KLVF Additional Articles
THE BODY TRAINING OF MOSHE FELDENKRAIS By Kristin Linklater
Published in THE DRAMA REVIEW Volume 16 Number 1 (T-53) March 1972
In October 1971, Moshe Feldenkrais came to the United States to give seminars in body training at the Esalen Institute, at Carnegie Mellon, and at the School of the Arts at New York University. The interest shown in his work by these institutions reflects an important change of emphasis in the area of movement training for actors. The choice, put simply, is between training the body to perform skillfully as a well-exercised, aesthetically pleasing physical instrument, and freeing the body of its habitual tensions programmed patterns of behavior, so that it can respond uninhibitedly to impulse, and genuinely reflect individual imagination and emotion. There is a trend away from the use of the formal disciplines of ballet, modern dance and classical mime as exercises. Actors are turning to Yoga classes, are being Rolf’d, are taking Alexander classes and T’ai Chi. The search for a psycho-physical approach to body-training found a temporary answer when Grotowski's exercises became available, but, although ‘the cat’ has remained a popular warm up, most of the exercises he developed for his company were too esoteric in their detail and philosophy to survive a cultural transplant to this country.
Moshe Feldenkrais has spent a lifetime (he is 75), exploring the physiological and psychological make-up of humans. He was a physicist until he was 40 and has brought this scientific training to bear on the question of how we learn, how we unlearn and how we re-learn. He worked with F. Matthias Alexander, became a judo black belt, and studied Yoga, Freud, Gurdjieff and neurology. He has several thousand exercises for the body, and does not believe in repetition of exercises to develop muscle. In his classes in Tel Aviv, Feldenkrais may spend an hour on an exercise and not do it again for a year. He works to establish or re-establish connections between the motor cortex and the musculature that have been short-circuited or re- routed by bad habits, tensions, and psychological or environmental influences, etc. The aim is a body that is organized to move with minimum effort and maximum efficiency, not through increased muscular strength, but increased consciousness of how it works.
There is innate physical strength in a body that is functioning normally, and it must be noted that ‘normal’ is not to be confused with ‘average. ’ Average functioning in nearly all human beings is sub-normal. Mind-body unity is the basis of the approach; subtlety and heightened awareness are the conditions of work, and the exercises are never goal-oriented. ‘If it hurts, don't do it. ’ ‘Never do more than you can do within the limits of pleasure. ’ ‘Waste your time. ’ These are the instructions given with every movement. The process releases the mind from its habitual ‘I can't’ response and denies it the programmed follow-up of: ‘But if I really try, if I compete, if I push and pull and welcome the pain, I can make it. ’ The result, though merely a by-product of this process, is nearly always a surprising achievement way beyond what one had thought possible. The reward for sacrificing pain is to find within the mind and body an infinite potential for mobility waiting to be released.
There is no uniform standard to be achieved; the individual discovers his own unique physical behavior free from habitual tensions and free from lifelong conditioning. In his book Body and Mature Behavior, Feldenkrais describes ‘successful action’ as that which is performed with the least exertion from a potent state of mind and body. This ‘potent state’ is described as ‘a special pattern of nervous activity, in conjunction with a muscular configuration and a corresponding pattern of vegetative impulses, in which the capacity and liberty of the frame to attempt and realize any act is at its greatest. ’ He goes on: 1 As no segment of the body can be moved without adjustment of all the others to a new configuration, the description of any act must necessarily be extremely cumbersome. Any act involves so many muscles and so complete an activity, that it is more useful to describe the function than the mechanism. And this is: (1) that the proper posture of the body is such that it can initiate movement in any direction with the same ease; (2) that it can start any movement without a preliminary adjustment; 3) that the movement is performed with the minimum of work, i.e., with the maximum of efficiency. To arrive at this state implies a re-adjustment that cannot be only physical—sensory, intellectual, emotional and somatic responses are indivisible. The structure of the nervous system is such that it is hard to imagine purely sensory, or motor or vegetative impulses. The most abstract thought has emotional-vegetative and sensory-motor components. Abstract thinking is possible only in conjunction with a special configuration or pattern or state of the body. The whole nervous system, therefore, participates in every act, whether it is easily observable or not is only a matter of what and how to observe. How an actor works on his body will determine the degree of wholeness and spontaneity it has as a communicative instrument. The more sensitive the instrument, the more subtle the communication. The synthesis of thoughts, feelings, senses and muscles makes for easy power.
To give an idea of Feldenkrais’ approach, I will try to communicate some of the work he did during the series of seminars in which I participated. The first exercise that I will describe was done standing. We were asked to shift the weight to the left leg and to begin caressing the outside of the right thigh with the right hand at the most easily accessible point, not trying to reach lower than was comfortable. As the hand went down, the weight was rocked onto the ball of the right foot with the right knee flexing and the right heel lifting. As the hand came up, the heel was lowered, the knee straightened, and an easy rocking motion began with the focus on the pleasant, very slow, circular caresses of hand on thigh. We were asked whether we were holding back any part of the body that wanted to go with the motion, and I realized that, though my head was bent forward as I watched my hand, I was stiff in my waist. Letting go the muscles I was holding, the top of my body began to go with the rocking, following the circular movements of my hand, and immediately the circle became larger so that I was caressing an area down to my knee— comfortably and pleasantly.
Next we were asked to continue the hand movements but to rock the weight back onto the left foot, knee flexing, with the toes of the right foot lifting as high as possible off the floor, leaving the heel down and letting the right knee straighten. Rocking back to center, the weight came onto both feet. It was the same rhythmic movement, the same absorbed examination of what was giving and yielding in the body and what was resisting. It became clear to me, when asked to check the pelvic girdle, that if it let go it would move to the left as I bent to the right, and when I let that happen I found I was caressing as low down as my calf with no reaching or strain. The hand was slowly describing a long ellipse from the top of the thigh when upright to the mid-calf.
For a long time, we alternated the two rocking movements—first with the right heel raised, then the right toes raised-interspersed with periods of walking around the room to feel how the sensations developing in the right side of the body differed from the left. No guidelines were given on what we should feel—nothing was labeled ‘right’ or ‘wrong. ’ 2
Using the same weight-shifting process, we then added the left hand caressing the inside of the right thigh and leg to the right hand movements. (My right leg was feeling very pampered.) It was suggested that, if it could be done without any strain or effort, we should touch the right knee with our lips. I found that by then my hands were stroking my ankles on the downward movement so that to kiss my knee every now and then on the way was simple—and rather nice. We had been continuously rocking, bending, stroking, and occasionally walking for about 30 minutes—all on the right leg. The next suggestion was that if we gave in a little bit more we might let our hands stroke the sole of the right foot on the circular caress. It was very simple to do. The movement now took in the whole length of the leg and involved the whole body in diagonal, lateral, and vertical movements.
Finally, we abandoned the stroking and, with legs straight, hung head-downwards, letting the hands touch the floor wherever it was easy. There was to be no stretching, reaching or trying. I have never been able to touch the floor with my legs straight, and I found that I could easily let my palms or wrists rest on the floor without strain. When we straightened up and walked, there was an extraordinary sense of lightness in the torso, ease in the legs and a balanced alignment through the ribcage and shoulders. Feldenkrais said that he preferred to work on one side of the body throughout a class and the other side the next day. Because there were contrasting sensations in each side, my physical awareness increased. This helped me to combat the urge to push and strain for what I thought was the aim of the exercise. So automatic is goal-oriented work that one doesn't recognize effort, as such, until led to a heightened state of awareness where subtle energy differences can be perceived.
What had happened in the course of 30 to 40 minutes was that our back muscles had slowly released while our attention was elsewhere. While the focus was on the hand and leg, the back was decontracting and limbering. The emphasis on back muscles in all Feldenkrais' work, his point being that their great intrinsic strength must be tapped for efficient body usage. For the actor this is of paramount importance as it takes effort away from the complex, delicate structure of the abdominal muscles, leaving them free to allow natural, relaxed breathing.
The other process that was applied to several exercises and should therefore be described was, in my experience, unique. Having worked in slow, gentle detail through a gradually building series of movements on the right side of the body for about half an hour, we closed our eyes and, transferring attention to the left side of the body, thought through the same series of movements without doing them. This took perhaps half the time of the original physical activity but had to be imagined very fully as being done, not just thought about, so that messages from the brain seemed to travel through the body without, however, culminating in any action.
It was found that having limbered up the motor cortex by thinking the preparatory exercises, through the left side of the body one could then perform the action physically on the left as easily as had been achieved on the right with muscular preparation. For instance, the aim of one of these series of movements was revealed to be that we should be able to wrap a leg around the back of the neck. We did it sitting on the floor, and although I, personally, only arrived at placing my right foot on top of my head, that was amazing enough. Forty minutes of complex, detailed, gentle work had resulted in that moment when, for the first time in my life, I felt my hair with the sole of my foot. We then merely thought through the whole series on the left side; after 15 or 20 minutes I lifted my left foot and placed it on top of my head.
For me, one remarkable aspect of the work was that I experienced no stiffness or soreness after any of the sessions, though my body had been taken through totally new configurations for well over an hour each time. It is clear that the mind can take over much of the work that the body 3 claims automatically, but not necessarily efficiently; that thinking muscles perform with great economy, and that the unifying of mind and body on a deep level is essential to change body habits. In his book, Feldenkrais describes ‘learning, or the acquisition of new responses’ as ‘a normal and suitable activity for the human brain’ and goes on to point out that: …this great ability to form individual nervous paths and muscular patterns makes it possible for faulty functioning to be learned. The earlier the fault occurs, the more ingrained it appears, and is. Faulty behavior will appear in the executive motor mechanisms, which will seem later, when the nervous system has grown fitted to the undesirable motility, to be inherent in the person and unalterable. It will remain largely so unless the nervous paths producing the undesirable pattern of motility are undone and reshuffled into a better configuration. His exercises constitute this reshuffling process, and although his work is not aimed specifically at the actor, two areas seem particularly relevant to the actor’s needs.
One, obviously, is in the release of limiting, habitual tensions and the opening up of the body to receive new messages and respond to new impressions without new tensions. The other is in shifting physical controls from the forebrain (or ‘new’ brain) so that the reflex actions of the ‘old’ brain can organize the body on a level far deeper than we can legislate intellectually. This means that animal connections can be re-established between instinctive emotional impulses and muscles that reflexively react to them. To have immediate access to emotional sources and to allow emotional energy to flow unblocked through a free body demands some re-ordering of the brain's priorities. Feldenkrais offers a detailed road map with which to explore one's territory and make conscious decisions about its use.
Anecdotal speculation on Iris Warren’s pedagogical history: Kristin Linklater’s personal reverie.
There’s a blank space behind Iris Warren where there should be an identifiable lineage of influence and a pedagogical track record. Yes - we know that before LAMDA she had her own private studio and taught at the London Theatre Studio and at the Old Vic Theatre School with Michel St Denis in the late 1940s early ‘50s. Am I right in thinking that her name appears in the Central School archives showing that she trained under Fogerty and/or Thurburn? But where did she encounter the idea that the voice was a human instrument rooted in the emotions, not just a musical instrument to be tuned and played? After all, this was long before the words psychology, psychotherapy and psycho-physical were part of our everyday language.
I don’t know how the apocryphal story about Iris having had an affair with a Freudian psychoanalyst in the 1930s arose but it is one I have repeated with variations in order to have some sort of backstory for the quite remarkable transformation she effected from voice training as a technical skill to its connection with the creative art of acting. She was not an actor, she seemed very down-to-earth and practical and when she was not teaching she was gardening. A fervent gardener, many of her teaching images were horticultural. She said that teaching was like gardening - clearing the weeds, digging fresh beds for planting. I don’t recall her talking about emotions or psychology but I’m sure she spoke about “truth” and the word “centre” was certainly part of her vocabulary. If someone cried in her class she considered it a problem with her teaching - she’d gone too far too soon. Where did she learn that voice comes from the inside out? Who was her guide?
When the movie The King’s Speech came out in 2010 many Linklater teachers were delighted to see a speech tutor teaching the then Duke of York how to loosen his jaw by clenching his hands together in front of his body and shaking them vigorously thus releasing the jaw muscles. The tutor was Australian and his name was Lionel Logue. He was played by the Australian actor Geoffrey Rush. We were pleased because we claim that loosening device as ours. Looking for 6 degrees of separation from Rush and thereby magically from Logue (magic dust for those extra degrees) I thought that perhaps Rush had suggested a technique he had learned from his own voice training as an actor. At that time one of NIDA’s voice teachers was Bill Pepper who had brought some of our voice work to NIDA from an early workshop at Shakespeare & Company at which Fran Bennett and I were teaching. But Rush did not train at NIDA. Dead end to those degrees of separation. Mind you, he played Waiting for Godot with Mel Gibson - Mel Gibson trained at NIDA. Backstage one evening - warming-up?
I loved the idea that Lionel and Iris might have shared jaw-loosening procedures. But of course this was a movie made in the 21st century with Geoffrey Rush suggesting how Colin Firth might shake the tension out of his jaw. And the clasped-hands jaw-shake came in in the 1960s with Fran Bennett (3rdgeneration Iris…)
Fran Bennett tells me: I discovered the jaw-hand-shake decades ago while at the Guthrie. I was shaking some fiber in a quart jar and discovered my jaw was also shaking as I was shaking the jar. I taught it to people at Shake & Co and any otherplace or people I have worked with. It is an advanced jaw shake, as most people use too much arm muscle when doing it.
Well - imagination can run riot…fact and fiction can result in fable.
Fact: Logue was teaching in London at much the same time as Iris.
I think it was the jaw-shake that prompted me to look further.
I wanted to know more about Lionel Logue - an Australian “elocution” teacher born in Adelaide. And once I found out about Logue’s life and the seminal influences on his work I thought Logue was a more likely influence on Iris than a mythical Freudian analyst. He was born in 1880 and died in 1953 ten years before Iris’s death in 1963. He was 73 years old when he died, Iris was 63. There were twenty years between their ages but they were contemporaneous.
A book written by Lionel’s grandson, Mark Logue, was published soon after the film came out which contained the following interesting information:
Settling in Perth, Logue taught elocution, public speaking and acting. He staged plays, recited Shakespeare and Dickens at concerts, and founded a public-speaking club. He also taught part time at the Young Men's Christian Association, at Scotch College and, from 1910, at Perth Technical School. In the following year he toured the world. A Christian Scientist, Logue was dedicated to healing. In World War I he treated returned soldiers afflicted with speech impediments caused by shell-shock. Using humour, patience and 'superhuman sympathy', he taught them exercises for the lungs and diaphragm, and to breathe sufficiently deeply to complete a sentence fluently.
Mark Logue’s book offers a lead to a connection with Iris. Quoting a journaIist called Michael Thornton he says that the initial connection between the Duke of York and Lionel Logue was made by Evelyn Laye. She was a major West End musical theatre star and a renowned beauty and the Duke of York was infatuated with her:
Evelyn Laye became the Duke of York's 's favorite actress when he saw her perform in a West-End production of "The Shop Girl." At the time, Laye (whose nickname was "Boo") was nineteen years old. She went on to become one of Britain's most acclaimed actresses.
When Laye encountered problems with her singing, she sought the help of Lionel Logue. Mark Logue provides the background in his book, The King's Speech:
According to Michael Thornton, a writer and long-term friend of Laye, the singer sought the advice of Logue, who diagnosed incorrect voice production and prescribed some deep breathing exercises relating to the diaphragm - which quickly relieved her problems. Laye was deeply impressed. (Logue, The King's Speech, page 63.)
