Acting: "Experiencing" as Apophasis

Mary Shelley, by Richard Rothwell, 1840

When I was a 19-year-old undergraduate studying acting under Karen Lund, artistic director of Taproot Theatre in Seattle, Washington, I remember being concerned that I could not “make” myself cry onstage. I remember thinking that tears must be some kind of technical skill that some actors have and others do not, something perhaps biologically inheritable, like the ability to wiggle one’s ears or move at will only one eyebrow (two enviable facial contortions I have never been able to effect). We were reading Uta Hagen’s Respect for Acting. From Hagen I took to heart the great utility of the object exercise: good acting is re-living what you really know, behaving with the same inward focus on stage that you would in your own apartment. But to take the leap between understanding the concept of the “magic if” and actually living and experiencing it on stage or in the rehearsal room was something that I don’t believe I have done until now. The thing that taught me the difference between understanding and experiencing was my own tears. They somehow flowed out at a few key moments when rehearsing a scene between Percy Shelley and Mary Shelley in Liz Lochead’s 1983 bio-drama Blood and Ice for a graduate acting course under Stanislavski expert Bella Merlin—and those tears both shocked and delighted me. What finally experiencing experiencing taught me, further, was that it was nothing I could force, not an expressive skill I could exhibit like raising of one eyebrow. It came about as the result of finely tuning myself to the harmonies and discords of a complicated relationship between two characters, and allowing myself to be battened about by the implications of the scene, and releasing my body from the constraints of intellectualization of the scene so that I could feel it fully as the Mary Shelley who is myself.

                The argument that I have been making throughout this dissertation is that performance is nothing, that it is not, and that the “pure performative” is the absence of performance. While J.L. Austin describes a pure performative as word and deed that fully corresponds (as in “I salute you!” which is in the saying itself the salute), I would like to understand pure performance as that which does not perform at all; pure performance is the essence of communication. In a sense, it is the “experiencing” of the actor that Stanislavski describes when he or she lives the utter spontaneity of response, alive with attention, actively listening to the scene partners and to the self. “Experiencing” is the creative state of the actor that Stanislavski hoped his System could foster. He related it to familiar states of mind like inspiration, creating, creative moods, or the “activation of the subconscious.’” “Experiencing” describes the sensation of existing fully in the immediate moment for the actor.[1] Stanislavsky called this “I am,” which is interesting when noting the legacy of that particular phrase in the Hebrew and Greek traditions (God says to Moses, “I am that I am”), and also considering Stanislavky’s interest in non-Western spiritualities. He also described “experiencing” as a state that is “rare” but “happy,” “when the actor is ‘seized’ by the role. At such a moment, the artist feels something akin to that of a yogi who has reached a higher state of consciousness; there is an ‘all-perceptive’ sharpening of the senses, and ‘intense awareness,’ and ‘oceanic joy,’ and ‘bliss.’”[2] Within “experiencing,” the actor is most fully himself, and most fully immersed in the scene. There is no need to access a kind of “transcendence,” or to posit that the actor has achieved anything other than the simple stripping away of convention and affect. She is present. Acting is a skill as well as an art when the actor becomes the “athlete of the heart” who can be present in the moment, as if the “as if” goes away and becomes “is.” Actors are the finest performers when this skill is alive within them—they make you believe that you are witnessing nothing more than life as it happens; that is, that they are not performing. What I believe to be possible is the ability, within the art of acting, to generate the creative conditions through which performance is truly pure—performance as nothing, performance as the absence of performance. Great acting allows us to understand performance as the absence of performance. This is what makes acting so much different from performance art. The actor creates the conditions for the stripping away of performance, and proceeds to do so. The performance artist, on the other hand, is already herself, whether or not the persona she performs is cultivated consciously. In performance art, the audience witnesses a self. With acting, the audience witnesses the conscious stripping away of a self to reveal self in relation. Performance art performs performance. An actor performs the absence of performance. That is the essential difference between performance art and acting. Another way to say this is that performance art creates experiences, while acting cultivates “experiencing.”

                The radical thing about acting is that it can achieve this “pure performative” through “experiencing” that is a result of active analysis—that is, the active and attentive relationship the actor enters with the text and scene partner(s).  Stanislavsky always maintained that “Actors play their roles, not themselves.”[3] The revolutionary thing about “experiencing” that I now understand after my experience with the eruption of emotion while working through a scene, is that although an actor plays a role, the experience of the role can only be through the actor living a moment in relationship with another actor and the conditions of the scene. Even though we can understand the performance through layers of representation and deflection of actor to role (i.e. through the semiotics of theatre), acting works when these layers compress into one comprehensive moment. At the pivotal moment when I finally understood “experiencing,” the deflected or intellectualized understanding of my character’s experience meshed with my own, and when it did, the tears flowed, as if I was experiencing what Mary Shelley was experiencing. I was only able to get to this place after analyzing the text with my scene partner, and working with him through several rounds of improvisations.

