which is in the head, a bigger idea which we will return to in detail in Chapter 17. In this way, we can think of the ideal centre as the geographical heart of the body, a connecting joint between different parts of our physical and psychological being, between thoughts/head and will or desires/legs and groin. It is a hub where all aspects of our humanity intersect.

I work with the ideal centre located in the centre of the chest and imaginatively ‘plugged in’ both to the heart and to the solar plexus at its root. In this way, we situate ourselves in the centre of our being, connecting not only to our sense of compassion, but also to our breath impulse and the organic process of inhaling and exhaling, of absorbing our experiences, on the one hand and expressing ourselves, on the other.

Presence

Effective use of the ideal centre creates an ‘ideal’ state of receptivity. We become conscious of ourselves as physical and psychological beings. As such it is the nucleus of the psychophysical continuum. We create the capacity to come into the present moment, engage fully with what we are doing and to whom we are relating. It also puts us in touch with a sense of our own power; a short time spent imagining the ideal centre awakens the realization that we have resources at our disposal, if we choose to tap into them. On a purely practical level, it is an excellent tool for increasing stage presence. Other fortunate side effects include reduction or elimination of self-consciousness, a sense of confidence, positivity and ease because we have moved our attention away from our head. I recommend that you also try using it beyond the rehearsal room.

We must practise imagining the ideal centre until it is present all the time and does not require special effort to conjure it up. By incorporating it consciously as a starting point in all the psychophysical exercises that follow, it will become more and more spontaneously present.

After we have cultivated the centre in the chest, Chekhov suggests that we can add the quality of radiating to it, an important extension of this exercise which we will discuss in detail in Chapter 7. We can also move the centre to different places in the body, a characterization tool which we will explore in Chapter 17.

Further exercises

• Sense where your heart is situated in your body, close to the centre of the chest and the solar plexus; pay attention to its organic movement of expansion and contraction. Imagine that this area of your body is gently opening. Take in a person or an object in the room and open yourself to them. Notice any feelings that arise.

• Execute simple movements consecutively while imagining that all your p...