Boo Laye may also have been the person who first suggested that the Duke seek help from Logue:
...in the summer of 1926, when she met the Duchess of York and their conversation turned to the forthcoming trip to Australia and all the speeches that the Duke would have to make there, Laye recommended Logue.
"The Duchess listened with great interest and asked if she would let them have Mr. Logue's details," recalls Thornton. "The Duchess appeared to consider it a point of great importance that Lionel Logue was an Australian and that she and the Duke were going to Australia." Soon afterwards, Laye called Patrick Hodgson, the Duke's private secretary, and gave him Logue's telephone number. (Logue, The King's Speech, page 63.)
In Michael Thornton’s article (Daily Mail 2009) it is Evelyn Laye who guided the king (originally Prince Albert, he was known as Bertie to friends and family) to Lionel Logue and indeed coached him herself. I leave it to others to speculate about the ‘West End rehearsal studio’ - (see below)….might Iris have lent a hand?
Evelyn Laye, seeing how much Bertie dreaded public speaking, recommended to his private secretary, Patrick Hodgson, the services of the London-based Australian speech therapist, Lionel Logue.
Later, in the utmost secrecy, Laye herself took a hand in trying to cure the Duke of York's stammer. She would invite him, incognito, to a West End rehearsal studio where she would give him deep breathing exercises, after which they would both sing his favourite Evelyn Laye songs, including I'll See You Again and Love is A Song (But Two Must Sing It).
Of course, the official version is as follows:
Resolved to find some way to manage his stammer, the Duke engaged Logue in 1926 after being introduced to Logue by Lord Stamfordham (see Lionel Logue - Wikipedia)
I wish I knew when Evelyn Laye began working with Iris but she was a client for decades and continued her sessions probably till Iris’s death. I remember Iris speaking affectionately and with pride about her. Iris had a beautiful studio in the Wigmore Hall building and she gave private lessons to many leading West End actors - (including Vivien Leigh.)
Isn’t it obvious that Laye would speak to Iris about Logue?
Now - let’s jump forward to January 2019. We are well into week three of Teacher Training Part One in Orkney. Attending Designated Linklater Teachers are Mary Irwin, Alexandra Whitham, John Wild and the redoubtable Fran Bennett. Fran, as you know, was in my first teacher-training group in 1965 in the US. Having completed her training with me Fran came to London in the 1970s to train with the legendary movement teacher, Litz Pisk. Fran taught at LAMDA while she was in London and word went out that she was teaching Iris Warren’s work and she took on some private clients.
The four DLTs and I went out to dinner one night at The Ferry Inn in Stromness and stories were told, discussions were discussed - including my speculation about Lionel Logue possibly being Iris’s inspiration. I mentioned Evelyn Laye. I knew that Evelyn Laye had been one of those who had eagerly signed on for private lessons with Fran when she was in London. I said what a pity it was that we hadn’t asked about Iris and Lionel while she was alive. She was then in her 70s (she died in 1996). Fran suddenly sat up straight and a faraway look came into her eyes. “Wait…” she said “I can see her grand piano in the suite at the Dorchester where she lived and where I went to give her lessons. It was covered in framed photographs. I can see so clearly a photograph of a man in a suit and tie - and its signature: Lionel Logue. And so many photographs of the royal family…”
As I said “andecdotal - speculative” but….of course!!! They had tea for three at the Dorchester and discussed breathing….and Life…and Emotion. Evelyn and Iris and Lionel.
There’s something deeply poignant about the fact that Lionel Logue worked with ‘superhuman sympathy’ to help shell-shocked soldiers returning home from World War I, and that Alfred Wolfsohn, Roy Hart’s teacher, was a German stretcher-bearer in the same war, and that their experience of the extremity of human expression became a vital ingredient in the art of voice. Roy Hart steered Wolfsohn’s work towards music and acting. Both Logue and Wolfsohn were alchemists – they guided the transmutation of suffering into healing art.
I would love to think we are part of that heritage.
THE EMBODIED VOICE. By Kristin Linklater
Keynote speech given at the 2019 PEVoC meeting in Copenhagen, 28th August
My reputation as a voice teacher rests on the fact that I teach from a solid methodology that delivers an organically logical progression of exercises addressing each of three general areas of what comprises the two to three octaves of the speaking voice. By ‘each general area’ I mean the musculature of the voice, the resonators of the voice and the articulation of the voice into words. These areas break down into many large and small fields of consciousness and reconstitute as one integrated whole.
We wouldn’t have to have conferences such as this if it were simple to describe how the voice works - how we make the raw vocal material that either speaks or sings. I am here to contribute my version of the process and to listen to other versions. I doubt if I will contribute any new knowledge but sometimes a rearrangement of the vocabulary can shed new light on a familiar subject.
I assume that we all share the understanding that the vocal anatomy is the same for speaking and for singing. However, the way we talk about it often differs radically and, because we are talking consciously about a mind-body process that functions unconsciously, we must treat the subject matter carefully.
My modus operandi as a teacher is to practice first and theorise second. Here I will be theorising - finding words and hoping they spark some imagined passageway into an imagined practice as you sit there.
To create a virtual map in your mind’s eye of the geography of voice according to my work I’ll sketch in three big outlines, the general areas, of the journey we embark upon.
Under the heading ‘musculature of the voice’ I include all the breathing muscles - not only the diaphragm, diaphragmatic crura and intercostals, but the back, the pelvis and the legs - AND the laryngeal muscles, the pharyngeal, jaw, tongue, soft palate, neck, face muscles AND the muscles of the - oh well - let’s admit it - the whole body…Under the heading of resonators one could also put ‘the whole body’ if we expand from the primary resonators of mouth, pharynx and nasal cavities to the secondary sympathetic resonators of the chest and the vibrations carried through bone and tissue from the top of the skull to the feet. Articulating the voice into words is pretty much the job of the lips and the tongue but - they are part of the facial musculature and the face muscles are activated by cranial nerves that interact with the vagus nerve which wanders everywhere (as far as I can see…) and thus even articulation could be described as a whole-body event.
We are aiming for whole-body-MIND awareness and freedom - to restore the voice to its birthright of the two to four octaves of speaking notes that can express the whole gamut of human emotion, and all the subtleties and nuances of thought.
The intrinsic vocal musculature is involuntary. We cannot tell it what to do. But we can tell the voluntary muscles what NOT to do and at the same time stimulate the action of the involuntary muscles with imagery and impulse. Our first steps are therefore physical - we spend a great deal of time becoming aware of habitual tensions and discovering how to release them from their inhibitory behavior. In the course of this ongoing exploration, which travels hand- in-hand with breath awareness, the psycho-physical nature of the work is inevitably revealed and we begin noticing the difference between voluntary, conscious control and involuntary action. These first steps start from a very simple understanding of how speaking works:
Step 1) the desire to speak manifests in an electrical signal in the brain (a primary impulse of greater or lesser emotional strength);
Step (2) that impulse activates signals to the breathing muscles and breath enters the body; as that breath exits a simultaneous message causes
Step (3) vocal folds come together to meet the exiting breath creating vibration;
Step (4) the vibrations reverberate through resonators and in
Step (5) the vibrations are articulated into speech by the lips and tongue.
All this is more or less one simultaneous reaction to the primary impulse on the involuntary or proprioceptive level. An equally simple picture all too often contradicts every step on this easy road. The primary impulse to speak, Step (1), is halted by an inner voice, a secondary impulse that says: “Are you sure you want to say that?” “That’s stupid!“ “Hold on”, ” Wait a minute ...” “Dangerous!” This secondary impulse hijacks primary impulse number (2), tells the central breathing muscles to hold hard against the incoming breath and protects the original impulse from exposure. However, if the need to speak is so strong that it overrides the lack of emotional breath response in the diaphragm and demands to be heard, then enough breath to activate the vocal folds may be found somewhere under the collarbone, and the muscles of the throat, the tongue, and the jaw provide supportive action with their muscular strength - compensating for the lack of deep free breath. As these channel muscles work hard to substitute for the breath, and as they clench with effort, they obstruct access to the resonators. Thus, the natural range and expressivity of the voice narrows.
To illustrate this I’d like to tell an allegorical story – (anyone who has done my work knows this story): A baby is born. Air enters its body – the baby lives. The baby’s body knows that air is breath and breath is Life. Next - the baby’s body experiences a Pang or a kind of pain. The breath of life now turns into a wail. Miraculously, warm milk is introduced to the tiny body, and the pain, the Pang, dissolves in the comfort of sustenance. The baby survives. The first experience of a baby’s voice is in response to a life-or-death need. Need, Pang, Voice, Response, Survival. If the baby’s body could speak it would say: “I breathe, I live. I wail, I survive.” This cardinal experience is repeated countless times in the ensuing months. Life-or-death lesson. Wailing works!
Then comes a major new phase. Imagine the little girl or boy at two to three years old. Many words have been acquired. Many of them are attached to food--a subject of primary interest. And the Pang still rules. Imagine the three-year-old playing with his or her toys late one afternoon while mother or father or caregiver is in the kitchen preparing supper. The child feels a life-or-death need for a chocolate-chip cookie. The child runs into the kitchen with all the force of the Pang fueling his or her body and voice. “I want a chocolate-chip cookie! Gimme a chocolate-chip cookie! Chocolate-chip cookie! Chocolate-chip cookie!” As can easily be imagined, mother or father or caregiver may not respond positively to this onslaught. The reaction is likely to be some variation on, “Stop that horrible noise. You will certainly not get a chocolate-chip cookie. Not until you learn to ask nicely. When you stop screaming and say ‘please’ and ‘thank-you’ in a nice voice then perhaps you can have a cookie." The child’s organism learns that to follow the Pang leads not to life and survival but to the equivalent of death. The Pang and its primary impulse route are dangerous. Communicate the Pang and you might die. Do not wail! Perhaps it is as soon as the next day that the little boy or girl is playing in the late afternoon and again feels a life-or-death need for a chocolate-chip cookie. The child is quick to recall the previous day’s lesson. The Pang is suppressed; breath is detached from the Pang-center. The need, together with some breath found in the upper part of the lungs well away from the dangerous Pang-center, is rerouted to a set of muscles above the throat. A little smile emerges, lips and tongue and jaw pick up the need, the voice no longer resonates throughout the body but flows nicely and inoffensively up into the cheeks and head. The child walks carefully into the kitchen and says in light, high tones of beguiling sweetness, “If I’m a very, very good little boy or girl and say pretty please with sugar on it, can I have a chocolate-chip cookie, dear mother or father or caregiver? Please, pretty please?” And mother or father or caregiver says, “What a good little boy or girl you are. You’ve learned how to speak nicely. Here are two chocolate-chip cookies!” The child’s organism has learned the next major lesson in communication: follow secondary neurophysiological impulse routes in order to survive. The jaw will protect, the tongue will deflect and support. These muscles learn to hi-jack the impulses that were aiming for the diaphragm. I assume that every singer as well as every actor has had to confront tension in the jaw and the tongue. I love the story told by Joyce DiDonato about when she first started working with her teacher W. Stephen Smith (the author of the wonderful book The Naked Voice): “Steve said: ‘Joyce, you’re talented and obviously very musical, but there’s simply no future in the way you’re singing. You’re singing exclusively on youth and muscle.’ He then dug his thumb under my chin straight into the core of my tongue tension, which at the time was my favorite type of “support”, and fought upward against the intense pressure I was applying downward, and he said ‘now sing aa.’ I told him I couldn’t phonate. I then spent my entire first year tearing down all the devices I had put firmly in place to aid me in sounding like an opera singer. The second year was spent building up the natural, naked voice.” For the person who wants to be an actor the release of inhibitory physical tension can usefully awaken the connection to the originating mental, and/or emotional cause for that tension. Mind-body awareness is the name of the game and step one is to free the personal self from inhibitions of expression that have (almost inevitably) been learned through an upbringing and education that acculturates to societal norms or, in too many cases, have developed into defensive armoring against trauma. These habitual defenses originate in the mind and are manifested in muscle behavior. We can, however, restore the extended humanity of the voice and extend our speech beyond our cultural boundaries. I want to highlight the fact that voice is universal and speech is cultural, - all humans have lungs, diaphragm, resonators, vocal folds and the emotions that bring them into action and convey our feelings. As soon as we learn to speak, the conventions and language of each of our cultures constrains and trains the voice according to accepted behavior. Inhibitory defenses against spontaneous vocal expression are adopted lest we are banished from society. Entering a rediscovery of how the voice works, we observe these habitual defensive activities and decide whether they serve our purposes or not. We become conscious of unconscious habitual activity and can make a choice as to whether the observed function is optimal or not. The aim of the exercises is to re-calibrate neural patterns in the brain and restore the neuro-physiological pathways that formed the original travelogue of the voice when we were, let’s say, between 2 and 7 years old. These pathways run on the grid of involuntary musculature. So the work is always along the path of non-doing, of yielding the control of conscious “doing” muscles to involuntary action that is observable but not directly controllable. We can stimulate the involuntary reactions but our controls must be in the causal thinking and feeling - not the resultant action. This definitely puts the emphasis on the “psycho” part of “psycho-physical” work.
I have to honestly declare to a new group of students that my aim is to change their minds. If the term “brain-washing” didn’t have such negative connotations it would probably describe what my work is about. Washing the brain clear of layer upon layer of behavioral thinking, scraping away the varnish of acquired correct thinking and acceptable speaking, throwing out the old carpets and curtains that muffled the floorboards and veiled the windows - relishing the clean spaces and clear views and ownership of the house. My house - my voice - my words - my choice of furnishing, my decisions as to what I want to show and what I want to hide. How do I live in these spaces? How do I speak from these spaces? How might I sing from these spaces? Every speaker has a prosody which is part of his or her own identity. As cited in Wikipedia: “… prosody is concerned with such linguistic functions as the rhythm, stress, and intonation of speech. Prosody may reflect various features of the speaker or the utterance: the emotional state of the speaker; the form of the utterance (statement, question, or command); the presence of irony or sarcasm; emphasis, contrast, and focus; or other elements of language that may not be encoded by grammar or by choice of vocabulary.” While we each have our own prosody that is intrinsic to our personalities it is clear that we have the neural capacity for our prosody to change.
Actors must exercise their ability to take on the different prosodies of writers and of characters - this is not a case of manipulating the dynamics of pitch, pace and volume but of entering the inner impulse world that lies behind the words and the grammar, and changing habits of thought, feeling and expression while staying true to oneself. Widening the boundaries of the authentic self. I’d like to try and demonstrate what I mean by taking on the prosodies of two very different writers. I’m going to read excerpts from Gerard Manley Hopkins’ The Leaden Echo and The Golden Echo - and then some of the very differently prosodic, but equally passionate Cascando by Samuel Beckett. You do not have to understand the sense or the words - but I would like you to experiment with embodied listening - every now and then open your mouth and listen as if your breath could hear - as if you were listening with an embodied ear. Listening in to Hopkins’ prosody in The Golden Echo I hear lyrical joy in the play of vowels and consonants dancing through octaves of vocal range with untrammeled rhythms conveying passionate imagery and transcendent feelings: (end of The Leaden Echo) So be beginning, be beginning to despair. O there ’s none; no no no there ’s none: Be beginning to despair, to despair, Despair, despair, despair, despair.
