Elia Kazan: «The Method was all build up by the media into something it's not. I started the Actors Studio. That was my idea. I got Lee Strasberg in- a born teacher. Lee formulated The Method. But all really good actors live by their spiritual content. It's about when the emotion is real and not simulated. Brando - that's real thing. He wouldn't say he worked with The Method».
Yoga and Freud -- new pages in method.vtheatre.net:
Film Casting and other "casting" pages: Cast in directing, Typecast in BioMethod, Actors and Cast in Method. Plus, Auditions.
"A Recipe for Failure"
1. Never get involved in anything. Say to yourself often, "Nothing Matters."
2. Keep you brain from getting tired - don't think about anything important too much.
3. Don't care about anyone or anything. Save all your concern for yourself and work on elevating selfishness to an art form.
4. Be a walking disaster. Leave trails of chaos in your wake where ever you go.
5. Have low expectations for yourself and always live down to them.
6. Waste as much time as possible. Spend your time hanging out, sleeping, playing games, complaining about how unfair life is, and making excuses.
7. Ignore other people and pretend you live alone on some remote island out in the Pacific Ocean.
8. Work on developing rude and obnoxious behaviors and appearances.
9. Never assess yourself, question your own values, or analyze your personal lifestyle.
10. Always keep your consciousness altered enough to keep you from fully grasping what is or is not happening to you.
11. Commit as much of your time, energy, and money as you can towards maintaining at least one major addiction to something everyone says is bad for you.
Copyright 1999, Ric Andrews
2007 updates are GROUP acting2
Webpages: Grammar & Spelling will be fixed only for the print versions!
LAST NOTES: method.vtheatre.net + PS in TOTAL ACTOR files!
"Theatre is not a mirror but a magnifying glass." Mayakovsky
I made a lot of new pages. Empty ones. Because I try to be systematic. Now I do the other extreme -- instead of texts without links, I do nothing but linking...
Biomechanics like every other technique is limited. I use it for comedy, but when we are in reign of drama, we have to use Method Acting. Best advise -- use one as much as you can, and go back to the other as soon as you reached the limits of its applications.
It all depens on the nature of your scene, monologue, character...
Go to swchowcases in SHOWS directory or to Plays directory, select the title, scene, character and start working!
NB. I have to find the logic in having two BM directories. This one -- for live class, the old one -- for web... That was the idea. More I work, more they become the same. Print and web?
... Teachers of the Alexander Technique foster awareness of good posture -- not a rigid statuesque pose, but a fluid, easeful alignment of the body that allows for movement to occur with the least possible effort. Attention is focused on the relationship of the neck to the rest of the spine. "Allow your neck to be free," Alexander teachers tell their students, "so that your head may move forward and up, and your back may lengthen and widen."
I do not know how I feel not refering much to many celebrated acting techniques -- Alexander, Laban, Suzuki, Lecoq, Viewpoints... I think everything I need to study about physical theatre, I can find in Meyerhold's theories. And more...
Stalin silenced Meyerhold's idea for two generations and unlike Stanyslavsky, Meyer still not known. I am not a theatre historian and I have to leave to other to restore the justice, to examine the ifluences and connections between biomechanics and acting training today. Or to write a book on Brechtian theatre from Meyerhold's POV...
* Fall 2004: Directing (wish list) Bergman, Fellini, Tarkovsky, Kurosawa? See "show to direct" (short list) in shows.vtheatre.net... Shrew + Oedipus !
PS
Kids, I hope now we are ready to return to Method Acting.
Go back to Acting One to understand when to apply Method instead of Biomechanics.
Limitations of BM (list)
Why Acting III is about Method?
Homework
If you do not keep notes, while you reading, you do not study -- you watch pages. Bad.
Keep your notes around, you will need them.
Read my "notes" pages to know what to expect in the future from the evolving online projects.
* "According to Meyerhold, "movement is the most powerful means of
theatrical expression." He believed that all other theatrical
elements--dialogue, costume and sets--the fundamental iconistic signs of
naturalistic theatre--were secondary to the actor's physical presence on
the stage and to the pantomimed movements of the skilled performer.
Meyerhold's system of Biomechanics sought to train actors to become
acrobats, dancers, mimes and illustrators so that the actor's body would
become "a word equivalent; the main transmitter of an invigorating shock
and a poetic force" (Leach, 56)." [ Theatre Semiotics ]
"Influenced deeply by the non-verbal quality of Japanese Noh theatre and
Chinese classical theatre, Meyerhold believed that Western theatre
needed to establish a series of clearly discernible and decipherable
hieroglyphic signs. Each hieroglyph would have its own particular
meaning and would replace emphasis upon text. Meyerhold developed a
series of biomechanical acting exercises for his students that he later
incorporated successfully into productions. Biomechanics dispensed with
the psychological overtones of the system and embraced a performative,
theatrical outlook. Actors were intended to be illustrative performers;
highly skilled, entertaining, and imaginative.
Meyerhold, borrowing heavily from the Russian Formalists and
particularly from Vladimir Propp, developed the notion that character
was little more than an action-function and that there were only a
limited number of "types." The goal of the actor--in conjunction with
the director--was to identify his or her action type and assume an
easily interpreted, or decoded, means for representation. Meyerhold
embraced two means for delineating action-function; the first was the
assumption of the facial mask and the second was the utilization of the
Formalist notion of "deformation and estrangement." The twin goals of
estrangement and masks were to reveal social rather than personal
meaning. The actor does not psychologically embody the character
portrayed but rather illustrates the social type. For each scene, the
actor--through proficiency of craft--assumes a specific facial mask that
reflects on both character and action. In keeping with the Formalist
notion of estrangement and the illustrative acting method, Meyerhold s
ought to render actor from character and to prevent identification and
psychological assumption. He achieved this by encouraging cross-gender
casting, and by consciously avoiding giving actors roles for which they
were apparently well suited.
