Dreamwork for Actors

Janet Sonenberg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136788833
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Médias et arts de la scène
• Subtopic: Arts de la scène

Drawing upon her wide experience as actor and director, Janet Sonenberg shows what dreamwork can do. No other acting technique offers the performer's own dreams as a means to profoundly deepen imaginative and artistic expression. This is a wholly new tool with which actors can unleash startling performances.

CHAPTER ONE

Stories We Tell Ourselves

In some fundamental way, imagination’s function is storytelling at its most majestic and minute levels. Or at least that’s the story I tell myself.

We use imagination in life to explain life to ourselves. It arises in the form of regulatory structures, theorems, metaphors, and philosophies—all of them stories to help us picture the life we lead. The more lifelike the metaphor seems to a culture, the greater its currency. Thus, www.com captured the global imagination in the 1990s, as theater did in Renaissance England.

As a parent, and once a child, I experience the muscularity and sensitivity of storytelling. It is through these stories that our parents tell us our lives and provide imaginative constructs that enable us to succeed and fail. The obvious are the cautionary tale, or simply the word “boat.”¹ Even before we are able to create verbal narratives, the acquisition of language is storytelling. We learn that the object on the water has an abstract identity other than its concrete being, and thus we begin our inculcation in the realm of symbol and metaphor. We are able to translate from one realm, the thing itself, to another, the word-symbol for the thing. This is the beginning of our comprehension that life is comprised of levels of meaning and experience. By the time we get told imaginative cautionary stories that further organize our experience, we are past masters of the form and we cannot get enough of them.²

All of us, to one degree or another, require organizing metaphors to make order out of the chaos and disorder of our passions. These metaphors are leaps of imagination that set us apart from any other species as sharply as the use of tools. Octavio Paz, in The Double Flame; Love and Eroticism, writes, “Imagination turns sex into ceremony and rite, and language into rhythm and metaphor…. The poetic image is an embrace of opposite realities, and rhyme a copulation of sounds; poetry eroticizes language and the world, because the operation is erotic to begin with.”³ Meaningful sex is improbable without the converting action of imagination. Expressive language is impossible without the converting action of imagination translating our desires and emotions. Meaning itself is not possible without imagination.

Of course, the kind of imaginative expressivity a theater audience is after depends on the collective story it desires to be told. In today’s popular theater we crave magical realism. We believe that only a layer of truth is embedded in the conscious, “realistic” realm, and the Truth is found in the recondite unconscious. This reflects the psychoanalytic story many Westerners still tell themselves in the beginning of the twenty-first century, whereas Nietzsche, in The Gay Science, is clearly speaking about the audiences of his own time when he wrote the aphorism “Art and Nature.”⁴

In nature passion is so poor on words, so embarrassed and all but mute; or when it finds words, so confused and irrational and ashamed of itself…. We have developed a need that we cannot satisfy in reality: to hear people in the most difficult situations speak well and at length…. The Greeks went far, very far in this respect—alarmingly far. Just as they made the stage as narrow as possible and denied themselves of any effects by means of deep backgrounds … they also deprived passion itself of any deep background and dictated to it a law of beautiful speeches. Indeed they did everything to counteract the elementary effect of images that might arouse fear and pity—for they did not want fear and pity…. [T]he Athenians went to the theater in order to hear beautiful speeches.

The impulse to convert that which shames and confuses us into flights of sentient words is still part of the human experience. We want, we need, imaginative stories to make sense of the mute, irrational aspects of our nature.

Imagination converts irrational social rules into acceptable stories. Here is one. When I was a child, Labor Day sharply set the demarcation between white shoes and colorful clothes and winter white and wool. This was a particularly shocking transition for Jewish kids whose mothers bought them new suits of thick wool, often quite lovely in my case, to wear to temple for the Jewish Holidays. Rosh Hashanah came when it did, sometimes as early as the second week in September when it was not autumn, but the height of summer’s heat and humidity. One year my mother bought me a fantastic wool suit of black and white herringbone, a fashion-forward mini-skirt and jacket and a vivid yellow wool long-sleeved turtleneck. It was fabulous, but very, very hot. My brother and I donned our new clothes with trepidation. Out the front door we went as a family, pausing for the traditional family photograph. “The Jewish Holidays are early this year,” said every Jewish father to every Jewish mother. And every Jewish mother responded, “It’s unseasonably warm.” Now, there was nothing unseasonable about it. It was the apogee of summer, 90 degrees in the shade and climbing, 86 percent humidity—and it was like this year in and year out. But the story our parents told each other (and us) was that the Holidays snuck up on us like bandits, robbing us of proper summer clothes. That was the terrific leap of imagination that justified thick wool. “It’s unseasonably warm.” It seemed to work for the parents. I cannot say the same for us kids.

