Body Voice Imagination

ImageWork Training and the Chekhov Technique

David Zinder

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134043293
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

David Zinder's Body Voice Imagination is written by one of the master teachers of the Michael Chekhov technique of acting training. This book is a comprehensive course of exercises devoted to the development of actors' creative expressivity, comprising both pre-Chekhov ImageWork Training and seminal exercises of the Chekhov technique. It also details the way in which these techniques can be applied to performance through a discovery of the profound connections between the actor's body, imagination and voice.

Part 1
Logic

Chapter 1
The Logic of Training

An untrained body is like an untuned musical instrument—its sounding box is filled with a confusing and ugly jangle of useless noise that prevents the true melody from being heard.

—Peter Brook

Training does not guarantee artistic results. Rather, it is a way of making one’s intentions coherent.

—Eugenio Barba

Training, in any form it may take, is based on the understanding that the basic elements of the actor’s creative individuality can be trained in preparation for the actor’s work on all the other elements of theater such as character, scene, and text. This involves a training of the most fundamental elements of the creative instrument—the actor’s three basic expressive tools, the body, the voice, and the imagination—and two basic skills: radiation (Chekhov’s term for the actor’s ability to project performative expression over a distance), and creative cooperation (the ability to create together with others: the director, fellow actors, and, most importantly, the spectators).

These strategies are the subject matter of the systematic training structure, which I refer to here as the “Logic of Training.” These are procedures that are aimed at developing in the actor an awareness of the separate performative expressivity of the body, the voice, and the imagination, then providing performers with an understanding of the mechanisms involved in connecting them into a complex but coherent whole that generates a performative presence. These procedures also address themselves to a training of the skills required for the actor to be open and available to work creatively with all the other people involved in the theatrical event in order to allow the communion of theater to occur.

Trajectories

What we are talking about in fact is a kind of tightly knit, progressively stepped training structure, with some fairly profound aims—no less than “developing creativity.” So the obvious question—and the most difficult one—is, Where do we start? If we consider training as a series of structures, each one addressing a different aspect of the actor’s creative instrument, we can, I believe, discern a number of parallel “trajectories” that provide the beginning of an answer to that question and a framework for the process:

• from body to voice to imagination;
• from physical to physical/vocal to physical/vocal/verbal;
• from the abstract to the concrete.

These trajectories are, in fact, different cross-sections of the same thing: the body of the training. They coexist and complement each other extensively throughout the process, and are extremely helpful in determining the sequence of the training, the order of the exercises in a given session, and the inner structure of the exercises themselves. In other words, embracing these trajectories can give a period of actor training a built-in “logic” that is very helpful in determining the structure of a training program.

From body to voice to imagination

This trajectory traces the sources of actor training back to the purely physical, with work on voice and the imagination coming in only later in the process. There are a number of reasons for this, and here they are, in reverse order—proceeding from the last of these elements to the first.

Of all the actor’s tools, the imagination is the most powerful and complex, but at the same time it is the most difficult to tap into or hold onto. This in itself is reason enough, I believe, to leave work on the imagination to an advanced stage of training. But there is also this very simple fact: the actor’s imagination can only be perceived in performance when it is made present by the actor’s body in space. How to em-body this wonderful tool; how to carry it into the audience’s perception and maintain its presence there in a powerfully effective way over a given period of time—seems to me to be the foundation that must be laid before any attempt is made to train the actor’s imagination for creative work.

Voice, as we shall see later, is the product of the moving body, and therefore it, too, requires a trained body before it can be worked on as a separate technique. And in The Open Door, quoted above, Peter Brook tells us that “since what frightens people most of all today is speaking, one must begin neither with words, nor ideas, but with the body. A free body is where it all lives or dies.”¹ All of which brings us to the outline of one of the training trajectories that informs this book: starting from the body, moving into voice work on a solid basis of the well-trained body, and only then moving into the fascinating, elusive, complex, and profound terrain of imagination.