In this scene, Percy Shelley tries to convince Mary to go sailing with him in his new boat, and Mary balks at the idea for several reasons. The scene operates on a metaphorical level: Shelley not only asks Mary to sail with him, but to acquiesce to his chosen non-monogamous lifestyle while at the same time remaining his “brother-body-soul melting into sister-body-soul.” Having given birth five times and losing four of those children, either to sickness or miscarriage, Mary knows that to say yes is to sign her own death warrant, because another pregnancy would very well kill her. That Shelley would ask her to chance this rips her in two, because the passionate love that he offers her also wounds her deeply. He does not understand why she should refuse him—he only sees that they are “fused as one,” and as a result, fails to see Mary as anything different than the girl he met in a graveyard when she was only sixteen years old. When Mary tries to tell him that she is a “woman now,” her words fall on deaf ears. In order to convince Mary of his sincerity and his love, Shelley describes to Mary how he saved her life when she was bleeding out as a result of her last miscarriage. He ran to make an ice-bath for her, which stopped the flow of blood. It was when listening to Shelley’s monolog here that I myself was suddenly plunged into the bloody ice-bath of the experience of the scene. All of the sudden I understood the depth of Shelley’s love, his desperation and his conviction that Mary’s body is his body. To lose her would be to lose everything. But not to risk with her is also to lose everything. He needs her like he needs his own body, and Mary and I understood this all at once, and it reduced us to tears, because it is a terrible impasse and an irreconcilable paradox to be asked in love to give oneself wholly over to love when it means risking one’s own very life. The sacrifice must be made, but to be asked to make the sacrifice by the one for whom you would already willingly make a sacrifice—it’s unthinkable; it’s almost as if the asking cancels the meaning of the sacrifice out. It can only be a sacrifice if it is not asked for; otherwise it becomes an economic transaction. Mary would willingly die for Shelley, but to have Shelley ask her to die for him, and not to seem to understand that this is in fact what he is asking: here, tears are the only appropriate response, because I cry for what I can’t change, mourning for an irrevocable loss. I felt the loss of the kind of trusting relationship where the beloved doesn’t have to ask for the sacrifice.  The asking is already a loss and a destruction. When I cried, when Mary cried, it was because I was witnessing, in that moment, the death of something beautiful in the asking of the impossible question. And it really did die in that moment, and it was truly tragic.

I now understand “experiencing” to be that sudden flood of understanding that plunges the actor into the scene with such abandon that the actor cannot help but live it actually, at the same time remaining distinct from the character.  On a less emotionally involved level, I had several experiences during the active analysis process that resulted in similar flashes of understanding. No matter how many times I sat with the scene by myself, it was not until I was discussing and improvising the scene with my partner that I was able to see the text in a different light. It was almost like an epiphany—I felt touched with a divine hand that somehow guided my thoughts to a new enlightened state. It looks funny and strange to put such words down on a page, but if this dissertation argues anything, it is that we should carefully allow for close attention to the indescribable, and not be embarrassed by it, whatever our beliefs. There is no way to quantify or map out the exact movements that were made in order to arrive at a new and fuller understanding of a character, or to actually feel the emotional life of a character, but it happens, and every actor knows when it does and what to do to get herself there. “Experiencing resides in the tacit dimension; it can be known but not expressed.”[4] The transition from intellectual understanding of a part to the living and emotional experience of a part must be regarded with the same reverence that our society allows for the artistic genius of people like Van Gough or Beethoven. We would never demand to know exactly how Beethoven came up with his nine symphonies. That would be to reduce inspiration to pony tricks. This class has given me a new level of respect for acting, because I can now extrapolate, based on this small experience, what it might be like to sustain such concentration and attention throughout the entire run of a show or the entire filming of a movie. Great acting lives through the truth of human experience through a medium that is both not the self and also not not the self, in the way that Starry Night is not Van Gough himself, but could only have been painted by him, in that way the art and the artist live and breathe through one another.

