Repetition is the Soul of Art
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Let me start off today’s article by apologizing for my lack of updates over the last week. I’ve just finished running tech for a performance of the Nutcracker ballet, so I’ve only had time to eat, sleep and be in the theatre. Actually, I didn’t get to do one of those things and I’ll give you three guesses which one it was; it wasn’t theatre or eat. But now that’s closed for the season and I’m back to doing what I truly love; acting.
Today I want to talk about something that I found in a book by Jon Jory called Tips: Ideas for Actors. Jory, who has been quite an influence on American theatre as a director, producer and playwright, wrote this very short book as a means for actors to quickly find the small helpful remarks that could make their performances better. A man after my own heart. Later, I’ll write up a full review of the book, but for now we’ll just say that it’s worth a look and you can find a link to purchase it from Amazon at the bottom of this post.
We’ve all heard the old saying that repetition is hell, but for an actor it may be the exact opposite. Acting in front of a camera gives an actor the freedom to try new things with every take and let the editor separate the wheat from the chaff. On stage, however, that freedom becomes very constricted. The actor can play and tweak a performance all throughout rehearsal process, but it must be set in stone by the time the show goes up. This is suffocating to many actors, who get bored with the repetition every night of the same lines in the same manner.
The English actor Ralph Richardson said “Repetition is the soul of art.” As actors there are so many things that we have to be on the look out for, both in ourselves and in our fellow cast members. There is a virtually endless check-list of technical tips that we must constantly keep in mind during a performance. But how can we think and act at the same time without that horrible feeling of bifurcation? It’s the repetition of the basic speech and movements that can free us. Repetition sets blocking and dialogue into our brains in a way that let us run those things on a kind of auto pilot, while we work on connecting them to the deeper meanings within ourselves. The short answer to the question of bifurcation is that we cannot act and think at the same time, the two are mutually exclusive. To counteract this problem we spend much of our rehearsal time repeating our blocking and words in the hopes that we can cross those off of our mental list.
So perhaps repetition isn’t actor hell after all, perhaps it’s actor heaven. Repetition isn’t what the actor is doomed to; it’s a means to a happier end. It gives you the freedom to play and explore deeper because with each repetition you begin to focus less and less on the technical and develop the ability to cement the role into your muscles and your emotions. I know it seems like doing a scene over and over is the most infuriating thing in the world when all you want to do is move on and do something else, but let me suggest that you let yourself explore deeper with each time through, rather than focusing on boredom. Jory suggests that four times through a particular moment is the optimum number as the fourth time manages to move away from boredom and into true development.
So next time you find yourself becoming bored with the same old performance, remember that repetition isn’t a time for the status quo, it’s an opportunity to build upon the foundation you’ve already set down. As always, I’m encouraging you to work harder than ever, to reach higher than you think you can, because man truly can achieve what he conceives and W. Clement Stone said. In other words, if you are going to sin, Sin Boldly!
Mental Acting Exercise
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A few years ago, a study was done by Dr. Denis Waitley Ph.D on Olympic athletes testing something called Visual Motor Rehearsal. It was also used on NASA astronauts in the Apollo program. In the study, athletes were hooked up to bio-mechanical feedback and told to run their particular event in their head, visualizing as much detail as they could. When the visualization was done, the machine showed that the bio feedback was exactly the same as if the athlete had just been performing the event. In other words, the same muscles fired while imagining as fired when performing. This study was ground-breaking in that it showed how everyone contains a mind body connection that is so powerful that the body cannot tell the difference between what the brain is experiencing and what it is imagining.
Incredible! This was a breakthrough for athletics, but what can it do for the actor? I think it’s actually the same. Rather than running an imaginary race, we imagine ourselves on stage, giving the greatest performance of our lives. The same muscles fire while we imagine as would fire if we were experiencing. What if it could allow us to feel the difference between the greatest performance we could give and the worst performance we could give? What could it mean for you to be able to actually model for yourself the sequence of feelings that become your best performance and avoid that sequence of feelings that result in your worst? Even if this exercise works half as well as I think it can, how marvelous of a tool could it be in our hands?
I want to put this out as a challenge to every actor, as an experiment that we all take just sixty seconds out of our day to do this during the rehearsal process. Try it once a day and see what happens. Find a place where you can sit or lay back comfortably with no distractions. Allow your neck to free and your back and chest to expand to their full surface area and take a few deep breaths. Close your eyes and begin to imagine what it feels like to be out on stage in your costume. The audience is full and the stage lights are on. Feel the heat from the lights and imagine the performance in as many details as you can. Now begin reciting your lines in your head and see what happens. How are you moving? How is the audience reacting? Are they laughing in all the right places? When you’ve done this for at least sixty seconds, open your eyes feeling refreshed and take note of what you’ve learned. Was their anything you experienced that you would like to incorporate the next time you rehearse for real? Then try again, imagine the optimum outcome of your performance, then once again imagining the worst outcome. What are the differences between the two?
See what happens by playing with this visualization technique. If it works, great! If not, you’ve only lost sixty-seconds. This exercise could be a great way to delve deeper into a character, help put your blocking deeper into your muscle memory, or model your optimal performance. I even suspect that it would help to overcome paralyzing stage fright.
So remember that what your brain imagines to be real becomes real to your body. But we knew that already, didn’t we? It’s the basis for being an actor: living truthfully under imaginary circumstances. And this is something that I want feedback for. Try it and email me your responses to it, or your changes to the method and I’ll post them on the site for others to try and maybe we can create a truly great exercise for every actor to benefit from.
Sin Boldly!
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