THE GOLDEN ECHO Spare! There ís one, yes I have one (Hush there!); Only not within seeing of the sun, Not within the singeing of the strong sun, Tall sun’s tingeing, or treacherous the tainting of the earth’s air, Somewhere elsewhere there is ah well where! one, Oné. Yes I can tell such a key, I do know such a place, Where whatever’s prized and passes of us, everything that ’s fresh and fast flying of us, seems to us sweet of us and swiftly away with, done away with, undone, Undone, done with, soon done with, and yet dearly and dangerously sweet Of us, the wimpled-water-dimpled, not-by-morning-matchèd face, The flower of beauty, fleece of beauty, too too apt to, ah! to fleet, Never fleets móre, fastened with the tenderest truth To its own best being and its loveliness of youth: it is an everlastingness of, O it is an all youth! Come then, your ways and airs and looks, locks, maiden gear, gallantry and gaiety and grace, Winning ways, airs innocent, maiden manners, sweet looks, loose locks, long locks, lovelocks, gaygear, going gallant, girlgrace— Resign them, sign them, seal them, send them, motion them with breath, And with sighs soaring, soaring síghs deliver Them; beauty-in-the-ghost, deliver it, early now, long before death Give beauty back, beauty, beauty, beauty, back to God, beauty’s self and beauty’s giver. See; not a hair is, not an eyelash, not the least lash lost; every hair Is, hair of the head, numbered. Nay, what we had lighthanded left in surly the mere mould Will have waked and have waxed and have walked with the wind what while we slept, This side, that side hurling a heavyheaded hundredfold What while we, while we slumbered. O then, weary then why When the thing we freely fórfeit is kept with fonder a care, Fonder a care kept than we could have kept it, kept Far with fonder a care (and we, we should have lost it) finer, fonder A care kept.—Where kept? Do but tell us where kept, where.— Yonder.—What high as that! We follow, now we follow.—Yonder, yes yonder, yonder, Yonder.
And now to an excerpt from Samuel Beckett’s Cascando - profound emotion contained in dark monotones:
saying again if you do not teach me I shall not learn saying again there is a last even of last times last times of begging last times of loving of knowing not knowing pretending a last even of last times of saying if you do not love me I shall not be loved if I do not love you I shall not love
the churn of stale words in the heart again love love love thud of the old plunger pestling the unalterable whey of words terrified again of not loving of loving and not you of being loved and not by you of knowing not knowing pretending pretending I and all the others that will love you if they love you 3 unless they love you
The singer must not only yield her or his own prosody to the text but then stretch its expression to fill the extended contours of a composer’s prosody. What a neural gymnasium! In my work we enter the neural gymnasium through the doors of the body. The impulses that stimulate the breathing musculature travel from the brain to the diaphragm, the diaphragmatic crura and the intercostals by way of the spinal cord. I invoke the solar plexus as the primary emotional receiving and transmitting nerve centre connecting with the diaphragm - and the sacral plexus as the nerve centre for instinct and intuition inextricably woven in to the crura as they morph into the pelvic floor. The intercostals answer to the demand for greater capacity. These nerve plexi branch out from the spine to the nervous system and - all the breathing musculature is attached to the spine With this understanding it is inevitable that the first part of the body to be addressed in freeing the voice from inhibitory tensions is the spine. The spine is a two-way communication highway from body to brain and brain to body. The spine must be flexible and strong, and its own musculature must support it - not the abdominal muscles. Beneath the diaphragm is the abdomen, the organs and intestines - when the diaphragm descends the organs must get out of the way. If the abdominal wall muscles are flattening the belly - either for cosmetic reasons or trained (unnecessarily) to support the spine - the organs can’t drop freely to make room for the descending diaphragm. The spine is central to the voice work we do as actors. My work has adapted many yoga-based floor exercises for accessing free breathing through physical release. However, we do not do yoga breathing because yoga breathing is designed to control the emotions and actors must be in love with their emotions, must nurture them with breath, respect them, surf them, harness them and never fear them. For this, we must un-train the breathing muscles from holding on to the breath in reaction to emotional impulse and get used to breathing, feeling and speaking. The control is in what and how we think and how we channel thoughts and feelings into word and action. Freeing the breath….well - I expect that quite a few of you have your points of view on and practices for breath and singing. I emphasize sighing in the beginning of the work because when you sigh you let go not only physically but mentally. The conditioning is mental - when I speak, when I sing, I release. The thought that goes into the body and the accompanying ingoing breath prepare the body for the outgoing utterance and I just have to want to communicate. Communication is the by-product of desire and freedom. I am sometimes challenged by other teachers on the idea of sighing and I explain that this is a preliminary re-training of the brain - to let go - to be confidently generous in communication. To allow the breathing muscles to just let go as if all the air is going to come out at once. Of course it doesn’t because the regulation of outgoing air happens at the level of the vocal folds and if the thinking is clear the breath will last as long as the thought. Once the brain has that freedom then one can have the experience of not using any breath at all - just voice. Economy of breath is the end result of sighing. When there is a challenge from the world of singing to the idea of sighing and letting breath go rather than managing and supporting I happily quote again from The Naked Voice by W. Stephen Smith - Joyce Di Donato’s teacher: “Releasing the breath is the most important concept in healthy, natural exhalation. Freely released air allows the singer to connect with and communicate from the original source of utterance. It all begins with a sigh.” My next big section of speaking voice work comes under the heading of resonance. Voice science tells me that resonance and the formants of voice are confined to the pharynx, the oral cavity and, rather grudgingly, perhaps the nasal cavity - but the sinuses are definitely not part of the team, nor the chest, or the skull. Sympathetic resonance is mentioned but not with much interest. Why, when we put a hand to the chest (front and back), to the skull, to the cheekbones and feel the vibrations of our voices there, does the quality of the sound change for the better? Or why, when we just picture vibrations flowing through the bones of our bodies - even seeing or feeling them right down through our legs to our feet - do our voices respond with such life? Which branches of science need to collaborate to provide satisfactory answers to these questions? Voice scientists, neuro-biologists, acoustical engineers, physicists might all have to be involved. In his book The Feeling of What Happens, published in 1999, Antonio Damasio, the neuro-biologist, talks about the fact that core consciousness, or the autonomic system, is run on a stream of imagery from brain to body and body to brain. The word “imagery” includes, for him, all five senses. Now, of course, we have the wonderfully enriching information that the gut brain contains around 100 million neurons and is in constant 2-way communication with the skull brain (86 billion neurons…) - presumably picking up some intelligence from the 40,000 neurons in the heart brain. Imagery, sensory intelligence, breath and voice interacting when we speak or sing. Might the vibrations we picture and feel be liberators? Could they be massaging neurons and freeing the functions of the skull brain that deal with music (sung music or spoken music)? From decades of classroom experience I know that imagining the caverns of the chest filled with reverberative deep sound helps develop the lower levels of the vocal range, while picturing the labyrinth of different shapes and sizes of the sinus cavities opens up a world of inflectionary expression and that playing with images of the occipeto-pharyngeal mouth (yes - I am pretty sure I invented the term…) opening on to the cranial floor delivers exhilarating freedom in the upper range of the voice before it slides easily and more familiarly up to the roof of the skull. We lift the voice off the muscles of tongue, jaw and throat by restoring it to breath and bone - through imagery. We are entering the realm of core consciousness, of the autonomic nervous system, and re-calibrating the pathways of the voice. To strengthen the voice we strengthen the power of the originating impulse. Regular exercise with strong originating impulses strengthens the involuntary breathing muscles. And now it’s time to address the subject of articulation. The tongue muscles have been relieved of any responsibility for supporting the voice as has the jaw - relinquishing the job to the breath where it belongs. The lips have been communing with vibrations in their journey forward and out of the mouth. Now the lips and tongue must pick up messages from other parts of the brain and convey the detailed information contained in words. The more economically the lips and tongue operate the less they will interfere with the connection of voice to breath and emotional impulse. The economy of articulation depends on the specificity of thought. Words communicate information - the detail of emotion, mood, intention. In ordinary everyday life the hierarchy of voice to speech leans toward speech as the master and voice as the servant. Most of our ordinary verbal usage is utilitarian, informational. The parts of the brain that govern speech are well known as Broca’s area activating the lips and the tongue and Wernicke’s area that puts words together to make sense. This only matters to a voice practitioner in that it emphasizes the conscious work that must be done to bring speech and voice into a democratic relationship. Clearly, Broca and Wernicke cannot live without the music of voice, but too often they act as if they are the bosses and we must work and think to order - rather than listen to the music, and verbally dance. Voice conveys para-verbal and meta-verbal information that comes from many different parts of the brain. The most obviously identifiable areas are the corpus callosum, motor cortex, prefrontal cortex, nucleus accumbens, amygdala, sensory cortex, auditory cortex, hippocampus, visual cortex, and cerebellum - plus, I assume, the medulla oblongata that deals with breath. But of course, voice and speech are inter-dependent. Voice is music and so is speech when it is freed from rules of behavior. Consonants and vowels riff on their intrinsic differences of longer and shorter, sharper or buzzier, murmurous or explosive, creating rhythm and pitch in intricate interplay beyond our conscious ability. These days our voices are mostly imprinted with utilitarian, logical information. Training the voice means demoting Monsieur Broca and Herr Wernicke and promoting the Dionysus within. Or inviting the schoolmasters to join the dance. There is a great deal of music in the words of a song before the composer makes more music for them - vowels and consonants enrich the final composition with a density of intrinsic harmonics and rhythms. Much of the exploration of speech that I do involves a ruthless pursuit of meaning. Behind words are images and feelings and shifting states of being. When we not only carefully, rigorously, conscientiously plant the images and feelings deeply in the body-mind but then trust those originating impulses of thought and feeling to connect music with syntax, grammar and vocabulary we will speak and sing with apparent spontaneity and genuine in-the-moment authenticity. And - the glory of it is that once the voice is restored to its intrinsic involuntary musculature, free from conscious management, it knows what to do. It follows wherever the brain leads it. Following Joyce Di Donato, my most recent singer crush is Barbara Hannigan - her various renditions of Ligeti’s Mysteres des Macabres and her wide range of singing styles must make her, I‘m sure, the current lode star in the singing world. She is all about whole body, whole mind, wholistic freedom. I love the way she talks about her craft, her life, about breathing and about studying a role until it ‘gets into your bones - gets into your marrow.’ Ultimately, The Embodied Voice rides on the freedom of the breath that makes it. Free breathing is organized so brilliantly by the involuntary breathing musculature that we cannot possibly do better with conscious control through voluntary muscles. A reminder of my description of how the voice works will underline the fact that it is the ingoing breath, the ingoing sigh that matters - because the ingoing breath carries the thought impulse that will tell the glottis and the vocal folds what to do: Step 1) the desire to speak manifests in an electrical signal in the brain (a primary impulse of greater or lesser emotional strength); Step (2) that impulse activates signals to the breathing muscles and breath enters the body; as that breath exits a simultaneous message causes Step (3) - vocal folds come together to meet the exiting breath creating vibration. The outgoing breath is regulated on the level of the vocal folds - the ingoing breath carries all the regulating information the body needs for that complex involuntary interaction to happen. So our responsibility is in the clarity of thought, feeling and intention. Back to Joyce DiDonato: “Don’t think about what we’re ‘doing’ with the breath otherwise we’re interfering with the breath. It drops in and you’re ready to go. Allow it to go all the way in - to back ribs, low ribs, 360 degrees, diaphragm, to tailbone, side ribs - if it enters freely and without force the odds are it’s going to come out freely. If you’re aggressive with the breath you’re going to have to contain it and it will be jaw tension and base of the tongue tension that do that work. The tongue is blocking the freedom of the breath. Get out of the way of the breath doing its job. If the sound is tightening up on me it’s not a matter of me needing to support the breath more but of me needing to release somewhere so the breath can move more freely. If I’m feeling tension in my tongue it tells me my breath isn’t free. At the end of a phrase just let the breath drop right down like water to the bottom of a balloon. (When exercising with specific vowels) be really clear in your brain what that vowel is - be very specific - if you’re clear in that vowel the breath knows where to go - if you’re nebulous it doesn’t. The clearer you are in the emotional content of what you’re singing the freer your breath will be. In a long phrase if I’m thinking about the breath I get scared it will run out and I start to hold on to it and conserve it which blocks it off - the freedom isn’t there. If you have really clear intentions and clear vowels the breath will be there for you. Breath support is about release and freedom not about what mechanism I am using.” As her teacher, Stephen Smith says “…and it all begins with a sigh.” I would just add - it begins with a sigh and trains the brain to be relieved when it speaks what it feels. However powerful. The powerful impulse acts on the involuntary muscles powerfully. It’s a relief for Oedipus to howl out his pain having gouged out his eyes with Jocasta’s golden brooches: It’s a relief for Constance in King John to wail:
O, that my tongue were in the thunder's mouth! Then with a passion would I shake the world;
It’s a relief for King Lear to howl out his madness on the heath:
Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow! You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout Till you have drench’d our steeples, drown’d the cocks! 5 You sulphurous and thought-executing fires, Vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts, Singe my white head! And thou, all-shaking thunder, Strike flat the thick rotundity o’ the world! How do I do that? I think it and feel it and my voice knows how to reveal what I think and feel. A strong impulse will generate strong action in my involuntary musculature - throughout my whole body – and it’s a big relief. Thank you.
MOMENTS OF NOTHING
An Essay by Kristin Linklater
What does “the breath of life” mean?
As you breathe out you are already preparing for new breath coming in. And yet you don’t have to do anything about it - breath comes in and nano-moment by nano-moment you are propelled forward to the next momentary new phase of your life. On a larger scale you may be breathing in the air of a new job, or travel, or a well-deserved vacation. Or, metaphorically, in life terms, you may be breathing out very, very slowly, letting go slowly because you have no idea where the next breath is coming from.
In the experience of relaxed, natural breathing (an experience I, as a voice teacher, spend a great deal of my working life examining) there is a moment between exhalation and inhalation that is a moment of nothing - a natural, involuntary nothing. And into this nothingness the next breath enters, drawing in a sense, the future into the present. For me, that moment of nothing, between the outgoing and the ingoing breath, between the past and the future, is my only reliable experience of faith. If I leave myself alone breath will enter of its own accord - I will be breathed - I don’t have to breathe in, I can have faith in the air around me and its agreement with my respiratory system to keep me alive.
This seems a handy metaphor, or model, for the art of living.
Respiration is made up of expiration (breathing out, expiring, dying a little) and inspiration (breathing in, inspired by life and hope). An involuntarily creative act. But you don’t get the inspiration without the expiration and its accompanying moment of nothing.
This is a pattern repeated in hundreds of different forms in every aspect of living in this world: you have to risk the moments of nothing in order to leave open the possibility of receiving the surprise gifts that Life has up her sleeve for you; you have to endure expiring in order to reap the harvest of creativity; you have to suffer repeated deaths of the ego for the true self to emerge from its chrysalis.
The in-between, nothing times are all Transitions - from the nano-transitions of the natural breathing rhythm to the personal and professional mega-transitions that move one from wave to wave in the grand surf-ride of life. Often, a transition feels like a really deep trough out of which no new wave will ever rise. We have all experienced those troughs - and they go on - those dark nights of the soul, those gnawing, icy pits of frustration, confusion, fear.
