Voice into Acting

Integrating Voice and the Stanislavski Approach

Christina Gutekunst, John Gillett

• Publisher: Methuen Drama
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781350064942
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Acting & Auditioning

How can actors bridge the gap between themselves and the text and action of a script, integrating fully their learned vocal skills? How do we make an imaginary world real, create the life of a role, and fully embody it vocally and physically so that voice and acting become one? Christina Gutekunst and John Gillett unite their depth of experience in voice training and acting to create an integrated and comprehensive approach informed by Stanislavski and his successors – the acting approach widely taught to actors in drama schools throughout the world. This updated edition contains: a new chapter on vocal embodiment of actions, new findings from neuroscience supporting the approach, more exercises, warm-up routines for training, rehearsal and performance, and a completely new glossary of terms. The authors create a step-by-step guide to explore how voice can: - Respond to our thoughts, senses, feelings, imagination and will
- Fully express language in content and form
- Communicate imaginary circumstances and human experience
- Transform to adapt to different roles
- Connect to a variety of audiences and spaces Featuring 55 illustrations by German artist, Dany Heck, Voice into Acting is an essential manual for the actor seeking full vocal identity in characterization, and for the voice teacher open to new techniques or an alternative approach to harmonize with the actor's process.

Part One  Laying the Foundations

INTRODUCTION

In Part One, we lay the foundations for our approach by focusing on:

The organic acting approach and the voice – we give an overview of the organic and representational acting approaches and how they can affect voice.

Disconnection and integration – we look at the reasons and possible solutions for the gap that may appear between the actor and the text, action and circumstances, and between the voice tutor and the acting process of the actor.

The creative brain – we assert the need for a partnership between the different areas of the brain, between intellectual control and intuitive, imaginative release.

1The Organic Acting Approach and the Voice

In this chapter, we look at the obstacles to integrating voice into acting and possible solutions.

In the organic approach to performance we aim to integrate impulse, language, mind, body and voice so that we recreate a human experience in performance that is coming from the whole human being, not just the conscious brain. Stanislavski is very much in line with contemporary thought here. Modern neuroscience places the brain, mind and consciousness firmly within the body as a unified whole, affecting each other in a constantly changing way as they interact with the world. This is a monist view, as opposed to the dualist notion of philosophers like Plato and Descartes of the mind being detached from the body. The neurologist, Antonio Damasio, asserts that: ‘a mind, that which defines a person, requires a body, and that a body … naturally generates one mind. A mind is so closely shaped by the body and destined to serve it that only one mind could possibly arise in it. No body, never mind’ (Damasio 2000: 143). A complementary view promoted by Rhonda Blair and Amy Cook in Theatre, Performance and Cognition (2016) is that we have an embodied and situated cognition: our mind and consciousness are inseparable from our bodies within a specific context and world (129).

Because we focus on how psychological impulse affects the body, and physical impulse affects our psychology, our approach is called psycho-physical. We aim to create the life of the human spirit of the role within a full physical expression.

Making circumstances and character your own

To experience a role, rather than demonstrate it, actors have to act as if they are a real person and make the text their own, inhabiting it as a natural and full response to impulses created within material, albeit imaginary, circumstances. We need to use ourselves, our human make-up, as the basis for this embodiment of the role – to find ourselves in the character and the character in ourselves. This means going to the character, and neither bringing it to us as we are in everyday life (as in some manifestations of American Method), nor offering an external imitation of a person lacking in full dimension and real life (as in some representational acting). We experience as ourselves as the character, rather than pretend.

STANISLAVSKI’S BASIC PRINCIPLE IS THAT DRAMA IS ESSENTIALLY ABOUT ACTION AND IMAGINATION.

Ease and focus

In order to perform and communicate well to an audience in any art form, the practitioner needs to achieve ease and focus, a concentration of attention without tension. For the actor, their whole body and being is their instrument, which has to be filled with these qualities if voice, physicality and action are to be responsive to thought, senses and feeling.

‘If’

We examine and imagine the circumstances then place ourselves within them and ask, ‘ if I am in these circumstances what do I, or what do I as the character, do?’ Stanislavski called this the magic if because of its far-reaching creative effect on inner and outer life and action. If actors don’t use such a connection, which relates to their own human experience, observation and imagination, they will be locked into a purely intellectual processing of text and circumstances. The actor’s imagination needs to be so free and fertile that it can create all the detail of the present and past circumstances of the character suggested by the text.

Communication

Once placed in the circumstances, we need to interact with other people, creating a dynamic and spontaneous responsiveness to create real communication, giving and receiving, in performance – as opposed to learning how to say lines in a particular pattern without really listening or reacting to others.

What do I want?

In addition, within the dynamics of any piece of action, we have a whole chain of objectives – wants, aims, needs, intentions or tasks – that drive us through the imaginary life of the play. We pursue the objectives through actions: psychological, physical, and verbal. For Stanislavski, ‘words are the most concrete expression of human thought’ (Stanislavski 2008: 402), and he emphasized the importance of mastering what he called ‘the active word’ (quoted in Benedetti 1999: 328).

Feeling and physicalizing

We enrich the action through our sensory awareness, engaging our feelings, and incorporating images of our imaginary world.

We discover the full physical and vocal characterization of the role through imaginative absorption of the world of the play.

We explore how to communicate the whole performance to different audiences in a variety of spaces.

We shall look at all these areas of acting process and how they relate to voice as we go through the book, and each element above is dealt with specifically in Part Three.

Integrating the voice

Actors need to believe that they are the character vocally and convince the audience of this. The individual voice of the actor has developed due to family, education, environment, class, etc. It needs to change into that of a different character by exploring such elements and finding where the new voice lives and resonates in the actor/character’s body.

What voice do I have ‘if’ I am this character within these circumstances, with this accent, with this age, in this era, in this place, presented with this set of problems, with these objectives and actions? For example, the circumstances will affect the character’s breathing and where in the body the resonance is; the objectives, the meaning of the language and responsiveness to other...