 |
| Mary Shelley, by Richard Rothwell, 1840 |
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 19th 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.
No comments:
Post a Comment