We want to be happy, we deserve to be happy, we enter into a legitimate pursuit of happiness - but we must learn quickly how to deal with what happens when happiness doesn’t happen. How do we create an emotional democracy in ourselves so that we are not always voting for joy, satisfaction, love and contentment and plunging into numb despair when the rebel powers of sadness, anger, melancholy or fear (even hate) stage a coup and impose a dictatorship on our human condition. In my experience, if I don’t allow these darker emotions to have a place in the emotional democracy of my personal nation state they behave as terrorists and guerrilla fighters, going into hiding, gathering forces and waiting for the chance to blow my life up.
Looking back at my long life a spotlight immediately illuminates all the good things - all the amazing, ordinary and extraordinary things that happened to get me here. I see a pattern: looking in the rearview mirror my life looks logical and planned. When I think a bit harder and look a little closer, aiming the flashlight into the dark corners, culverts, dead-ends, crooked lanes, bogs and swamps of memory, I unwillingly recall the midnight terrors, the abyss of failures, the 3 a.m. wakings and shakings and weepings of hot tears into comfortless pillows - the boredoms, frustrations, desperations and fears. Although the crests of the waves catch the sunlight of recollection the troughs and transitions lurk in the shadows still. I know that every life plan or ambition I have had turned out differently from what I’d intended. Of course, nothing at all would have happened if I had not had intentions and plans, and indeed, if I had not been quite passionate about them. But I had to be open always to Life’s input and desires, her intentions - and be ready to follow a sudden, new, unexpected direction offered by her.
Enduring the pits and troughs was inevitably one of the keys to my creative potential: embracing, eventually, the despair, the sadness and the tears as necessary nourishment for my soul. You can’t expect Life to be an equal partner with you unless you take her on in all her reality. Quite a number of great artists seem to court a melancholy state: “But when the melancholy fit shall fall….Then glut thy sorrow on a morning rose” says John Keats - in his Ode on Melancholy; and “…Joy, whose hand is ever at her lips/ Bidding adieu, and aching Pleasure nigh/ Turning to poison as the bee-mouth sips/ Ay, in the very Temple of Delight/ Veiled Melancholy has her sovran shrine…”
Why were my parents, then, so intolerant of my gloomy moods! “Cheer up!” they’d say. “Pull yourself together!” “Snap out of it!” “Smile!” “Don’t be so self-centered - don’t take yourself so seriously.” However it becomes clear as the years roll by that being able to feel and accept one’s own darker emotions creates the condition for compassion - feeling with others, and compassion is the prerequisite for responsible citizenship. And, perhaps, for legitimate, if fleeting, happiness.
Next to “To be or not to be…” one of the best-known quotes from Shakespeare is “All the world’s a stage/ And all the men and women merely players/ They have their exits and their entrances…” The world stage is full of whirling melodrama. (*N.B. I wrote this originally in 1997) Look around the globe at the huge life and death dramas, daily tragedies, genocides, massive corruptions, all marinading in a stew of moral decay. The rich, muttering platitudes about free enterprise and free markets, get richer at the expense of the poor getting poorer. Life is seething with dark passions under a veneer of glitter. To be on stage in a passionate affair with Life one must build emotional muscle, become an emotional warrior, and develop the capacity for compassion to a high art.
Compassion is not warm and fuzzy. Compassion means staying awake to the tragedies of the world, opening oneself over and over again to the unacceptable facts of suffering, witnessing and protesting what is unfair and unjust, not switching off, not going numb, not shrugging one’s shoulders free from the burdens of others, not being in denial of global trauma. And meanwhile getting on with the moment to moment staging of one’s own life which may swing from tragedy to stand-up comedy to kitchen-sink drama to soap opera within one day. A sense of humor is, to be sure, essential.
Laughing till you cry, and crying till you laugh, feeding one’s mouth and heart with words, with poetry and song, getting knocked into annual ecstasy by the miracle of springtime and marvelling at the glories of fall. The senses and the emotions they bring must nourish the heart if it is to prosper.
Music and theatre, singing and dancing, painting and sculpting and poetry-making are the arts that keep our humanity alive because they are rooted in the senses and the passions. They are the best arenas to give the muscles of empathy and compassion regular exercise. Without them humanity is a risk because the soul of humanity is a feeling place, not a commodity.
You can feed your soul and live life to the fullest by paying attention to your breathing (not organizing it, just watching and feeling it), by living at the centre of the democracy of your emotions and by creating art on a daily basis by living in open, expressive communication with other folk; by using your feelings, by voicing them.
Give your inner life breathing space. Don’t be afraid to stop for long for short or long moments of nothing, until the next moment, the next breath of life happens to you. Listen in to yourself. Have faith in transitions. Be willing to respond. (Mind you, if you find the moment of nothing is stretching on and on and you are atrophying, then take a big gulp of air and jump-start the batteries of your life any way you can!)
And here is Lucille Clifton to help you launch your ship of life into the everlasting waves…..
may the tide
that is entering even now
the lip of our understanding
carry you out
beyond the face of fear
may you kiss
the wind then turn from it
certain that it will
love your back may you
open your eyes to water
water waving forever
and may you in your innocence
sail through this to that
blessing the boats
by Lucille Clifton
OUR VOCAL HERITAGE
Presented November 2018 at the Shanghai Theatre Academy International Conference: INHERITANCE OF ACTING TECHNIQUES AND THEIR INNOVATIVE DEVELOPMENTS
INTRODUCTION
As a lifelong practitioner of voice training for actors, I write from my own practical experience and interest. I am not an academic and will not be adhering to academic requirements for this paper. Thus - there will be no footnotes or references. I present to you some of the ideas and perspectives that interest me as a teacher and passionate theatre lover. These are personal points of view emerging from sixty years spent in drama schools training young actors, in studios coaching successful, experienced, professional film and stage actors, at the side of directors directing everything from classical to experimental theatre, as an actor playing many of Shakespeare’s women and some of his men, directing Shakespeare and the Greeks myself and running workshops in many different countries and languages.
VOICE TRAINING: ACTOR TRAINING
The title of this conference implies, quite rightly, that Voice and Movement techniques are also “Acting Techniques.” It was not until the early 20th Century that “acting” began to be explored distinct from the performance instruments of body and voice. Until relatively recently in the English-speaking theatre world and in Europe, actor-training meant elocution, singing, dance and imitation of one’s thespian elders.
I think we all recognize that it was largely Stanislavsky’s search for a more convincing stage life in the Russian theatre that engineered the redirection of the actor’s energies inward rather than outward. His emphasis was on how to generate emotional and psychological truthfulness. The search was on for the causal impulses that would activate voice and body. A distinction was made between “Acting” and “Performance.” “Acting” became “Being” while “Performance” was “Showing.” The separate discipline of “Acting” was born and Stanislavsky’s ideas and exercises spread from Russia to America in the 1920s and ‘30s spawning the concept of “psychological realism.”
In France and then England in the 1920s and ‘30s, it was initially Jacques Copeau who developed exercises in character behavior that challenged actors to break free from the repetitive vocal inflections and stylised gestures that were the hallmarks of great theatre on 19th Century European stages. This “performance” theatre style lasted well into the 20th Century and shifted gradually in England under the influence of Copeau and Michel St. Denis before making way for Stanislavsky in the 1950s.
We tend to give the Actors Studio credit, and make Marlon Brando the exemplar, for popularizing psychological realism; but playwrights from Ibsen, Chekhov, Bernard Shaw, Eugene O’Neill to Clifford Odets and, in England, John Osborne with his 1950s Look Back in Anger supplied the material that demanded that actors dig beneath the surface of external behavior for truthful psychological and emotional representation.
Perhaps the art of vocal and physical acting training met its most significant challenge with the impact of film. During the 1930s and 1940s film documentaries recorded social and political stories that revealed the gap between how real people spoke and behaved and how the stage depicted them. That gap had to be filled in by questions of motivation. Cameras and microphones picked up the intimacy of inner motivation and uncovered details of character that justified action. External, stagey representation became unacceptable.
Stanislavsky codified exercises that helped actors to investigate the motives of invented characters telling invented stories. The question he asked, and the question that actors have asked ever since is why something happens. “Why” becomes the key to the story historically, biographically, psychologically, emotionally, professionally, politically and (possibly) philosophically.
I acknowledge that psychological realism is by no means the only major influence on 20th Century acting. Social and political realism gave birth to the powerful contribution of Erwin Piscator and Bertolt Brecht in Germany. "Epic, political, confrontational, documentary theatre" as it has been described, has spawned its own particular training methodologies. In the latter half of the 20th Century the powerful influences of Jacques LeCoq and Jerzy Grotowski have created a whole genre of physical theatre that continues to break boundaries.
My own predilections have directed my lifelong pedagogical focus towards psychological realism and its extensions and I will confine this discussion of inheritance to those actor-training parameters with which I am most familiar.
Of the English-speaking drama schools that still dominate the field, the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, LAMDA, is the oldest, dating from 1861 while the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, RADA, and the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama were established in 1904 and 1906. My own teaching owes its origins to the pioneering methods of Iris Warren who taught at LAMDA. I trained at LAMDA as an actor and began my teaching there. Iris saw that vocal health and vocal authenticity were rooted in free emotional connection and she re-directed traditional voice-training exercises from external, muscular control to interior controls of thought and feeling impulses.
I moved to the United States in 1963 and my experience of the Human Growth Movement during the 1970s and 1980s helped me develop and deepen the psycho-physical aspect of Iris Warren’s approach, as did the expansion during those years of research in voice science.
Development in the field of voice-training for actors must serve its art. Western theatre “inheritance” has determined the way that actors have trained their voices thus far. Innovation in Western theatre may frame speculation about innovations in voice training but it seems clear that we are not going to abandon the old ways to make room for new. Technology, special effects, artificial intelligence, microphones and robot voices may be fashionable for short periods of time but it seems that audiences still want to be told good stories in voices they recognize to be human like theirs. We must train for the past, present and future theatre.
Ancient Greece is generally recognized as the birthplace of Western theatre, and Athens as its nursery. Our imaginations are fed by the story that Dionysus, the god of the grape-harvest, winemaking and wine, of fertility, ritual madness and religious ecstasy was the progenitor of Greek tragic performance. Tragedy was to be publicly acknowledged and communally shared. The word “tragedy” comes from an ancient Greek word that means “song of the goat” and the satyrs, half men and half goats, were said to have formed the chorus that could provide the rhythms and rituals capable of transmitting the force of the tragic story. From this choral transmission there emerges, mythically, the individual actor - Thespis, the first actor to speak alone on stage. Thespis had a new task: to convey the details of the tragic story in solo speech. To act.
The most famous theatre space in Greece, for voice aficionados, is not the Theatre of Dionysus in Athens but Epidaurus, an outdoor theatre seating 14,000 people, where a whisper from center stage can be heard in the back row.
There are many theories as to how and why these acoustics are so remarkable but the story I like best is that which connects Vitruvius, the theatre architect of his day, with Epidaurus. The 1st C Roman architect, Vitruvius, made it clear that the proportions of the human body and the corresponding proportions of the cosmos should be incorporated into the architecture of all theatres, and they were to be designed for voices to be heard, in his words, “clearly and sweetly.” “The voice,” he said “is like a breath of flowing air that moves in successive undulations as when a stone is thrown into standing water. But while in water the circles move horizontally only, undulations from the voice both move horizontally and rise vertically.” To reinforce the vertical undulations of the voices of actors Vitruvius instructed: “In the foregoing investigations on mathematical principles, let bronze vessels be made, proportionate to the size of the theatre, and let them be so fashioned that, when touched by the voice, they may produce with one another the notes of the fourth, the fifth, and so on up to the double octave. Then, having constructed niches in between the seats of the theatre, let the vessels be arranged in them, in accordance with the musical laws.” The urns reinforced the harmonics of the voice and enhanced not only the flow of sound-waves that carried the story horizontally to the audience but vertically upward to nourish the harmonics of the music of the spheres. The belief of the time was that the cosmos was maintained by the harmony of the spheres - great crystal globes that emitted different notes within the double octave which combined to make the perfect harmony that holds the world together. The actors of that time would not only have to develop the power of their voices to reach their audience of 14,000 people but to reverberate accurately within their bodies so that the harmonics would reinforce the music that maintained the cosmos. Quite an incentive for exercising and warming up the voice before a performance!
Whether this cosmic idea is accurate or not, we know that the ancient Greeks paid great respect to the voice, employing teachers for strengthening the voice - vociferaii -- for enriching the voice – phonasci -- and to develop intonation and inflection - vocales. The art of oratory was studied, analyzed and prized.
The jump from Ancient Greece to mediaeval England is perhaps facilitated by reference to bards and story-tellers. Before Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides was Homer - the great Greek bard who in the 7th Century BC first told the stories of The Odyssey and The Iliad, stories that were repeated orally for a hundred years or more before being written down in the 5th Century BC. The oral tradition and the universal human need for story-telling can be seen as the origin of drama.
In mediaeval Europe, Ireland, Wales and Scotland there were troubadours, minstrels and bards who recited and sang epic tales disseminating local stories of valour and romance throughout the country. But it was the Church that co-opted the story-telling to spread its word and in so doing gave English birth to the great, humanizing art of theatre.
From the 5th Century to the 15th the Church spread its reverent word by means of travelling monks and players who set up their wagon stages in the streets and market-places.
And, inevitably, there were also stories of irreverence - secular and comedic stories. Stories of human frailty and vice to balance out those of virtue. Entertainment was expected, and delivered by clowns, jugglers, acrobats and jesters. The voices of the players of the 14th, 15th, 16th centuries were exercised in telling stories that elicited laughter, tears, reverence and ecstasy from their audiences.
Voices in mediaeval times were outdoor voices. Melodic voices. Energetic voices. The voices that joined together to bring about the golden age of English theatre were melodious and strong. Elizabethan England was known on the continent as The Singing Nation. From the court to the villages people sang madrigals and rounds and hymns, drinking songs and lullabies.
Elizabethan education was conducted in Latin and schoolboys recited their lessons in accordance with the strict rules of rhetoric, which demanded appropriate gestures and persuasive intonations. It is not too fanciful to suggest that the Elizabethan schoolroom provided good basic actor training.
The translation of the Bible from Latin into English in the mid-16th Century resulted in a volcanic splurge of freshly-minted words drawn from a marriage of old Anglo Saxon and French mono- or bi-syllabic words with Latin-based poly-syllabics that could articulate complex intellectual and metaphysical ideas. While Shakespeare is credited with inventing between 1000 and 2000 new words he was not the only writer to do so. Everyone was at it.
The artistic exuberance of the Elizabethans was short-lived. In 1642 the Puritans tore down the theatres and banned public entertainment. Singing and dancing were seen to be instruments of the devil undermining those in godly authority.
The pendulum swung back to mirth and frivolity on the Restoration of the Monarchy in 1660 under Charles II. The theatres re-opened but with plays that were pure froth, frivolity and entertainment. The rich layers of historical, political and social commentary that had electrified Elizabethan and Jacobean playwriting were missing and would not return until near the end of the 19th Century. Scandinavian, Russian and German playwrights started digging beneath the surface of human behavior and, with the eventual help of Freud and Jung, initiated the great ongoing voyage of discovery into the human psyche.