Recently I read an article on annulments in the Catholic Church. An annulment is the equivalent of saying, “This marriage did not exist.” Since marriage is seen as a contract with God, and a contract with God cannot be broken, then to sever such a bond, it must be that it (a real marriage) never existed, ergo an annulment. What imaginative story is more profound than pure denial: this event simply did not happen. While it is difficult to comprehend the denial of daily reality of a marriage, I finally understood what story the church told its faithful and what imaginative leap it required. If this imaginative story does not resonate with the listener, he or she will naturally struggle with the concept.

Imaginative stories are the sine qua non of our ability to understand the world, much less our shifting selves. The stories given to us by the autonomous imagination are invariably lifelike and precise, although often challenging. Michel de Montaigne tells a wonderful story about impermanence in his essay “Of Repentance.” He writes, “I do not portray being: I portray passing … My history needs to be adapted to the moment … I may indeed contradict myself now and then; but truth, as Demades said, I do not contradict.”⁵ Shakespeare has Hamlet tell much the same story propelled by tragic circumstances, so the shocking story of impermanence must have been well and truly in the air the late sixteenth century. Did Montaigne’s lively imaginative construct excite Shakespeare? It accounts for the blinding interaction among the past, present, and future. The present is just passing; observation itself alters the present and turns it into the future, and the interplay between man and his environment, or one another, changes us in every moment. Intelligent, observing people require a good imaginative story to cope with the slippery slopes of our ever-becoming selves.

Several years ago I was talking with a scientist friend of mine. He stated audaciously, “This thing you call rational thought doesn’t exist. It’s just a story about consciousness some people tell themselves. I never think.” Although I wondered just who the “I” was who never thought, I was stunned. Now, I already knew my dirty little secret that I didn’t think. I do something quite different than the commonly held model of discursive, linear thinking. But I had no idea that a scientist, capable of brilliant mathematical computations—in my estimation the hallmark of thinking—didn’t think either.

It set me thinking, or whatever the equivalent is that I do. I realized that as a teacher of theater practice and as a director I do as follows: I read a playwright’s text. She has already told herself a story so she can tell me a story, the play. In order to understand the play, I tell myself a series of stories. At that point, I tell stories to actors until they can tell themselves a story that connects to the playwright’s and my own. They, in turn, tell the audience their stories that are constantly contacting the playwright’s story, while at the same time the audience is telling itself stories that connect to every story down the line. What an amazing series of imaginative stories—when it works.

Of course there are other kinds of theaters telling quite different stories. Polish director Tadeusz Kantor’s theater militated against the transferal of objects into metaphor. His actors’ function was to be in a state of anomie in order for the playwright’s words to manifest themselves. This is a story in itself!

An actor must tell an ageless story and fill it with newly envisioned variations on a hoary old theme. It will be his story of the story. If he is skilled and imaginative, these variations will delve beneath ornamentation and open a world of insight into character and the landscape of the play. Accomplishing this requires a good story to spring the imagination. A delightful story is one of imagination’s greatest delicacies. Imagination tells us stories, and at the same time there is nothing that activates and then nurtures imagination’s presence better than a good story.

This two-way principle applies to all acting techniques. They each have contained within them a narrative of some kind that catalyzes a fundamental difference in the way an actor experiences the world. Imagination then does what it always does—it creates its own story out of this newly generated experiential material. Imagination volleys back a story that corresponds precisely to the implied narrative in the technique being explored. So for example, if the tale an exercise tells is about contact between two people, the story imagination tells back to the actor is an interpersonal one.

The effectiveness of a technique is proportionate to how well the actor’s imagination is captivated by its story. The better a technique is, the more it harnesses the themes human beings find endlessly interesting. However, a technique’s fascination does not have to be immediately clear to be effective. Actual engagement in an exercise will lead to the creation of new information, which may reveal what the actor did not initially realize. He finds that he is comprised of more parts or more sensations than he ever suspected—that he is related to the world in ways previously unknown to him. This revelation will keep the actor focused for a protracted period of time, for it is a really good story with an unknown ending. And it simultaneously provides the actor with a productive haven during his time of not knowing.