Meyerhold's aesthetic strategy--which was later adapted and popularized
by Bertolt Brecht-- was predicated upon foregrounding the means of
representation in order to maintain a critical distance between the
spectator and performance. This strategy forces the spectator into an
active role--the audience members become practicing semioticians who
must analyze the encoded performance (Aston and Savona, 92). This is a
radical shift away from the iconistic quality of naturalistic theatre.
Theatre is no longer a mirror in which the audience sees an
illusionistic representation of itself. Rather, the performance becomes
an event that is startling, challenging and alienating. The actor is a
technician whose craft is one of precision and competence in execution.
The audience is forced to critically analyze the performance and to
glean meaning from a variety of sign systems--both iconic and schematic.
Meyerhold's career as an actor and director began in 1890 and lasted
until 1940 when he was murdered by Stalin's secret police. It spanned
the birth of classical semiotics and continued through the articulation
of the Prague School. While the semioticians developed their notions of
sign systems, Meyerhold was crafting a practical schematic semioliogy of
performance that ultimately undercut the comfort and accessibility of
iconistic sign interpretation. Meyerhold greatly enriched the theatre by
increasing the complexity and multivalent quality of performance, but in
doing so ironically threatened the entire project of theatrical
semiotics. By challenging the foundations of the iconistic theatre,
Meyerhold insisted on the development of a new means of interpretat
ion--hieroglyphs and a new means of performance--foregrounding that
undermined the audience's shared ability to decode the theatrical event.
Keir Elam considers Meyerhold's system of biomechanics to be an ideolect
that represents a kinesic style. An ideolect is a subcode that is
associated with a personal aesthetic or the style of a particular artist
(Elam, 55). Ideolects complicate the process of code breaking because
the spectator must be trained to recognize and decode the inherently
idiosyncratic nature of an individual's style. The ideolects of Chekhov
or Strindberg--what we now refer to as the Chekhovian or Strindbergian
styles--are relatively easy to decode because both are outgrowths of
Naturalism. Beginning with Meyerhold and particularly with later artists
who emulated him, however, the process of decoding becomes ever more
challenging because these artists are self-consciously anti-paradi
gmatic.
Schematic signs, which by definition contain multivalent meanings,
become even more opaque when compounded by ideolects of the playwright,
director and actors. Meyerhold and, later, the German Expressionists,
took classical texts and contemporary works and imposed upon them a
series of ideolects that affected textual organization, the physical
stage space, the mode of interpretation, and the manner of enactment.
The results were productions that were hailed as theatrically brilliant,
but jarring, unsettling and difficult to comprehend.
This process of unraveling and diminished accessibility was accelerated
by Antonin Artaud and the score of theatre practitioners from Jerzy
Grotowski to Peter Brook and Robert Wilson who embraced and championed
his ideas. Artaud rejected the ideolects of Meyerhold, the schematic
theatre of the expressionists and the epic theatre of Brecht because he
believed that they were merely reactions against the prevailing
paradigm. Artaud, in contrast, sought to destroy it by rethinking the
entire enterprise of theatrical representation.
In Symbolist theatre, the text is mediated by the director; additional
levels of meaning--or rather semiotic layering is added. In Meyerhold
and later Brecht, the text is foregrounded by performative elements that
draw attention to the theatrical event as an artifice. Antonin Artaud,
however, took the process a gigantic step forward by negating the text.
The text is no longer a secondary or even a tertiary element. Theatre,
according to Artaud must be a language in space and movement--a language
of symbols and signs that exists in performance without having to pass
through or be mitigated by words. Words are simply a variation of human
noise--just as screams, grunts, moans, sighs, cries, yelps are also
vocal expressions. These expressions are combined with gestures, signs,
dance, other movement, lights, colors, and costumes to form ideograms
that convey meaning directly to the unconscious receptors of the
audience." [ THE SEMIOTICS OF ACTING: FROM HIEROGLYPHS TO IDEOGRAMS by Edward Isser ]
Grotowski: "theatre is something that happens between actor(s) and spectator(s)."
The Biomechanics Curriculum (sample from other U.)
Introduction to Biomechanics January 6 - 18, 2003
This intensive two-week course focuses on the development of the body as a fully expressive instrument. Classwork includes the fundamentals of Theatrical Biomechanics, tumbling, partner acrobatics, object work, Biomechanical etudes, and physical compositions. Students will explore the dynamics of movement in stage picture using floor, walls, cubes, ramps, stairs, and tables as stage surfaces.
Master Biomechanics - Scene Study * Summer Intensive Program - TBA
This intermediate / advanced two-week program explores the dynamics of movement in stage picture and the application of Theatrical Biomechanics in the creation of character. Scene study, incorporating a Biomechanical approach, is combined with rigorous daily work on the fundamental Biomechanical exercises. Prior training in Biomechanics is recommended.
from http://freeholdtheatre.org/studio/specialworkshop.htm
* Fall 2004: Directing (wish list) Bergman, Fellini, Tarkovsky, Kurosawa? See "show to direct" (short list) in shows.vtheatre.net... Shrew + Oedipus !