This condition of being “not me and not not me” that describes Richard Schechner’s definition of performance underscores my appreciation of Sharon Carnicke’s nuanced explanation of Stanislavsky’s thoughts about “experiencing,” especially in relationship to the task of playing a real person. Although Stanislavsky said that the actor “does not act, but lives,” Carnicke is careful to qualify this Romantic-sounding fusion with a subtler understanding of the relationship between acting and living. Because the theatrical event, the work of playing itself, is the source of the actor’s genuine experience, we must understand that the way the actor “lives” onstage is the way that they “create” onstage, in the immediacy of the performance itself. Carnicke outlines two senses in which Stanislavsky uses “experiencing”: first, in the theoretical communication of personal experience, the actor and role fuse through sincere self-expression. Second, on a more practical basis, “acting generates its own experiential dimension in performance,” with the alternation between actor and character.[5] What I think is useful about playing real people is that it highlights the second way to think about “experiencing.” Since the role necessarily has a history outside the life of the actor and the text, and since there are resources out there to challenge the actor’s perception of the character, the character that is a real person makes the “fusion” of actor and role even more difficult to swallow, forcing the actor to find other ways to approach the character since information about the character can come from places other than the actor’s own experience and the text of the play. Since Blood and Ice takes place early on in Mary Shelley’s life, and ends with the drowning of Percy Shelley, my perception of the scene as Mary’s rejection and leave-taking of Shelley was challenged when I found out that she later spent a great deal of her writing career publishing and promoting her late husband’s work. Why would a woman intent on leaving her husband spend such energy immortalizing him? Perhaps he is the tantalizing prospect of immortality itself, which Victor Frankenstein grappled with in Frankenstein. If Mary can save Shelley from oblivion, maybe she can save herself.

“Experiencing” does not happen in a vacuum; rather, it is the spontaneous filling of the void the actor works to create within herself. The work is in the creation of the void; the filling of it is a gift, and it is nothing that can be grasped at or forced, and furthermore, it can only happen in the community of actor, partner, text, and scene. The work of the actor is to create the empty space the conditions and relationships of the scene will fill with significance and emotional understanding. I can still remember, on a visceral level, what it felt like to be standing in my costume, tightly girdled about the waist in a dark 19^th century cotton house dress, my bare feet sensing the warmth from the bright cans absorbed by the flat black paint on the rehearsal block, gazing at the muscular frame of Jeremy, my scene partner, whose penetrating blue eyes, when he turned to look at me, suddenly embodied everything I’d ever known about love and loss. I felt like an empty water glass pushed suddenly under a gushing tap. I was the glass—I gave shape to the torrent coursing into and out of me, but I myself did not fill it. I had control, but I could also choose to give myself over to the grief welling up and bursting out, and so I did. What happened in that rehearsal, as a result, was real.

The conclusion that I draw from this experience is that while effective acting functions through the active stripping away of self, this emptiness is what allows the scene and relationships created to fill and inform that generative space. If pure performance is the absence of performance, it is because the pure performative is itself the emptiness that functions as a crossroad, or a junction, between condition and character. Performance is the condition that allows for the active relationship between two bodies desiring communication. It is not the relationship itself, but what allows the relationship to take on shape. Not the glass that shapes its contents, but the emptiness of the glass that allows for the pouring and the spilling.

[1] Sharon Carnicke, Stanislavsky in Focus (New York: Routledge, 2009) 129.

[2] Carnicke 130.

[3] Carnicke 141.

[4] Carnicke 130.

[5] Carnicke 144-145.

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Iconography: Florensky and Stanislavsky

 

I just finished reading Pavel Florensky's Iconostasis, and with the kind of bittersweet fervor that often accompanies my readerly conclusion of rare works of literature that grasp the essence of soulful yet earthly life, I kissed his printed name on the front cover. The last time I can remember doing this was when I finished A Room With a View, by E.M. Forster. I was on the public Metro in Seattle at the time, riding home from my minimum wage job that was getting me through my Master's degree.

