SEE SITI's Extended Ensemble

Veteran acting teacher Steve Wangh developed an exercise that he suggests can teach an actor most of what they need to know about acting. Five or more actors enter the stage together, each with the task of getting the audience to look at them and them alone.  Although it seems that this might lead to a free-for-all demonstration of blatant narcissism, in fact actors quickly learn that being loud and obvious does not necessarily attract and hold the attention of the audience.  To become un-dismissible demands a concentration of energy and intention into intensely focused action. The audience becomes interested when they begin to suspect rather than be sure of something about an actor’s state.  In this way, the actors learn the importance of keeping a certain amount to themselves.  Their privacy engenders fascination on the watcher.  Too much sharing does not stimulate attraction.

The actor-director relationship is a fascinating paradigm.  What is happening?  The actor tries out ideas upon the director.  The director responds both in the moment and after-the-fact.  In the moment, in the heat of a rehearsal, an actor should sense the quality of excitement or energy that his or her attempt is affecting upon the director whose job is to stand in for a future audience.  After the fact, a director gives notes, citing dramaturgical, psychological, spatial or temporal issues. 

I like to think of the director as litmus paper. Litmus is a water-soluble mixture of different dyes absorbed into filter paper to serve as a pH indicator. The usefulness of litmus is in its ability to test materials for acidity.  Blue litmus turns red under acidic conditions and red litmus turns blue under alkaline conditions.  To think of the director as litmus paper is to suggest that an actor can the test his or her effectiveness by noticing the change in the constitution of the director who is attending closely to the actor’s actions. Then the actor gauges the next attempt based upon the success of his or her action on the director.

To consider the litmus metaphor in more depth, it is necessary examine the nature of the chemical reaction is that is taking place between the actor and the director in rehearsal or between the actor and the audience in the heat of performance. What is essential is that the actor is being present in such a way that he or she cannot be dismissed easily by the audience or by the director.  It should simply be difficult to look away. In order to engage the sustained interest of a director or of an audience, an actor develops a strong inner life and drive and then experiments with how much to manifest and what to hold back. The actor sets up a reverberation between himself and the environment, other actors and the audience. 

Richard Schechner, theater director, writer and my professor in graduate school, spoke recently with the directors at Columbia University. “Do not be a motorboat,” he said, “Be a sailboat.”  I found his advice profound. Directors often assume that their job is to arrive with all guns firing and then keep the barrage up until opening night. Perhaps this is not such an effective idea. Behaving like a motorboat leaves little opportunity to respond to the vicissitudes of the weather and currents of rehearsal. For a director, it is essential to catch and channel the power of the emergent culture as it happens in the room.  “Actors will always provide plenty of useful hot air,” said Richard. 

An actor comes onstage in a rehearsal with an inkling, and makes an attempt, an assault on the mountain.  This way the actor tests his or her ideas upon the director’s sensibilities. But the director’s attention is not focused directly upon the actor, but rather surrounds the action, encompasses the context, sees the whole.  In this way too the director is also holding back, not suffocating the actor. The director is also waiting for the moment in which the arrangement of spatial and temporal issues begins to vibrate, literally, physically.  And the actor is part of this arrangement, but not everything.  The actor’s visceral relationship to the architecture, the lighting, and the sound, all becomes part of the whole.

PS- SITI Company's UNDER CONSTRUCTION is playing until May 7th in NYC. I hope you will be able to make it! For more info and a special discount code, please go to http://www.facebook.com/home.php#!/event.php?eid=199775003384338.