The better an acting technique is, the clearer the actor’s sense of location—where to go to get the good stuff—is. Inevitably this will be experienced physically. A good technique leads an actor to a solid sense that she will be able to find that place, that tangible boundary, and situate herself in relation to it so that information will unfold. The more physically conscious the process, the more reliable the results will be. The more conscious the actor is of sensing the boundary to be explored, the easier it is to get there. The boundary becomes an embodied place, not an abstract idea.⁶ All good acting techniques define the boundary that is to be attended, and then grant the actor a structure in the form of a story that enables her to approach and dwell there.

Consider the most abstract object exercise; let’s say an actor is “breaking down” a chair. This particular exercise comes from Teresa Ralli, a member of the Peruvian theater company Yuyachkani. Let us assume that the exercise has only one given: break down the chair only in terms of your physical relationship to it in space. The surface purpose of such an exercise is to find the many, many ways the actor relates to the object and the object relates to the actor. So, the actor’s body is an object relating to this chair object. After the actor sits on, leans on, and stands on the chair, and finally runs out of ways in which he commonly relates to it with his everyday, reflexive imagination, the exercise begins to take on new dynamics. At first he remains a body and the chair remains an object (although not necessarily a chair) as he finds new ways to put his body under, over, and around the chair, and the chair over, under, and around his body. Later, he further abstracts both himself and the chair, and they begin to create a unity, with differing tensions and fluidly created shapes. The longer he works with slow intensity, the more images and sensations arise unbidden. The observant actor will perceive relationships, either potential or realized, that issue forth as he works.

The shift in awareness and the expansion of imagination that the actor experiences can be attributed to two important things. The first is the freshly drawn boundary drawn around the body and the object. When the actor releases his rigidly held idea of both himself and other, and his limited sense of “chair” and “my body,” a new imagining space opens that embraces them both. The dialogue between actor and chair never stops, and new fantasies and stories are told in that intersecting space. They are not the stories he would have told himself earlier in the exercise, but are now filled with a remarkable autonomous images and memories filled with tenderness and passion. Attention to the boundaries must be paid! By simply redrawing the field of perception great insights and newly discovered lands emerge at these points of contact.

Equally, or perhaps more importantly, the actor has fully identified with his body. He accepts that he is “just” a body in relationship to an object. He first gives up the shallow imaginative products of the reflexive imagination, and as he moves with his body in an unpressured way—there is no right or wrong—he discovers that consciousness suddenly resides throughout his body. His whole body becomes an imaginative realm. The body invites the presence of imagination, memory, and emotion, and continuing the exercise as a body in space sustains these subjective entities.⁷

Contrast this object exercise of Uta Hagen’s with Ralli’s. Each tells a story about the actor in relation to an object, but each draws a distinctly different boundary between or around the actor and that object. Here is Hagen’s superb object exercise to be undertaken by the actor playing Nina in The Seagull.⁸ She wisely suggests removing the character from the play’s crisis and placing her

in her bedroom, preparing herself for an outing at the lake; the life of a landowner’s daughter outside Moscow in the late 1800s. You must look for, and identify with, and make use of not only your [Nina’s] clothing and underclothing, the details of your room (washbowls with pitcher and soap and heavy linen towels, the kind of bed and bedding, curtains, scrubbed flooring, icons, prayer habits), but also with what you read, what’s forbidden or allowed. How do you write? By candlelight, kerosene, gaslight? If you write a note to Konstantin, on what kind of paper, with what kind of pen and ink, etc.? Then explore your specific task of getting ready for an outing.

Hagen’s exercise places the boundary between the actor and object. She then asks the actor to remain conscious of usage and to observe carefully her transactions with the object. The final two movements in the exercise are identification—orienting the self with the object resulting in a close emotional association—and making use of all objects, permitted and forbidden. It is a formidable exercise, and a benchmark of the constructive approach. This detail is splendid, and an enormous challenge to any actor. Done thoroughly it will assure public privacy by growing an actor’s feet down into the soil of the period, and into focused character behavior. When an observant actor rigorously attends the boundary between her self and objects, it yields up stories of Alençon lace delicacy. We do not often tell ourselves the story of delicacy in these days (and Chekhov in performance has suffered as a consequence). This exercise bestows personal reference, historicity, and their attendant behaviors to the performance.

The story the technique tells is to watch the transactions at the boundary between self and object. The...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter One: Stories We Tell Ourselves
• Chapter Two: Next Year Let’s Work on Your Imagination
• Chapter Three: The Pilgrimage to the Temple
• Chapter Four: Prayers and Offerings
• Chapter Five: The God Is Silent; The God Speaks
• Chapter Six: Dream Homeopathy
• Chapter Seven: A Machine and a Miracle
• Chapter Eight: Virtual Reality
• Chapter Nine: Rules for Dreamworking the Character’s Body
• Conclusion
• Index