What does all this imply for a study of the “inheritance of acting techniques” for the English-speaking actor? On one level it dictates the curriculum of most acting schools. The Greeks and Shakespeare are the foundation of serious training in the leading actor-training programs. Ancient Greek drama plunges the student actor into raw emotional story-telling, demanding stamina and commitment. Playing Shakespeare develops nuance through the heightened poetry of complex character revelation and story, requiring a full two to three octaves of vocal range, the dynamics of rhythm, pitch and volume and crystal clear articulation. Only when student actors have stretched their expressive instruments on the rack of the Greeks and Shakespeare can they deal with the truthfulness of contemporary communication whether for stage or screen. The subject matter of contemporary story-telling is no less extreme than that of the Ancient Greeks or Shakespeare though the form of the telling has changed.
Voice training for actors in the 21st Century must accommodate the history of theatre and be prepared to take on the demands of 21st Century psychological realism and surrealism. In the English-speaking voice and speech training world that means opening the gates of emotional and imaginative expression wider than ever before. Not only must actors be able to render believably the most extreme emotional states of being, or convey layers of perhaps psychopathic mendacity but they may be asked to stretch their voices into extended animalistic or robotic or fantastical noises. Believably. In my particular approach to voice training for actors this means that I must help my students drop all defensive psycho-physical habits they may have (almost certainly have) developed as human beings growing up in an often hostile or confrontational world, and restore the wild expressive courage they once knew as small children.
Voice training in the English-speaking world has evolved exponentially from the emphasis on “correct” speech and “beautiful” voice that dominated a profession serving the aesthetics of 19th Century theatre practice to the current emphasis on believability and freedom. It is no longer unusual to hear popular singers whose range covers more than 4 octaves. Gruff, ragged, crude or monotonal delivery may be recognized as necessarily ugly in the interest of truthfulness. My job as a voice trainer is to help the creative imagination to find a free connection to the extraordinary capabilities of the human voice.
While there will always be some extended vocal demands made on performers (Roy Hart teachers and others specialize in that branch of voice work) most voice teachers within a drama program will train young actors for a career composed of stage, television and film work. Their voices must be able to connect without constraint to their emotions, their imaginations and their psychological landscapes. Only then can the emotions and inner truths of the character they are playing be freely expressed. Their voices must not describe, but must reveal the thoughts and feelings of the characters they play.
We now know a great deal about how neuro-physiological pathways work from brain to body and body to brain and why those pathways can become blocked. Neuroscience and psychological advances help the expressive artist understand herself or himself and present ways of thinking and practical exercises to clear defensive and habitual obstruction. In actor-training thought processes and the experience of speaking must be re-routed from the reasoning head and mouth to the sensory brain in the body. There are 100 million neurons in the gut-brain, the enteric-brain – in constant communication with the 86 billion neurons in the skull-brain. Voice comes from at least eleven different parts of the skull-brain all of which are in visceral communication with the gut-brain. In order for the actor’s voice to reveal the character it must connect profoundly with the breath, the sensory life, the gut-brain of that character. The rhythms of speech and all dynamics of expression that are specific to that character’s psyche will then organically transform the actor’s speaking.
Believability depends on this transformation happening on the level of impulse and the subsequent interaction of involuntary breath and laryngeal muscles. Any inhibitory or conscious interference with this involuntary process compromises the transparency of the communication. Training implies training the imagination to be experienced viscerally and for breath and voice to be intrinsic to the visceral experience.
When actors get a clear picture of the actual neuro-physiological functioning of the voice and are at ease with their emotions and psychological complexity, their voices and bodies respond with integrity to the stimuli of character and story. They can say “My voice and my body can do anything my imagination comes up with. My expressive potential is limited only by choice. And the choice is mine.”
Perhaps some future actors will choose to imagine their own version of the cosmic consciousness of their ancient Greek ancestors and discover a vertical electro-magnetic field that will amplify their resonance and beam their voices up to join a galactic, inter-planetary chorus bringing harmony to the world.
The European League Of Institutes Of The Arts
National Academy of Theatre and Film Arts, Sofia, Bulgaria, July 1st 2009
The human voice is my subject. The theme of this Teachers' Academy meeting is storytelling, and I suspect that I have been invited to speak to you because the manner of the telling determines whether a story is successfully communicated or not and historically it is the human voice that has done the telling. I am particularly pleased to be with you in Sofia because I was involved with ELIA in the early days and because I had the distinct honour of being awarded a doctorate by NATFA in 2005. Both of those events were due to recognition of the paramount importance of voice in the art of performance. Thank you.
Mine is an old-fashioned presence here—highlighting the long old tradition of telling stories verbally, vocally, and in the flesh. Now, in the 21st century, we can highlight dozens of different media that function well and reach millions with their messages, their stories, but, here, at this Teachers' Academy, I assume that I'm surrounded with fellow teachers who still do most of their teaching in a room, in the flesh, talking, talking, talking. If this is so I know that you understand me when I say that we carry on the old tradition in our daily storytelling with our students.
The human voice was and is the prime medium for such vital communication—and it tells its own story. The words we use may be powerful, poetic, informative, but it is our voices that carry our foundational identity, it is our voices that command the attention of our listeners, draw them in, alert them to the veracity and value of our messages. And yet our daily voices may have been distorted by unconscious habits of inhibition, imitation and protectiveness. Our storytelling may be compromised by a faulty medium of communication.
We are born with the birthright of a voice with 3 or 4 octaves of speaking notes that can express the full gamut of human emotion and all the subtleties and nuances of thought. It can accurately reveal our psyches—our inner world. This is clearly a dangerous instrument! Inevitably we acculturate ourselves to fit into a society that cannot tolerate such communicative openness. Thus, from childhood, we have adapted and modulated our voices in order to accommodate social norms. Throughout our lives our voices have been conditioned by who we are in our multifarious interactions and if we pay attention to the breath and resonance that create the sound of our voices we may be surprised to realize how much influence the first ten years of our lives have had on the way we speak now. "In my beginning is my end" and "In my end is my beginning" says T.S.Eliot as if he were speaking about voice and storytelling. From the supreme storyteller, William Shakespeare, comes:
All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse's arms.
And then the whining school-boy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress' eyebrow. Then a soldier,
Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the cannon's mouth. And then the justice,
In fair round belly with good capon lined,
With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws and modern instances;
And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slipper'd pantaloon,
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side,
His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide
For his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice,
Turning again toward childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.
Shakespeare's Jaques in As You Like It tells a sweeping story. And, following the rules of rhetoric, it starts with an introductory title, which is followed by a beginning, a middle and an end. But the rules can always be broken. Here's another story that eschews all rhetorical rules:
I'll tell you a story
Of Jackanory
And now my story's begun
I'll tell you another
Of Jack and his brother
And now my story's done.
That leaves a lot to the imagination. It's cheating really as a story—but it's evocative. What on earth happened between those brothers? Did Jack's brother silence Jack's voice? How? Like so many cute little children's rhymes, if you hang in there for a moment the story opens into a ghastly funhouse of mirrors.
Stories are meant to have a beginning, a middle and an end. "Once upon a time" is the classic beginning—then follows challenge, conflict, transformation—and at the end "they lived happily ever after." That's how it used to be with storytelling. But that kind of certainty has become suspect. We don't believe in happy endings any more. (Unless, that is, we are fans of romance novels: the formula for those is classic and has been snappily condensed into "Boy meets girl. Holy crap, shit happens! Eventually the boy gets the girl back. They live Happily Ever After." Nora Roberts, who is America's Supreme Romance Novelist, sold 8 million books in 2008 and makes 60 million dollars a year following this formula—see June 22 New Yorker.)
As a teacher, and not a romance fan, I know that our stories are truest when they unravel, disintegrate, wander off into the distance and sometimes meander back with a new start. Teaching is a never-ending story. We know what we initiate in the classroom or the studio or the workshop, and we may even witness a blossoming middle to the story, but the end is endless.
From this point of view we are lucky—we can let ourselves off the hook as we offer techniques, analyze traditions and inject stimuli that we earnestly hope will spark the creativity that will surely form the next generation of story-telling. I may not understand their stories but that doesn't matter. That's not my responsibility; nor is it my responsibility to pontificate on the purpose of art—though I often do. I am struck, however, by the massive change in subject matter that has come about even in the last 100 years. I recently attended a performance of Vaughan Williams' Sea Symphony written in 1910:
a huge orchestra and a huge chorus singing Walt Whitman's huge words.
On the beach at night alone,
As the old mother sways her to and fro singing her husky song,
As I watch the bright stars shining,
I think a thought of the clef of the universes and of the future.
A vast similitude interlocks all,
All spheres, grown, ungrown, small, large, suns, moons, planets,
All distances of place however wide,
All distances of time, all inanimate forms,
All souls, all living bodies though they be ever so different, or in different worlds,
All gaseous, watery, vegetable, mineral processes, the fishes, the brutes,
All nations, colors, barbarisms, civilizations, languages,
All identities that have existed or may exist on this globe, or any globe,
All lives and deaths, all of the past, present, future,
This vast similitude spans them, and always has spann'd,
And shall forever span them and compactly hold and enclose them.
Vaughan Williams meets Walt Whitman in an excessive, extreme and wildly emotive expression of man's search for the meaning of Soul and Nature.
In the English-speaking world by and large we don't do Soul and Nature any more. We do Consciousness and Environment. Language has been pared down, made practical, utilitarian—and the arts are asked to be reflective of a technological, often cynical 21st century. Texting has signaled the death of the vowel with all that that implies for our poetic yearnings. Neuroscience is our new Savior and the brain gurus are shining their headlamps into the amygdala, the hippocampus, the anterior superior gyrus and the cingulate to catch a glimpse of that elusive thing called consciousness. Our brains are changing.
Science deals with the physics of life and right now neuroscience is exciting physics. But it doesn't deal with experience. Only artists can do that. And I firmly believe that so long as artists continue to tell the story of human experience they will be in the vanguard of our never-ending quest for the meaning of life. They might even manage to preserve the poetic language of the soul. Human consciousness has evolved (with the help of science) and artists must use it to develop more and more artistic languages that can articulate the full extent of our humanity. Those languages (music, visual arts, verbal arts) can only communicate fully if they are authentically rooted in individual experience. As teachers of the future storytellers we must not only express ourselves from our own deep authenticity but awaken those depths in our students. Our responsibility is to help them find their own true voices metaphorically, metaphysically and physically. Only from that deep root can the tree and branches of our communal consciousness grow with healthy purpose.
I train teachers of voice—basic voice—mostly for actors but it's the same voice whether for actors, or singers, or teachers, or public speakers of any kind. It's the human voice. Which we tend to take for granted as a given part of us, like long legs or short ones, or blonde hair or brown. And yet our voices are much more revealing of who we are than our legs or our hair. Our voices are made of breath, vocal folds, and resonators that are part of the body. Our breath is born in symbiosis with our emotions and carries the imprint of our identity. The larynx and the resonators develop habits of personality—they are our 'persona'. Consciously or unconsciously those who listen to us when we speak, are reading us, categorizing us, judging us, accepting or rejecting us through the sound of our voices, as much as through the words that we speak. 'Per' and 'sona'—through sound. This also means the mask that the ancient Greek actors wore. My persona is my mask. My personality is how I behave according to my interactions with other people. My voice is exquisitely conditioned to a multiplicity of social prevarications. The question is: can I choose to drop my mask, my persona, and let my voice pick up the living impulses of who I am and what I care about in my intrinsic identity. As a teacher, who is it that enters the teaching arena? Whose voice am I speaking with? A teacher's voice or my own?
The word 'voice' is used metaphorically in many of the arts. The 'voice' of the poet, the writer, the composer, even, I think, the visual artist is synaesthetically discussed. Frequencies of colour reverberate with the frequencies of sound and energies of visual form are seen in poetic and language forms. A lyric poem written in short lines and short verses evokes a voice:
I felt a funeral in my brain,
And mourners, to and fro,
Kept treading, treading, till it seemed
That sense was breaking through.
And then I heard them lift a box,
And creak across my soul
With those same boots of lead,
Then space began to toll
As all the heavens were a bell,
And Being but an ear,
And I and silence some strange race,
Wrecked solitary here.
Emily Dickinson's voice is unmistakable and her favored lyric form is true to her voice and energy. Gerard Manley Hopkins broke open all received forms with a voice equally unmistakable, a voice supremely relevant to the early 20th century:
I CAUGHT this morning morning's minion, king-
dom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
As a skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird,—the achieve of; the mastery of the thing!
Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!
No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.
There's rhythm and music and image and colour and action in both these poems as they deal in wildly different forms with the soul.
In the English language the voice soared in the Elizabethan era, was still charged with passion in the time of the nineteenth and early twentieth century romantics but by the end of the 20th century the voice had become largely utilitarian. Good for satire, for commercials, for cynicism.
Emotion can be there but must be undercut with knowingness:
A single flow'r he sent me, since we met.
All tenderly his messenger he chose;
Deep-hearted, pure, with scented dew still wet -
One perfect rose.
I knew the language of the floweret;
'My fragile leaves,' it said, 'his heart enclose.'
Love long has taken for his amulet
One perfect rose.
Why is it no one ever sent me yet
One perfect limousine, do you suppose?
Ah no, it's always just my luck to get
One perfect rose.
Dorothy Parker
And:
The day he moved out was terrible
That evening she went through hell.
His absence wasn't the problem
But the corkscrew had gone as well.
Wendy Cope
The exciting thing that can happen when language is held close to the chest and kept on a tight leash is to feel how it can intimate the unfathomable depths of the sub-conscious mind. Samuel Beckett is the great theater poet of the 20th century. His voice is also unmistakable. He is the master of bleakness and of fundamental optimism:
I would like my love to die
And the rain to be falling on the graveyard
And on me
Walking the streets
Mourning the first and last to love me.
And from the end of Texts for Nothing No. 6:
And yet I have high hopes, I give you my word, high hopes, that one day I may tell a story, hear a story, yet another, with men, kinds of men as in the days when I played all regardless or nearly, worked and played. But first stop talking and get on with your weeping, with eyes wide open that the precious liquid may spill freely, without burning the lids, or the crystalline humor, I forget, whatever it is it burns. Tears, that could be the tone, if they weren't so easy, the true tone and tenor at last. Besides not a tear, not one, I'd be in greater danger of mirth, if it wasn't so easy. No, grave, I'll be grave, I'll close my ears, close my mouth and be grave. And when they open again it may be to hear a story, tell a story, in the true sense of the words, the word hear, the word tell, the word story. I have high hopes, a little story, with living creatures coming and going on a habitable earth crammed with the dead, a brief story, with night and day coming and going above, if they stretch that far, the words that remain, and I've high hopes, I give you my word.
One has to listen in for one's true voice in order to tell a true story. Listening in to the voices of those who have told good stories, stories that last, can tune the ear and awaken the soul. If the voice that tells the story has no connection to the soul (should I say "to individual consciousness"?) it is arid and meaningless. How do we listen in to the sound of the 21st century soul? Can we teach techniques and skills to transmit it? I do my best—I teach breath and voice.
It doesn't all have to be solemn, and because parody and comedy are essential variations in storytelling I cannot resist making some new lyrics for Shakespeare's tune. The first six lines are the same as before:
And then the whining school-boy, backpack, iPod,
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful rap-song
Made to his mistress' buttock. Then a banker,
Proud of cooked books and clever like a fox,
Jealous in business, sudden and quick in stock quotes,
Seeking the bubble goal of billionaire
Even in the hedge fund scam. And then the chairman,
In fair round belly with good lobster lined,
With eyes severe and hairpiece neatly stuck,
Full of wise tales and googled instances;
And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slipper'd retiree,
With medication near and prostate cured,
His iPod still well-saved, a world away
From his shrunk brain; and his big manly voice,
Turning again toward childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.