The kiss was appropriate because I gazed upon the name "Florensky" in the way the author himself describes the true encounter with the icon: the icon is not an object in a world of objects, not a representation of another realm, but the actual presence of the saint or the divine in the life of the perceiving subject. I sincerely felt that having read this loving translation of his work by Donal Sheehan and Olga Andrejev that the words themselves were Florensky's presence in my thought and own life. "The icon that shows himself forth does not merely depict the holy witness but is the very witness himself. It is not the icon that, as a monument of art, deserves our attentive study; rather, it is the saint himslef who, through the icon, is teaching us. And if in that moment when, through the tiniest gap or break, the icon ontologically separates itself from the saint, then the saint hides himself from us in the unapproachable sphere and the icon becomes in that moment merely one more thing among the world's other things. In this terrible moment, a vital connection between earth and heaven disintegrates into a cancerous spot that kills that area of life in us where the saint once lived; and then there arises in us the dreadful fear that thic cancerous separation will spread" (Florensky 165). The radical claim here, of course, it that when the icon is correctly perceived, the icon IS the saint, or the Virgin, or Christ himself. In this claim we can sense the whole history of Protestant discomfort with the possibility of the power of idols and idol-worship. If the icon is the saint, that means the saint has an active and real presence not only in the life of the believer, but in the world as it is actually and objectively known, and that it is powerful, affective, and alive. And because an icon remains a work of metaphysics, to destory an icon in no way destroys the saint, but only the image of the saint. The icon both resists ontology and is the very essence of a representational ontology.

In the vein of performance studies, what might it mean to assert that, along with "the icon IS the saint," "the performance IS the performer"? Can it work in a similar way? I suppose this is a repetition of "How do you separate the dancer from the dance?" This is a truth performers have known forever. Performance is already iconographic, I would say, because as Stanislavsky says of the actor's work, the truth of the acting comes from the actor's actual experiencing of the role together with the means of production, and the art of acting relies on this experiencing, which is a holistic synthesis of all processes that come together in the creation and execution of a character. The icon IS incarnation of the saint. The actor IS the incarnation of the theatrical process and the role.

A word about Florensky himself (1882-1937, theologian, philosopher, engineer, inventor, mathematician): he began as a scientist in an atheistic family, and after years of study and brilliant output at a very young age, began to feel as though science had shown him all he could know about the physical universe. He applied to a monastary, feeling the next logical step would be to learn about the unknown. The abbot there wisely rejected him, suggesting he get married and go to seminary to become a priest instead. Florensky did this, and quickly became one of the most respected theologians in pre-revolutionary Russia. But with the onset of the revolution and the prohibition of religious study, Florensky again found himself without an intellectual or spiritual home. He worked for the Bolsheviks as a scientist and teacher, producing tremendous output, but all the while maintaining his priestly garb. Much in the way he describes a tempera-paint icon beaming with the light of creation, Florensky never gave up his cassock, his very being contradicting the secularism forced upon him, everywhere he went his presence beaming with the light of his faith. Eventually, he was imprisoned on trumped-up charges, and executed years later, along with thousands of other clerics and religious people.

Work Cited:

Pavel Florensky, Iconostasis, trans. Donald Sheehan and Olga Andrejev (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1996).

Iconography: Breath and Gold



St. Clare is under construction









I just wanted to reflect on the process I've been learning so far. My teacher, Betsy Porter, has been coaching us in the Byzantine style of iconography, which uses simple images and all natural ingredients. Her website includes extensive instructions, examples, and resources.


Betsy Porter with two of her icons

 So here is what I've learned so far, just in terms of the practical process.

First, choose an image. Betsy had a bunch of photocopies of simple line drawings of Maddonas, Christs, angels, and saints. I was wondering which to choose when she said to me, "You know, you can choose a generic saint and adapt it to whatever saint you like, by adding different symbols." I ended up choosing a female saint wearing a habit. My first thought was to make this into St. Clare of Assisi, as a way of getting to know my patron saint better. So I worked on replacing the original image's elements with details that reflect St. Clare. I decided on giving her the white  lily to hold in her right hand, and the book of the Gospel to hold at her chest in her left. Both are traditional elements for Clare. Betsy reminded me that what I was doing was rather unusual, since I'd be painting an Italian saint in a Byzantine style! We both thought that it was appropriate for a modern woman like myself.

After choosing and adapting the image, I used a photo-copier to size it to the wooden board, which is made of poplar and reinforced with oak rods to keep it from warping. The white gesso is made of natural pigment and rabbit hide glue. The surface is smooth as silk, and I am careful to keep it wrapped up when it is not being worked on, and not to touch the surface with my oily fingers. The next step is to trace the image onto the board using carbon paper, and measure out and trace the 3/4" border around the inside of the board. After that, you apply the red clay paint called 'bole' to the border and the halo area. Bole is of a thick heavy-cream consistency, and some iconographers make their own from clay, water, and animal hide glue. Betsy gave me a mixture of store-bought prepared bole mixed with her own clay. She added a drop of honey to the mixture on my palette, tellling me that the honey would help the gold leaf stick to the halo later on.