From physical to physical/vocal to physical/vocal/verbal

These trajectories overlap in many significant ways, and in fact coexist as distinct procedures in the training. The distinctions that I have drawn among them offer, I hope, a more comprehensive, multilevel overview of the training offered here. This trajectory looks at the same parameters set out above in the first one, but charts the progression of the training from a slightly different angle—that of the relationships among body, voice, and language. The basic premise here is that actor training needs to steer clear of voice, words, or text for as long as possible, and to develop the training in that order: from the purely physical to the discovery of the sound produced by the moving body, and only then using the well-trained, deeply connected body and voice to support the actor’s work with words, language, and text.

In the filmed version of Nikos Kazantzakis’s Zorba the Greek there is a moment when Zorba, unable to contain his excitement about the plans for the lumber cableway, rushes out into the night and dances wildly on the beach. Collapsing finally in exhaustion, sweat pouring down his face and a beatific/apologetic smile on his face, he explains his ecstasy to his buttoned-up English friend: “When a man is full, what can he do? He dances!” When words fail, the only resort is to choose a “denser” form of expression that will say it all: dance—or, closer to our purpose, nonvocal movement and gesture. Translating that into training strategies means that the physical/nonverbal mode is where it all begins. Having the confidence of a well-trained, highly expressive body allows the actor to bring in voice—not for its verbal content, but for its deep connections to the actor’s rhythm, pace, and breathing, and, at the end of the process to apply the knowledge she has gained to words and text. This, then, is the outline of the second training trajectory, one that moves from training the body to training the connections between body and voice, and, only at the end of the process, to connecting it all to words and language.

But this trajectory also brings into focus the curious paradox between the “density” of performative expression, as in Zorba’s dancing and its “revelation factor.” Basically, it goes like this: the denser the mode of expression, the more it both reveals and hides the inner life of the actor. How does this work? Up on her feet and expressing herself only through movement, gesture, and facial expression, in other words working almost directly from the subconscious to the physical without the mediation offered by voice, or, particularly, by language, the actor has absolutely no place to hide. “Revelation,” under these circumstances, is almost infinite. And yet the opposite is no less true—since purely physical expression is far less precise than language or voice, it is susceptible to multiple interpretations, so that under the same circumstances of physical expression, the actor is actually protected from any kind of uncomfortable personal exposure. This “multiple interpretability” offers the performer many more shelters from unwanted revelation and exposure than vocal or verbal expression, and ensures his or her relative “safety.”

An example from my own days as a theater student at Manchester University in the 1960s is a good case in point. In those early days of the Drama Department, there was a regular Wednesday evening event we called The Studio Group—an open framework for our own creative initiatives. Not long after we launched this fixture, I created and performed a one-man movement piece that I titled One Act of Self. It was a fairly desperate piece about the loneliness of a young man in an alien environment, far from his home, family, and friends. After the performance, one of my friends—the only person I was truly close to at the time—told me she had been shocked by the glaring transparency of the piece, and wondered how I dared bare my soul so completely in front of so many strangers. I was totally amazed because until she mentioned it I had not thought of the piece as being so powerfully revealing. However, listening to her I realized—after the fact—that she was absolutely right, and I began discreetly canvassing some of my other classmates to hear their impressions of what they had seen. I was in for yet another surprise: all of them offered many very different interpretations of my performance, but none of them said anything that even remotely resembled the acute discomfort Carry felt as she watched me supposedly “baring” myself so devastatingly before them. Now, forty years later, I know what happened: the high “revelation” value of the dense, nonverbal movement piece indeed “bared my soul” to someone with privileged information about my emotional state of being and a similar psychological makeup. Yet this same density also sheltered me completely from any gossipy interpretation by people less close to me. Somehow, as I was preparing the piece, I must have understood that I was, in my own modest way, emulating Antonin Artaud’s paradigm of acting and “signaling through the flames,” yet, at the same time, remaining almost totally protected from the fire.