I'd like to end on a soulful Whitmanesque note. This is what I dare not say in so many words to my 21st century students—it's addressed to their voices which are the messengers of their souls:
Away O soul! hoist instantly the anchor!
Cut the hawsers—haul out—shake out every sail!
Have we not stood here like trees in the ground long enough?
Have we not grovel'd here long enough, eating and drinking like mere brutes?
Have we not darken'd and dazed ourselves with books long enough?
Sail forth—steer for the deep waters only,
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me,
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.
O my brave soul!
O farther farther sail!
O farther, farther, farther sail!
We must not deny expression to our big passions but we have to find new forms to contain them.
You say I am repeating
Something I have said before. I shall say it again.
Shall I say it again? In order to arrive there,
To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not,
You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.
In order to arrive at what you do not know
You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.
In order to possess what you do not possess
You must go by the way of dispossession.
In order to arrive at what you are not
You must go through the way in which you are not.
And what you do not know is the only thing you know
And what you own is what you do not own
And where you are is where you are not.
So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years—
Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l'entre deux guerres
Trying to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate—but there is no competition—
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.
Vox Eroticus
Published in AMERICAN THEATRE MAGAZINE
April, 2003
In singing the voice erotic, a world-renowned voice teacher lays bare the basic instincts—an anatomy—of theatre as a verbal art.
The voice is inherently an erotic organ. The sensation of voice is part of the totalized suspended Eros of childhood—what Freud referred to as the polymorphous perverse world of childhood, upon whose delights we slam the door as adults. Children, the object of their own love, explore indiscriminately the erotic potential of the whole body, and that erotic potential extends to the inner organs of the body and is in no wise limited to the genitals. As adulthood teaches us to draw our energies up out of our bodies and to concentrate them in reasonable and rational thinking in the brain (which lives in the head), the pleasure principle is subdued to the reality principle- polymorphous perversity becomes buried libido. Thought and speech become the servants of reason and fact, and the voice that expresses such thoughts loses, in adulthood, its map of the neuro-physiological circuitry that connects the voice with the sensuality of the body. When the connecting door between voice and auto-eroticism is shuttered, communication through mere language becomes dry, hollow, authoritatively vociferous or shrill-to the point where a larger erotic possibility shrivels and dies. Deliberately mis-used, the human voice could well be developed as a tool in aversion therapy for sex addicts.
We often toy with the word "play" as a central element of theatre, and we often devise games that will bring us back, as actors, to a childlike state where the imagination has no critic to restrain it, where instinct and intuition are uncontaminated by the fear of judgment. Creativity grows best in the garden of innocence; we have to invent the means to give us back the freedom we lost when we left childhood behind. The voice must also be offered liberation from the prohibitions of society: "Learn to speak nicely"; "Don't shout at me"; "You're too loud, too noisy, too full of yourself and your ideas", "Shut up!" If the actor is to be true to Oedipus, Medea, Cleopatra, Leontes, King Lear or Queen Margaret, his or her voice must be unlimited by societal niceties, psychological inhibition or emotional fear. The actor's voice must run, ripple and pour through the sensory, sensual, emotional and, yes, erotic pathways of the body—if it is to pick up and reveal the rush and nuance of a character's inner states of being.
On a daily basis in my classes I tend to use the word "sensual" rather than "erotic" to describe the pleasure that may be experienced when the vibrations of the voice travel naturally through bone and cartilage and flesh. When these sound vibrations reach the appetite centers, it may be hard to draw distinctions between food, sex and thrilling sound. There is, of course, currently a cultural conditioning that makes "sensuality" more acceptable in pedagogical practice than "eroticism." Meanwhile, little differentiation is made these days between eroticism and sexuality, and sex has become a frightening subject-except in advertising, stand-up comedy and sit-coms. But Voice-Sex-Pleasure are designed by Nature to be unified, so we, as actors, have to be intrepid vocal adventurers. We must confront Eros, if we are to fulfill our creative destiny.
Here's the lovely and accurate anatomical picture I'd like you to entertain: The breathing musculature laces itself down from the silky billowings of the diaphragm to be woven into the webbing of the pelvic floor along with the muscles and nerves of its genital neighbors. When the impulse to speak sparks, the interaction between breath and vocal folds creates vibrations of sound. Those vibrations are palpable throughout the body from the pelvis to the crown of the head (and can often be felt right down to the soles of the feet).
One must applaud Nature's innate sense of humor for giving both men and women a vocal anatomy that is almost indistinguishable from female genitalia. Look at a video of the vocal folds in action, male and female—though, actually, I don't recommend looking at such a video unless you're pornographically inclined—and you might just as well be looking at the vagina. In other words, both men and women have tiny vaginas in their throats. Those humorous ancient Roman anatomists doctors or philosophers, who gave Latin names to different parts of the human body, labeled a certain area of the female genitalia labia—which means "lips." I assume they saw a connection with speech. If we play fast and loose with etymology, we could conflate the Sanskrit lingam (phallus) and the Latin lingua (tongue) to speculate that women as well as men possess penises, by virtue of having tongues.
As a voice teacher I allow myself an imaginative annual trip through the evolution of language. I look at the thousands of years of animal-roar communication that must have been necessary for survival among early humans (i.e., voice, before speech). A roar that is rooted in appetite centers: a hunger for food and a hunger to procreate the species (though for many thousands of years, no connection was made between sexual activity and paternity). These appetite centers are both located deep down in the lower belly area. One can imagine undifferentiated roars signifying the desire for food or sex, causing chaos in early tribal communities over millennia until some quantum leap of consciousness articulated those roars into specifics: "Can we have saber-tooth tiger steak for dinner?" versus "How about a little nookie?" The instruments of speech that accomplished this astonishing evolutionary development-the lips, the tongue, the teeth—were originally deployed in appetite-related activities such as sucking, licking, biting, chewing and early versions of kissing, and were thus directly connected to the activities of the lower belly area. Speech, for contemporary, civilized, technologized humans, is more likely to be experienced as cerebral and utilitarian than erotic.
Auto-eroticism is one of the great unadvertised joys of voice-work. By this I obviously mean auto-eroticism of a polymorphous perverse nature, not limited by genital organization. Everyday speaking has the potential to be endlessly erotic. The organs of speech could be experientially connected with the sensuality of the body through the vibrations of the voice. Throughout the day we could be experiencing sexual titillation, if not sheer orgasmic delight, just by dint of speaking. We could, by waving a psycho-physical wand, become polymorphous perverse again in an instant.
Oh, we could blame the early Christians (for separating sex from the soul) or the Puritans (for forbidding the joy of secular singing, except on Sundays in praise of God) or Descartes (for saying "l think, therefore I am" rather than "I am, therefore I think")—we could blame any one of them for denying us the erotic pleasures of the voice. But we are also left with some incontrovertible anatomical facts which are ours to enjoy experientially and imaginatively, if we choose. One of those facts is the internal weave that connects the solar plexus to the sacrum (the emotional center to the instinctive center) through breath. While this weave may be experienced vividly in the throes of sex, we seldom allow the same vivid connection in our daily chat. Of course, this excitement might not be appropriate for most of our verbal intercourse; but more, perhaps, than we might initially think.
What does this psycho-physical situation imply for the actor? It implies that there is an enormous subliminal power available to arouse and disturb audiences on a bewildering level, and it occurs seismically deep underneath the words being spoken. And it implies that the actor can gain access to erotic imagery only revealed to the ardent vocal explorer. Near the end of Cleopatra's story in Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra, for example, with Antony already dead and the inexorable humiliation of defeat looming, ready to die rather than submit, Cleopatra conjures up the image of Antony for Dolabella, the Roman who has been sent to guard her:
I dream'd there was an emperor Antony (Act V, scene II).
Allow the imagery to travel down through the vibrations of vocal sound to the erotic-sensual centers of the body, and the images become startlingly clear:
His face was as the heavens; and therein stuck
A sun and moon, which kept their course, and lighted
The little O. the earth....
We know the double meaning of "O" to be "vagina"; we know that "the course" very often means sexual intercourse. The image that emerges is of Cleopatra and Antony making love—she is the earth, he shines above her.
His legs bestrid the ocean [she is the ocean]: his rear'd arm [his erection]
Crested the world [Cleopatra]: his voice was propertied
As all the tuned spheres [the eroticism of voice], and that to friends; [when he was being gentle];
But when he meant to quail and shake the orb [rouse Cleopatra to orgasmic excitement]
He was as rattling thunder. For his bounty
There was no winter in't; an autumn 'twas
That grew the more by reaping [they could make love all night and each time he climaxed he was ready for more]: his delights
Were dolphin-like [dolphins are known for their polymorphous and ceaseless sexual proclivities]; they showed his back above
The element they liv'd in. [What an enchanting description of love-making! She is his essential "element".]
Only program notes would explicate this to the audience, or horrendously bad acting. This is secret knowledge for the actor, not to be explicated. What do these secrets give the actor? Among a number of possibilities there is the idea that, as Cleopatra arouses in herself the visceral, sensual, erotic memory of making love with Antony, she is making a last desperate attempt to save her life through the seduction of Dolabella. This is not so much interpretation as divination—to be given weight, or discarded, as the demands of character, concept and directorial choice dictate.
My point is that we evade the power of Shakespeare if we take refuge in metaphor rather than plunge fearlessly into the erotic vortex of his imagery: "What I am and what I would are as secret ("sacred" in some editions) as maidenhead,'' says Viola to Olivia in Twelfth Night, "to your ears divinity, to any other's profanation." Disguised as a boy, using her wiles as a woman, whispered into Olivia's ear, this is irresistible! "Give us the place alone..." says the love-starved Olivia.
And thus later, Viola, bearing messages of love from Orsino to Olivia, to whom she pours her heart out, is aroused to poetic heights by her own impossible passion for Orsino, saying that if she loved Olivia she would:
Make me a willow [the sorrowful symbol of unrequited love]
cabin at your gate [the entrance to love]
And call upon my soul within the house [the soul of the lover lives in her body];
Write loyal cantons of contemned love,
And sing them loud even in the dead of night;
Halloo your name to the reverberate hills,
And make the babbling gossip of the air
Cry out "Olivia."
Olivia is lost: seduced by voice.
Shakespeare splits open the safe ground of our mental foundations to expose the tremors and quakes of ever-present and super-potent eroticism in his words: To survive, we actors must screw our voices to the sticking-place and have the courage in our utterance to let fly the arrows of Eros to crack and remold the mirrors we hold up to the underbelly of today.
The Vox Eroticus does not simply serve the god of love. Every major passion engages the deep musculature of the pelvic floor and the primal instinctual nerve-endings surrounding the sacrum. Hate, murderous rage, jealousy and grief are not separated by some cordon sanitaire from the erotic. There is erotic energy in such lines as "Cry ' Havoc' and let slip the dogs of war" (from Julius Caesar), and in "God for Harry, England and Saint George!" (from Henry V), and in "I will chop her into messes" (from Othello), and in "Were my wife's liver / Infected as her life she would not live /The running of one glass" (from The Winter's Tale), and in Constance's lamentation in King John: "Death, death. O amiable lovely death!/Thou oderiferous stench! Sound rottenness!" and later: "Grief fills the room up of my absent child/Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me...."
Moreover, the erotic energy of the voice is not limited to the works in classical repertory. Where does Vox Eroticus live in today's theatre? In a time when irony and the flat reportorial tone are fashionable, there may be scant exercise for these classical connections. But surely the actor who plays Weston in Sam Shepard's Curse of the Starving Class must be plugging deep into his auto-erotic, childhood richness when he says:
I'll kill him! If I have to, I'll kill myself along with him. I'll crash into him. I'll crash the Packard right into him. What's he look like? WHAT'S HE LOOK LIKE? I'll find him. Then I'll find that punk who sold me that phony desert land. I'll track them all down. Every last one of them. Your mother too. I'll track her down and shoot them in their bed. In their hotel bed. I'll splatter their brains all over the vibrating bed. I'll drag him into the lobby and slit his throat. I was in the war. I know how to kill. I was over there. I know how to do it I've done it before, It's no big deal. You just make an adjustment. You convince yourself it's all right. That's all. It's easy. You just slaughter them. Easy. HE'S WITH MY WIFE! THAT'S ILLEGAL!
Here Eros surely grapples with Dionysus, the god of tragedy and comedy-"the chorus-master of the fire-breathing stars," as the philosopher Martha Nussbaum describes Dionysus in The Fragility of Goodness, "who links risk with value and brings healing in a harmony that is not simplicity but the tension between distinct and separate beauties."
The Vox Eroticus is the instrument that guides us to the larger Self that lurks inside us, yearning to break free from the shackles of conformity, correctness and the judgment of an imagined hostile world.
Kristin Linklater would like to acknowledge poet Richard Howard for inspiration on the subject of polymorphous perversity in his Columbia University lectures on The Origins of Modernism.
Thoughts On Theatre, Therapy, And The Art Of Voice
THE VOCAL VISION, Edited by Marian Hampton & Barbara Acker, Applause Books, 1997
Theatre, therapy, and the art of voice: it would be presumptuous of me to think that I can corral these three huge and restless subjects into a cohesive holding pen for long enough to separate, brand, and relocate them for classification, breeding, and sale, were these not cattle already grazing in my training pastures. I have to examine the art of voice training within the context of where theatre is headed next and what kind of healing power is generated by my work and the greater art it serves because these questions are daily present, not theoretically but practically, in my classroom.
At drama school in London where I trained and taught in the late fifties and the early sixties, teachers of actors considered themselves gardeners: planting, fertilizing, pruning, and grafting as they tended the budding and blossoming of each student actor. Metaphors of racehorse training came in now and then to help harness powerful imaginative energies in impulsive muscular bodies, but one way or another cultivation of preexisting talent was the order of the day. The sociological and psychological climate of the nineties is demanding animal husbandry, some experience in lion taming and the ability to recognize a rabid raccoon as part of the job description for actor trainers.
I remember students at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art sitting with their eyes obediently closed in Iris Warren's voice production class, looking inward and downward with their minds' eyes as they relaxed and breathed. When asked what they saw deep inside themselves they reported lovely visions of rose gardens or beds of lilies, forest pools or calm seashores. Recently, in response to a similar exercise at a workshop I was running, an actor gave a vivid description of looking down through a glass ceiling at a cageful of growling, slavering, enraged wild animals which would eat her alive were they to escape.
If, as many voice and acting teachers suggest, the voice that tells the truth comes from deep inside, forged on the anvil of emotion, and if, as seems evident, the theatre of tomorrow even more than today must reflect an increasingly violent society if is to remain useful, the actors whom we train must be able to conjure up their own psychological monsters from the deeps, look them in the eye, tame them, and train them to leap through hoops of fiery texts telling tales of horror that lead to redemption, destruction, or transmutation. For catharsis is still the mission of the theatre. And catharsis originally meant shedding light into dark corners. Dark corners of kitchens or dark corners of the soul, the darkness, the dirt, must be illuminated before it can be cleansed. The human soul absorbs dirt from dusty psyches, grubby memories, and scrofulous experiences, and the actor must at least have knelt down on the floor of his or her own soul with the scrubbing brush before contemplating the illumination of the souls of others.