Betsy demonstrates cutting the gold leaf into triangular shapes
for application to the bole halo.

The spiritual significance of the bole is that the icon, which represents heaven, is grounded in the creative soil of the earth. The red bole border is the earth which the iconographer handles while creating the image of the Heavenly.

I was especially intrigued when it came time to apply the gold leaf to the halo, which was lesson number two. First, you must sand and polish the bole of halo to a mirror finish. I used waterproof 420-grit sand paper for this, and then Betsy let me borrow her burnisher, which is a beautiful tool with a wooden handle and a curved piece of polished stone on the end.

I apply the gold leaf with a soft brush.

You rub the sanded bole with the burnisher until it literally gleams. It is a very satisfying process, making the earthy red clay paint shine like a mirror.

Then, you stick the icon in the fridge for a few minutes, until the surface is cool. Betsy commented to me that the day I was applying the gold leaf was very appropriate, since it was a wet and stormy San Francisco day, and you don't want the air to be too dry or the gold will have a hard time sticking. Meanwhile, prepare your gold leaf by taking the small squares from their tissue paper booklet and sticking them to small squares
of waxed paper, cut to shape for this purpose. Then you cut the wax/gold sheets into small triangular shapes with little tails of paper. Now here's the cool part: you take your icon from the fridge. Sit down, get everything ready, and then lean in and blow from the bottom of your lungs (like you're cleaning your glasses) onto the surface intended for the gold. Condensation will form, and you quickly lay the gold over it before it dissipates, and the cold surface sucks the gold onto it. It looks amazing up close--I can't really describe it. I asked Betsy about the spiritual significance of this part of the process, and she said that the iconographer's breath is the creative breath of God blowing over the surface of the deep, like in Genesis. Reflecting back on this, I think it's fascinating that in this "drama" of icon creation, the iconographer is playing the "role" of God!

A stipling tool adds detail to the soft gold.

 The next step is to lay 2 layers of gold leaf, returning the board to the fridge as needed. Use a brush to adhere the gold to the surface, and brush flakes of gold toward the center of the halo. Afterward, use stipling tools or nail-setters to decorate the gold with a pattern, before it hardens into the paint. I had a fabulous time marking out a circular kind of rose-pattern on Clare's halo.


I guess that's it for now. See my previous post for a description of the most recent class, where I laid the first pigments to the image.

The finished decorated halo.

The results of last Sunday's work: all foundation colors
have been laid.

Iconography: "Smile, Jesus!"

I just completed my third lesson in iconography with teacher Betsy Porter at St. Gregory of Nyssa Episcopal this afternoon. Betsy was taking some pictures of students' icons in various stages of washes, floats, and highlights. She asked me to hold up one icon she just recently finished, of "Christ in Glory." I held it up, Betsy pointed the camera at it, and she said with that little wry smile of hers, "Smile, Jesus!" It didn't occur to me until I was on the train back to Davis that her commanding her icon to smile when she photographed it was a rather unusual thing. If the icon is usually understood to speak the unspeakable of the Divine to the gazer, can the icon also incorporate an earthly demand or two into its performance repertoire? I'm sure Jesus smiled for Betsy. All of us students always do what she tells us--Jesus should be no exception.

Today I laid the foundational tempera paints in large swaths over the board according to the design I had already drawn out. At first Betsy mixed the paints for me, but then after two or three colors, allowed me to scoop the tiny grains of natural pigment into the palate, add the egg yolk and white wine base, and dilute with water to the proper consistency. She showed me how to test the paint on a piece of white paper first, using the proper circular brushstroke. I'm not yet sure why, but the base paints need to be rather grainy. Betsy added iron red and sandy yellow orchre to the tones that will lay under the flesh and garments of St. Clare. Perhaps this is so the finer colors adhere to the board later on?

My lesson in brushstroke technique was economic but unforgettable. Betsy took the brush from me and said, "An iconographer never makes a stroke like THIS" (she sliced a straight line through the air). "That's not humble. Little circles. Little circles." She showed me how to fill in the color in a motled pattern, laying the paint so that it created a smooth, wet surface, with the granules of iron or clay spread evenly beneath. I immediately understood what she meant about not painting defining lines. The pigment will leave a streak on the board if you paint in long strokes, where what you want is the illusion of no strokes at all. Be self-effacing. This is not about you and your ego making a mark. This is about embracing the labor of the process, being patient.

I grew to rather enjoy the scent of egg yolk and white wine. Reminded me of French cuisine.

Pictures when I get my camera working again.