This paradox of density and revelation led me to an inescapable conclusion: if the physical/nonvocal mode is the densest, the least controlled, the most highly revealing, and yet at the same time the “safest” or least threatening, then it seems like a very good place to start a program of training. Since the densest form of performative expression—the physical/nonvocal—releases the greatest degree of inner life, revealing and sheltering at the same time, it also helps develop in actors a facility for expressing their emotions, sensations, images, memories, and fantasies through physical action and gesture, and sharing them fairly securely with their observers. At the same time, it provides them with an understanding of the kind of confident vulnerability that they need in order to become sensitive and communicative artists. Once a basic level of proficiency has been achieved in this technique, actors can then move in stages to the other two modes, the physical/ vocal mode and the physical/verbal—or textually-connected—mode, both of which require increasing levels of skill and a constantly growing willingness to touch upon, and express, highly personal imagery.

Finally, following this trajectory in a training group is also particularly conducive to the creation of an ensemble relationship. Acquiring the ability to reveal aspects of one’s inner life with a fair degree of security is of vital importance, both to the development of each individual actor and to the development of trust and freedom within an ensemble (and an acting class, for all intents and purposes, is an ensemble). This trajectory of physical/nonvocal to physical/vocal to physical/verbal, allows the actors to develop the confidence of revelation gradually, in a training environment that is as supportive as it is demanding, and in so doing, to open themselves up freely and creatively to their partners and colleagues.

From the abstract to the concrete

This third trajectory, which informs the training concurrently with the two previous ones, is slightly different, and, rather than addressing the physical aspects of the work, suggests, in effect, a strategy for the development of the “habit of creativity” at every point along the other two trajectories. Since the actor’s creativity is the central issue of this training, the application of this trajectory to the Logic of Training is as rigorous as possible.

Pablo Picasso once remarked how much he envied the creative freedom of his two young children, Claude and Paloma, as they scribbled away with childish abandon in his studio. “I have spent a lifetime trying to learn how to paint like they do,” he said. What Picasso envied in his children was their ability to maintain a direct line of communication from a totally unfettered imagination to graphic expression, blissfully ignorant of “rules” and unencumbered by inhibitions or emotional stumbling blocks—in short, their absolutely natural hold on a precious commodity: creative freedom.

There is a logic at work here that I have found very useful in training actors. In order to help actors achieve a deep understanding of their creative individualities, and in order to provide them with techniques that will lead them to the highest level of their art, the training process that they undergo must first of all help them explore different strategies for understanding what creative freedom is all about. Before they learn about limitations, they must experience the sheer joy of creative/improvisational freedom, in all its variations. Only after they have developed the habit of that kind of freedom can they go on to one of the most important lessons of all: how to retain that same creative joy and freedom even within the tightest structure (of text, costume, mise-en-scéne, lighting, music cues, etc.), or the most limited forms of expression.

The conclusion, once again, seems inescapable: every segment, indeed every exercise, in the Logic of Training should remain free-form for as long as possible, devoid of anything “concrete” such as words or props, or the kind of structured movement found in mime or “imaginary object” exercises. Miming the opening of a box of matches (for some reason the all-time favorite “imaginary object”!) is an exercise in prestructured memory, in which the entire development of the movement sequence is known in advance, allowing no room for improvisation or invention. Beginning a movement/phrase from a physical impulse and giving it leave to find its own form in total improvisational freedom until it is over is an abstract exercise in creative freedom, one that provides the actor with a limitless variety of choices as the movement/phrase unfolds from one second to the next. The same principle underlies almost every sequence of exercises in the book, and is a crucially important element in the Logic of Training.

These three trajectories of the training intertwine and coexist naturally in the training offered here. The first two suggest different “takes” on the progression of the physical work into work on the imagination and the relation of all these to voice and language, while the third, “From the abstract to the concrete,” informs them all equally, as an overall strategy of training for the development of creative freedom.

Improvisation technique

These trajectories of training are colored throughout by three “primary colors” of the actor’s craft that run through them all, and will be referred to frequently in the exercise section in the Part 2 of this book, “Praxis.” These three “colors” are (1) connectedness—the po...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface to the Second Edition
• Pre-text
• Introduction
• Part 1 Logic
• PART 2 Praxis
• Appendix 1: Exercises by group, number, and page number
• Appendix 2: The exercises in alphabetical order
• Bibliography
• Index