In my experience, the voice is a powerful scrubber, with words an excellent cleaning agent. The right words are alchemical touchstones that can turn the deadly, poisonous lead of an abused and wounded childhood into the life-restoring gold of art. A playwright forges the right words to expose a monstrous issue that society would rather ignore, and it is the actors who have found words to bring their own monstrous experiences out of the dark and into the light who can bring authenticity and the ring of truth to the playwright’s words. The climate of our times has brought words that used to be taboo into the broad light of day and onto the airwaves. Experiences that used to be hidden in shame or not even known because not named can now be named easily. "Incest," "rape," "abuse" – with the naming comes the memory and the monsters emerge from their caves in the shape of stories we would rather not hear and emotions that shake the day loose from its moorings.
Theatre is alchemy and if theatre is to be potent the ingredients must not avoid the extremities of life. Unless the actor-alchemists are emotional warriors, the lead will turn to pablum that poisons as it soothes. If the actors are emotional warriors what must the teachers be? How do these bold words translate into classroom life?
These are some of the questions that are being asked with increasing urgency: what are the boundaries of teaching? Can I teach theatre and stay clear of involvement with my students' personal problems? What happens when a student comes face to face with an unresolved trauma in the middle of my class? Should I be able to draw a clear line between theatre and therapy?
A lively, three-hour panel discussion at the 1993 Association for Theatre in Higher Education Conference in Philadelphia centered on the subject of theatre and therapy, airing for the first time in public some of the anxieties that exist in the field. Acting teachers, voice teachers, and movement teachers are finding that exercises which they have used for years in successful pursuit of theatrical ends have, in the past five or ten years, been triggering responses in their students of an increasingly emotional nature, and sometimes stimulating memories of childhood traumas that may seem inappropriate to the training task at hand.
Here are some not uncommon events in theatre training classrooms: A voice teacher spends a couple of classes teaching relaxation, and gradually student belly muscles let go so that breath can enter a body fully for what seems like the first time in years, and the student begins to cry uncontrollably. When asked to say something about what is going on, the tears are articulated in memories of a) being told not to answer back by a parent or a teacher; b) holding his breath as his parents fought; c) hating her body so much that she became anorexic, bulimic, and/or suicidal; d) being sexually or physically abused in a variety of ways...the list goes on. A movement teacher notices a lack of coordination in a student's body; exercises for the legs and pelvic area provoke resistance – boredom, exaggeration, panic or collapse. A student may say in response to an individual critique: "I don't understand" or "I'm frozen" or "I don't feel anything in my lower body; it feels numb." These days the movement teacher who has read any kind of psychophysical literature or even Newsweek will suspect sexual or physical abuse as the cause of this separation of mind from body. An acting teacher asks students to bring in a monologue. A student brings in something from Extremities (or one of a dozen other plays or monologues about rape). She cannot speak. A contemporary scene class includes scenes from A Lie of the Mind or 'night Mother. One actor has a brother who is dying in hospital; an-other's sister committed suicide.
We ask for the truth on stage. We say that the actor's raw material is her/himself. The demands we make are time-honored and valid. Yet many teachers, myself included, are becoming alarmed by the responsibility they are faced with when these facts of theatrical life spark a personal horror story in the student actor, together with the threat of "going over the edge," "collapsing," "falling apart," "breaking down completely," "going crazy, killing myself." What are we supposed to do?
Those of us teachers who belong to the humanistic, psychophysical, “use yourself” genre find ourselves in a variety of classroom dilemmas:
One student “goes” and they all “go”: horror is as contagious as tears.
Half the class is in tears and the other half is in angry resistance, furious that their time is being wasted in emotional indulgence.
We deal with the situation in the classroom; someone says, “this seems like therapy to me. Are you qualified?” If no one says it, someone is noisily thinking it.
We do not deal with this situation in the classroom and set up an appointment during office hours. The next thing we know is that we have taken on hours of personal commitment and bought into an unhealthy codependent scenario.
We tell the student we are not equipped to deal with such distress and suggest or insist that s/he gets counseling. The next thing we hear is that s/he cannot get an appointment until next month or that s/he would rather work it out in class because acting class is better than therapy.
These emotional incidents, I hasten to emphasize, are not the whole story but only, as it were, the highlights in a long semester's hard daily work. Focusing on the problems in this way is akin to presenting a two-hour performance of nothing but the climax scenes from all of Shakespeare's plays. Luckily in both the plays and the classes there are long stretches of calm exposition; sometimes there is a dull passage and often there is comic relief. The purpose of this examination is to isolate the emotional incidents and see where (or whether) they fit into the art of theatre. Are they just therapy? Just personal?
Of course, there is a whole other style of teaching that manages to avoid the personal, emotional problems altogether and I confess I often wish that I had adhered to the school that says: “Leave your personal life behind you when you come into the classroom (or rehearsal or the stage).” This approach says: “You become a character and for a brief moment on stage you escape from yourself.” The notion of losing myself in a character implies that the character is bigger, more estimable, more exciting than I am while the idea of finding the character in myself suggests that I am multi-faceted and illimitable and that each character I play finds the roots of its truth in the fact that I am All as well as One; that from my wholeness I can create multiplicity; that I have the capacity to understand the natures of all people and can become any of them by expanding the seed of my understanding until it dislodges and rearranges the ingredients of my personality and a different part of me dominates. This temporarily dominant characteristic proceeds to rearrange my physical and vocal behavior as I develop a character that is rooted in truthful experience because rooted in me, and has blossomed into a flower or a tree or a poisonous plant—or a ravening beast or a purring kitten—that is unrecognizable to my familiar self.
The kind of teaching that we focused on at the ATHE conference and to which I clearly belong is this inside-out approach to training the actor. In fact, we are training the person who will become the actor and therefore we are inevitable inhabitants of therapeutic territory because we are restoring a lost sense of illimitability. It does not seem such a bad thing really; if we believe that one of the missions of theatre is healing we can accept the fact that healing goes on in the microcosms of theatre we call classrooms. The person who becomes the actor needs unblocked access to the fullest capacity of voice, body, emotions, intellect, and imagination. Very often one or more of these essential attributes is held hostage by past experience that says emotional expression is dangerous, impulse and spontaneity are dangerous, words are dangerous. Inner voices shout STOP at the moment a creative impulse yells GO and the resonance of these hidden voices flooding the inner ear deafens the sound of one's own true, individual voice. There is no authentic individual artistry until the reverberation of personal truth replaces the resonance of naysaying; until then derivative performance is inevitable and real art is elusive.
If real artistry depends on the authenticity of the artist's voice, and if we are talking about the real, physical voice, not a metaphorical one, then we must recondition real usage on a psychophysical level, by which I mean not just the discrete respiratory and laryngeal mechanisms but their deployment in the larger arsenal of emotional defenses. The emotions that are being defended are often huge and the order of the art they produce is seldom “recollected in tranquility” but more often forged in a chaotic escape on the rehearsal floor or in the classroom when they are afforded relaxation and permission.
Nine times out of ten, magical performance results when a teacher and her student can channel undammed emotional energy into a scene or a monologue or a poem. We witness artistic transformation. But the tenth time, an enormous personal story presents itself that demands personal work right then and there. Such work can result in personal transformation or vocal transformation or breakdown. When either transformation or breakdown occurs at the very end of a class there is potentially some danger that the student will be left feeling out of control or disoriented if s/he is unused to intense experiences of this nature.
We are operating within a social climate that has changed radically in the past twenty years and many of us are looking for ways that expand the safety nets both for us and for our students without ducking the issues. At the ATHE conference we talked about ways of “cooling down” emotionally to balance the practice of “warming up”, and shared techniques of “stepping out” of emotional hot spots. Panel member Robert Barton, who teaches acting at the University of Oregon, adamantly expressed the point of view that if we soft-pedal, sidestep, or soothe away the painful emotions that erupt from time to time in our classes we will produce actors fed on pablum who will in turn produce theatre that is pablum. We must be able to step into the fire. And we must avoid getting burned. We must build emotional muscle and exercise the passions, passions which are hottest at the core of the toughest personal ordeals. And we and our students must be able to step out of the core, cool down and go on with our days.
I remember saying to the actor with the glass-ceiling zoo in her belly that if she could learn the names of the raging beasts and find the keys to their respective cages, she could, over time, develop a relationship with her monsters. I suggested that if she let them out and exercised them on a leash they would learn to behave and might become useful guard and attack animals. They could also transform into fabulous engines of creativity when she needed them to be that and then go back under the glass and sleep peacefully. This is, of course, easier said then done, and I am grateful to Robert Barton and to Susanna Bloch, who was also on our ATHE panel, for offering us practical techniques for handling wild animals.
Susanna Bloch brings a background in neuroscience to her study of emotional effector patterns and her work is provoking considerable interest among actor trainers. From laboratory observations she found that specific emotional feelings were linked to specific patterns of breathing, facial expressions, degrees of muscular tension, and postural attitudes. Her experiments led her to develop a “step out” procedure which will restore neutrality to someone who is caught in an emotion and cannot shift the state.
The procedure is: take at least three slow, regular, and deep full breathing cycles; then totally relax the face muscles and change posture. Not only will this end the emotional state but it will obviate the “emotional hangovers”.
Robert Barton pointed out that we seldom spend as much time on rituals to end classes or rehearsals as we do to start them off. 'Ritual' might simply mean a warm-up or a circle but might be more elaborate. His suggestion was that we end each work session as we began, thus formally 'taking off the mask' of our work and returning to our daily selves. He also has a 'step out' process in which he as the teacher stands opposite the person who is emotionally trapped and asks to be mirrored as he stretches, massages his own face, and breathes slowly. He always sets up agreements with his students that give the option of disengagement from any exercise that may be emotionally demanding; he defines boundaries of safety and sets up ground rules of support and comfort. For example, students learn to ask for a hug if that is what they need. Unsolicited hugs are discouraged as they sometimes come from the wrong person even though with the right intention; sometimes they come from the wrong person with the wrong intention; sometimes they are counterproductive because an emotional condition that looks painful from the outside is thrilling from the inside and comfort is an unnecessary distraction from a long-desired and enlivening experience.
I myself sometimes ask a student who suddenly starts crying uncontrollably in the middle of a group relaxation to sit out for ten minutes and write in his or her journal until s/he feels better-it is important that s/he does not leave the room. This can work well for the more advanced student who understands what is happening on the personal level, does not really need help, and appreciates that the class cannot always stop its momentum to accommodate the rise of an emotion, but also wants to record and examine the details of a valuable spontaneous memory or insight. The student always rejoins the class in a good state. This solution honors emotions without letting them rule the day.
Students who have yet to learn the value of the sudden onset of emotion and who feel frightened when it happens must, of course, have personal attention. With careful planning, a light-hearted approach, and a modicum of luck, I try to postpone the possibility with new students until we have a shared experience of voice exercises that can be drawn on. At that point real emotion is a key ingredient in the true reconditioning of habitual defense patterns. Once the student knows how to keep the throat open and can choose where the breath goes in the body, vulnerability is experienced as strength, and emotions become a source of power as their owner is no longer incapacitated by them.
Quite recently I had a student who even after a semester of voice work still spoke in a breathy whisper most of the time. She was the survivor of all manner of childhood abuses, was in therapy, had attended violence workshops, and generally understood her state of mind and body well but could not yet risk a full voice. One day in class she became choked with fear as she was doing an exercise and whispered, "I'm scared I'm going to cry." I said, "Open your throat and say that on the vibrations of sound." She opened up her clenched throat and in a loud, clear voice said, "I'm scared I'm going to cry—oh! That's funny—now I don't want to cry any more!" When she went back to the whisper the emotion threatened to incapacitate her; when she found her voice the emotion receded.
The practice of setting up agreements with one's students is essential to the health and integrity of this kind of work. Without them we run the risk of abusing our positions of power. Students must know that they are in a collaborative relationship with their teacher; that they are working together towards the same goal. Ideally, “problems” are made explicit and “solutions” openly discussed. If the teacher diagnoses resistance (and worthwhile change nearly always meets some resistance) the student should accept the diagnosis and endorse the prescription before the teacher administers treatment. This is not only healthful but twice as effective as the old authoritarian mode of teaching-so long as the partnership is genuine. The ultimate caveat about emotional work with acting students is that the teacher must be as psychologically healthy as possible.
The question of the emotional and mental health of theatre practitioners is obviously beyond the scope of this piece of writing and may properly belong in a standup comedy routine, but it should be equally obvious that there are serious ethics involved in stirring up the interface of the personal and the artistic experiences. Teaching that stays forever behind a locked classroom door is almost always unhealthy. The artistic worth of a method of teaching can and should be measured in an artistic product visible to all. Artistic output can provide some sort of guarantee of the competence of a teacher and the health of his or her methods; process and product can be assessed in a public product more objectively than in the classroom. But finally it is the teacher who should be his or her own severest judge. S/he must ask students for honest feedback on how the classroom culture and content is working and be willing to make changes where responses are negative. Honesty, openness, and courage in a teacher create an environment where students can be honest, open, and brave. They want to be; if they are not then we must take responsibility for having failed them.
For myself, I teach. the same basic technical progression of voice production exercises that I inherited from Iris Warren between 1957 and 1963. But after thirty years of admittedly random consciousness raising and refining I see much more about my students now than I used to. Willy-nilly (often more nilly than willy) I have learned more and more about the causes of human dysfunction and I have read enough about psychological development to recognize not only the behavioral manifestations of traumatic childhood but the potential for huge expressive talent beneath the behavior. I have picked up basic principles from Stanley Keleman and many others that clarify how the body's intelligence develops survival habits that save a person's life but can at some point be exchanged for the energy of life itself. Dozens of books, seminars, and workshops are available to the searcher after truth, freedom, and creativity.
What I have learned reflects the psychophysical knowledge of this century in this very privileged country. We-we privileged few-have been relieved enough of our external survival needs to be free to focus on internal survival and something which has come to be called “human growth.” (This is a term which should not deny the moral growth many humans experience in the face of external adversity.) The “human growth movement” of the past twenty years focuses on release from psychophysical adversity, emphasizing the benefits of emotional and psychological freedom in achieving a fully lived life. This goal would be immorally self-centered did it not include the notion that the purpose of growing as a human being must be to look at and listen to the whole human condition with increased understanding and compassion and, in the case of the artist, to shed an ever brighter light on the causes of humanity's more egregious errors. The theatre is home to both light and sound, and it is the sound of the actor's voice that is the ultimate instrument of catharsis. It penetrates the ultrasound to the hidden recesses of a listener's soul if its frequencies are begotten in true feeling and delivered free of distortion and effort.
The voice of a very good actor rings with authenticity whether in the wild poetic extensions of the classics of Western dramatic literature or the equally wild poetic extensions of language that express the contemporary soul in extremis, and although I know more and more about the workings of the psyches of my students and my intention is that they prosper as human beings, my objective is that they become very good, very exciting, very idiosyncratic actors. My super-objective is that they advance the art of theatre.
We often use as a challenge to take our discipline seriously the analogy of the musician or the dancer: talent is not enough—you must train. Does a talented musician (or dancer) go out and perform Beethoven (or Swan Lake) on the strength of talent alone? Invoking the years of scales and arpeggios, barre exercises and hard, slogging, self-sacrificial technical work that dedicated musicians and dancers undertake before inflicting themselves on an audience, we goad our students into voice and body work that, alas, often trains them out of authenticity and into a slick showcase of styles.
Musicians seldom have to perform Beethoven and hard rock, and ballet dancers are not required to do both Swan Lake and break-dancing, but actors must be able to deliver the authentic ring of the streets, the shelter, the prison, the hospice and Shakespeare, Restoration, Shaw, Chekhov, and Tennessee Williams. Today's high earners in film and television are often cast from real life. Training would have ruined their authentic look and sound. If they continue in the profession, however, they discover the need for training and often come to a moment when their artistic wings yearn for the spread of the classics. Do the classics represent the highest echelon of the art of theatre? Or is the art at its highest when it engages a community (or just one individual) and helps bring healing through reflection and transformation? Is it inevitable that “the classics” are distanced from the daily grind of real life? Or can they connect with current issues at least as graphically as a movie or a soap opera?
Those of us who train actors' voices cannot afford to make a choice between the classics and contemporary drama, nor do we have to make any such large distinction. We encounter contemporary drama daily in our contemporary students and when we listen carefully they already possess the stuff of the classics, only requiring access to some different forms of expression to gain entry and command. What sometimes seems like emotional chaos tearing us apart like an internal zoo full of rabid wild animals becomes the passion that authenticates King Lear on the heath, Medea, and Oedipus.
The miracle of the voice is that it connects both inwardly and outwardly, and the depth of the art with which the voice is deployed by the actor depends on the depth to which it plunges internally in the creative process and the scope of its outward journey. Voice is air and vibration; it is infinitely malleable, transformable, and expressive. It can communicate more intimate nuance over a greater distance than the body can. It is the bridge between souls. The art of the voice flourishes in the ground of healthy psyche, and though in today's theatre it is an art not much heralded, I hope that if we can heal the rifts that society and upbringing have made between the souls and voices of the actor/artists that are our charges now, the voices of the next theatre generation will discover how to penetrate the inner worlds of their audience with harmonies of understanding, compassion, and true healing.
The Incredible Shrinking Shakespearean
AMERICAN THEATRE MAGAZINE, October, 1990
A crying baby expresses its emotional truth—its breath picks up its essential survival impulses and turns them to sounds, which demand a response. If the response comes, the baby lives. If the call is unanswered, the baby dies, either literally or in spirit. Later, when words begin to come, a child's environment either confirms that emotional expression is all right or, more commonly, inhibits such expression. The three-year-old with a life-or-death need for a chocolate chip cookie—"MOMMY, MOMMY, MOMMY, I WANT A CHOCOLATE CHIP COOKIE I WANT"— very quickly learns to disconnect his or her voice from emotional impulse in order to get results. The voice that coos or pleads in a sweet unthreatening high tone—"Mommee, if I'm a very good little boy (or girl) and say pretty please with sugar on it, can I have a chocolate chip cookie?"—is likely to get the cookie. That voice has begun a conditioning that disconnects it from emotion and hooks it into mechanisms that disguise the truth, thus creating a vocal behavior conformable to and supportive of the cultural norm.
When I work with an actor on Shakespeare, I have to re-condition the impulse connection back to the two-or three-year-old and wipe out mummy's training to be a good member of society. To play King Lear or Lady Macbeth, Richard III or Queen Margaret you need to be closer to the two-year-old throwing a tantrum than to the civilized good citizen.
To be believed on stage your voice must tell the truth. The questions come, though, as often in what we laughingly call "real life" as on the stage: "Whose voice am I really speaking in? What is truth? Is this what I really think? What do I really feel right now? Whose are these other voices in my head, saying 'nice little girls don't do this.' 'Big boys don't cry,' 'wrong!' 'You're stupid,' etc.? Our everyday, 20th century emotions, strained through the filter of Western Society, do not suit the passions of the Elizabethan playwright, and our everyday voices are not exercised in the extremity of passionate speaking from the heart of truth.
If Constance, in King John, had been told when she was a child: "Go up to your room and stop that crying; when you've pulled yourself together you can come downstairs and tell me what's wrong," she could probably not have said:
I am not mad. This hair I tear is mine;
My name is Constance; I was Geoffrey's wife;
Young Arthur is my son, and he is lost.
I am not mad; I would to heaven I were;
For then tis like I should forget myself.
O, if I could, what griefs should I forget!
If I were mad, I should forget my son.
Or madly think a babe of clouts were he.
I am not mad; too well, too well I feel
The different plague of each calamity.
And I doubt that King Lear's mother ever said to him, "Don't you lose your temper with me. Never speak to your mother in that tone or voice." The voice must have an accustomed connection with large emotion if the vocal musculature is to serve Lear's full-throated competition with the storm:
Blow winds and crack your cheeks! Rage! Blow!
You cataracts and hurricanes, spout
Till you have drench'd our steepies, drown'd the cocks!
You sulph'rous and thought-executing fires,
Vaunt-couriers of oak-cleaving thunderbolts,
Singe my white head!
Our society has split the emotions from the intellect and even the expression of passionate love is problematic for the 20th century actor. I do an exercise in which my students have to say: "I like you; I love you; I adore you; I worship you!" This contains a clear escalation of feeling, but played according to the truth of the average 20th century experience of love and the tangled relationships we mostly associate with that emotion, today's actors will start boldly and be brought to a state of twisted unease by the worshipful climax. To play Shakespeare one must be able to express adoration and worship with open joy and ecstasy. Our everyday voices lack the regular nourishment of the expression of such rich emotion and lack the amplitude to accommodate the size of Shakespeare's emotion-steeped language. His language is emotion.
The English language has remained basically unchanged through the centuries succeeding Shakespeare, but we have changed—fundamentally. The language is rich and redolent—sensorially, sensually, emotionally—but our capacity to experience it has become one dimensional. We use language as a utility, functional and informational 90 percent of the time. It is linear and arid in our minds and mouths.
In 1987 I directed Hamlet at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Hamlet and MIT. The very pairing suggests the problem faced by today's actor when confronted with Shakespeare's text. Elizabethan English lived in the body. Twentieth-century English is experienced in the head. Elizabethans experienced thought in the organs of the body. If any of the MIT students that I worked with had experienced their thoughts in their bodies, they would have electrocuted themselves. They talked at lightning speed and their brains burned at an almost visible white heat. Their bodies were machines at the service of the brain. These walking brains, the crème de la crème of American intellect, the creators of the technological and electronic miracles that determine the kinds of lives we live and our children will live, are the extreme examples of the 20th century mind. Not that we are necessarily more intelligent than our forebears, but we are prejudiced in favor of the scientific mode and tip the balance of our humanity towards the head rather than the heart or the gut. The Elizabethans strove for balance and harmony in their inner and outer worlds.
Holding the mirror up to today's nature, actors must encompass both the sophistication of the electronic age we live in and the blitzed inarticulateness of a Valley girl or drug addict. A balanced humanity is hard to achieve and yet no one can fully play Shakespeare without a balance of head and heart, body and voice. The Elizabethans still implicitly knew that their bodies and their humors were microcosms of the great macrocosm of the universe—they were part of Nature. We are irrevocably split from Nature. Even as we seek to control and dominate her, we are surprised to find she’s gone sick on us and won’t play.
Suiting the action to the word and the word to the action, as Hamlet advises the Players to do, is not natural to us any more. It is no longer the fashion even to “stand by” our words. Instead, we hedge them about with ambiguity lest an expert should try to disprove what we say.
The Elizabethan mind was unified with the body it animated. Information was stored in human memories and between the covers of small miracles called books. It is only in the last milli-second of human evolution that communication has shifted from the oral tradition – soundwaves travelling through the air from body to body, as though the whole body were mouth and ear—to print-dominated, visually transferred information exchange.
Four hundred years after Shakespeare we tend to feel that our minds are puny weaklings in the face of a vast infinity of information. The technological capacity to miniaturize the elements of communication will continue to speed up exponentially the accumulation and storage of information. You might say with Stewart Brand in The Media Lab that eventually there will be: "submicron computers with gigahertz clock rates, nanowatt power dissipation and RAM storage densities in the hundreds of millions of terabytes per cubic centimeter." Translated this comes out as: "whole computers smaller than a millionth of a meter, going at millions of cycles-per-second on a billionth-of-a-watt of energy, with memory in the trillions of bytes."
What is the poor actor, whose job it is, Hamlet says, to "hold the mirror up to nature," to do with all this?
The great poet of the theatre of our time was Samuel Beckett, and his mirror reflects a dislocated 20th century mind, searching for identity. I was forcibly struck, almost driven mad, by the mental contrast between Beckett and Shakespeare, while driving on the Massachusetts Turnpike, from my home in the Berkshires to Boston, trying to learn the text of Beckett's Not I while in the last week of Hamlet rehearsals. How to switch from Shakespeare's iambic rhythm that picks up the heartbeat and is the natural pulse of the English language:
To be or not to be: that is the question;
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And, by opposing, end them.
To Beckett's Mouth in his 11-mintue play—the audience sees nothing but a mouth:
Out...into this world...this world...tiny little thing...before its time...in a godfor...what?...girl? ... yes...tiny little girl...into this...out into this...before her time...godforsaken hole called...called... no matter...parents unknown...unheard of...he having vanished...thin air...no sooner buttoned up his breeches...she similarly...eight months later almost to the tick...
My brainwaves were going crazy on the turnpike trying to learn this for a performance I was giving. I felt dizzy, I nearly drove off the road. There is a palpable effect on the whole organism, on the cellular sensation when the harmony and regular rhythms of Shakespeare go through one, but the jagged dislocations that reflect through Beckett the 20th century experience constitute the normal, familiar mode of the 20th century actor. This actor, in order to come close to Shakespeare, has to rediscover deeply buried harmonies and rhythms and open up wells of passionate expression that have had lids put over them so that society does not inadvertently fall in.
Recognizing our fragmentation, and seeking out the balm of Shakespeare's words, perhaps today's actor can become whole enough to do him justice. The miracle of Shakespeare is that he can still speak to us and through us. He knew he would, "So long as men shall breathe or eyes can see/ So long lives this, and this gives life to thee."
Most miraculously, he is the only truly global playwright. His plays are translated into every major language in the world. The Germans say they actually understand him better than the English. Kurosawa makes us believe that Shakespeare was a Samurai in another life. Ingmar Bergman exposes the tortured Scandinavian soul in him. The Russians (or rather, the Georgians) have produced the definitive Lear. The Chinese have an annual Shakespeare festival. The Arabs claim him as an Arab—Sheik Spear. His stories are archetypal and illuminate human lives no matter what language those lives are dressed in. But Russian, Swedish, Chinese actors are telling Shakespeare's stories in their own everyday language. The English-speaking actor has a harder road to travel, since Shakespeare's English is not the everyday English spoken by today's actors.
Understanding Shakespeare's language is not, however, merely a matter of looking up the vocabulary, and getting one's tongue around Elizabethan language structures. The fact is that when words are experienced viscerally—sensorially, sensually, physically, emotionally—they yield up different meaning from those wrestled out of the cerebrum. And it is clear that Elizabethan English was a much more robust, red-blooded affair than that of today. It was, after all, 400 years younger. Our everyday English is an anemic, insecure, elderly shadow of the language which used to sound all those letters in words that now only serve to provide sadistic pleasure for the people who devise spelling bees. If you experiment with even the smallest understanding of how this older English might have sounded, you will find how much energy it takes to say the words, and that the extra activity of the lips and tongue and throat stimulates you physically right down to your breathing center. The whole body is involved.
Today's actor has to rediscover language in order to plug into Shakespeare: become, as it were, a child again; relearn the body-and-soul expressiveness of individual vowels and consonants; remember the first knowledge of passion-words—Love, Rage, Grief, Ecstasy, Hate, Jealousy, Joy—slow down every phase of the process of speaking so that the language is reborn and the elemental particles of communication reconstruct their relationships.
Vowels and consonants were fashioned from emotions and sensations. A poetic genius such as Shakespeare consciously or unconsciously uses the sounds within the words to convey on a sub-or-intra-verbal level the effect of the content of the words. Shakespeare's images, when they travel through the body along the psychophysical paths of vowels and consonants, evoke spontaneous emotional responses. When the eye of the solar plexus accurately receives Shakespeare's image the actor feels the emotion the dramatist intended.
Actors today often have trouble understanding why Shakespeare's characters behave the way they do. For instance, it is difficult to analyze the Macbeth marriage according to 20th century psychology. Within the Elizabethan World Picture, with hell burning below one's feet and heaven shining way up in the sky and the "great chain of being" stretching between, the behavior of the Macbeths is comprehensible and playable. It is not hard for us today to revert to an experience of animal passions, lust, revenge, hate, rage, murder, ambition—living in the lower regions of the body. Redemptive love dwells in the heart and the divine soul and reason belong in the head. Hell pulls one down and heaven draws one up and we struggle between two magnetic forces. Macbeth's conflict at the center of these two opposing attractions is palpable, and if the actor playing him can embody the images, he will enter the flesh, spirit and felt dilemma of the man.
Language went through volcanic changes in the 15th and 16th centuries. The Bible was translated from Latin into English; education, law and religion were no longer conducted in Latin, and in Shakespeare's time the plain Anglo-Saxon that characterized everyday, spoken English received a transfusion of fresh blood from thousands of newly coined words concocted from the language hitherto the exclusive domain of the educated. Words we take for granted were used by Shakespeare to hit the ear with a vivid shock. He himself brought hundreds, possibly thousands of new words into the language. If the actor's consciousness is attuned to the juxtaposition of Anglo-Saxon, monosyllabic words with Latin-based polysyllabic ones and alert to the effect of deliberately setting a short, visceral, direct word alongside a longer, more intellectual one, an astonishingly emotional response may be spontaneously sparked in the body.
We can see very well how this understanding can help the actor when Macbeth begins his examination of the pros and cons of murdering his king. He cannot even say the word "murder." He first attempts to confront the act with monosyllabic directness: "If it ["it" is tiny word for a huge sin] were done [finished, over with] when 'tis done [committed], then 'twere well/ It were done [performed] quickly." But he doesn't go and do it. He tackles the subject from another, more intellectual standpoint, distancing the argument: "If the assassination [long, Latin-based word, still avoiding the word ‘murder’]/ Could trammel up the consequence [thinking hard], and catch/ With his surcease success: that but this blow [Anglo-Saxon]/ Might be the be-all and the end-all here/ But here upon this bank and shoal of time/ We'd jump the life to come [it sounds as if he is gathering enough Anglo-Saxon directness to do the deed]. But in these cases [oh, dear, he's changing his mind]/ We still have judgment here, that we but teach/ Bloody instructions which being taught return/ To plague th' inventor [head and heart are butting against each other in juxtaposed Anglo-Saxon and Latin-based words].”
If the actor allows the images to play through his emotions and experiences his belief in the "great chain of being" as feeling, he will have no difficulty in achieving the extremity of Macbeth's battle of conscience, before Lady Macbeth comes in to provide the spur. We know the rest.
Within the elements of Shakespeare's language is encoded Shakespeare's creative force. When that language is incarnated—when the words become flesh and breath and feeling—today's actors are reborn to embody the archetypal stories told by the greatest poet-dramatist ever.
Through the incarnation of language, today's theatre could rediscover the whole purpose of theatre, which is to bring healing and new life to the community it serves. The breath of life within the words, the word animating emotions in the body, the body and voice deepening and expanding the humanity of the actor, the actors revitalizing the theatre, the theatre nurturing the soul of its community, the community a microcosm of our global village, where, breathing deeply the air common to all humanity, we may one day—before it is too late—find and share words and stories that can save our universal souls.