Existentialist Shadowing in Theatre Creation

Challenges for teachers of Performing Arts

A Yr 12 student, CJ, pointed out that the first act of our new creation for the opening of The Joe Woodward Theatre was actually an Existentialist piece of theatre. I hadn't thought of it in this way; though I acknowledged the Post Modernist influences. Today another student suggested that most of the cast couldn't even spell "existentialist", let alone know what it meant. He has read much of Peter Brook, Michael Chekhov, Suzuki and Bogart (to name a few) and wondered if our work was too sophisticated for our cohort of students; even though they were actually part of the creation team for it. And he wasn't making supercilious suggestions or criticisms. I am reminded of how students can take their learning far beyond the curriculum when they actually read and chase up questions for themselves. But then I ponder how many teachers are more concerned with dotting the "i" and crossing the "t"; the application of anal retentive pedantises over critical thinking and creative application!

In 1969 as a Yr 12 student in Brisbane I was totally fascinated by the poetry of John Keats; this was part of the English curriculum then. But I have never forgotten the disillusionment with the system when my teacher at the time sarcastically rubbished me for my references to Leigh Hunt when writing an essay on John Keats. He had never heard of him ... or at least this was what he suggested at the time! This was when I became totally emersed in the story of Keats and the influences and contexts for his work. Keats the man was Keats the poet. His loves and his exhaustions grabbed me in both a psychological and in an academic sense. So I wonder if many Drama teachers today are even aware of the references some students actually raise when exploring difficult and sometimes confusing issues in the construction and discussion of performance.

This is a serious issue as most PL programs for teachers in Australia are about pedagogy and not content! I wonder if this actually inhibits their understanding of what students are capable of achieving. This is further at issue when Government agencies responsible for curriculums consistently publish the suggestion that a teacher is a "teacher"; this teacher can teach anything! Well! I am paraphrasing. But in reality, teachers can't teach "anything". So to suggest a teacher who once sang in a musical by some company from Pumpkin Creek or who confidently takes English classes can automatically teach Musical Theatre or Drama is a total betrayal of the Arts and Drama.

Exploring that relationship between art and life; between the character and the actor; between the writer and the interpreter has opened up many liminal spaces within our company's mindset. The essential liminality within these relationships gives rise to so many underlying features of all theatre practice and theory. The young actor is not only asking "how do I link with my character?" but more essentially, "how do I link with myself?" How do I break out of the character I am allotted by fate? by circumstance? by all those around me?

Of course the questions are rhetorical. They can only point to continuums that might easily suggest some cracks in the paradoxical sarcophagus of life's entrapment. Yet these are the critical questions for all creative activity.

The student who is exploring through diverse literature and academic treatises on the multitudes of cultural, social and artistic traditions, variations and viewpoints has critical advantages in choice making over the one trapped within one's own experience. Concepts of meditation and enlightenment certainly also play a part. One's own struggle through repetition and continuous practice of whatever chosen craft may also play a significant part in understanding something of the paradoxical relationships between the creator and what is to be created.

"Do I create my character? Or does my character create me?" ask characters from our DTC production of "The Heart"? In attempting to answer the question, each has to find deep within themselves, an awareness of their own heart; an awareness that is obscured and militated against by cultural and social norms that militate against such slowing down to a discovery of simply BEING!

CJ was right. Our play is very much within the scope of Existentialism; while also challenging its concepts within the second act. Students have had to lift up and challenge their concepts of theatre and presentation to do this. But then to contribute to much, if not most, of the writing from my initial scenarios and treatment has taken truly a great commitment from all involved. The students themselves have taken on existentialist shadowing within their process to come to that point of creation. This is a far cry from simply aping popular commercial works likely to produce unthinking audiences seeking distraction and well-intentioned though patronising applause.

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Tickets can be purchased for the DTC production of THE HEART taking place in the inaugural season at The Joe Woodward Theatre, in the Issoudun Performing Arts Centre, Canberra.

Tickets available for 18 and 19 October 2024:

https://events.humanitix.com/the-heart

Acting Vs Theory in Performance

Lost amid the abundance of theories on acting and performance

Young actors search for the magic bullet in transforming their fumbling attempts to act and perform and maybe even gain a profession from it all; an elusive career! The most committed will seek out the insightful teachers and the best acting schools with reputations for placing actors in career boosting companies upon graduation. Some will even endure the natural anxiety and depression that comes with a lack of success or even a lack of frequency in successfully gaining employment. Others will see it all as a hobby and no more; a fulfilling addition to their real life work in some other or related field; but nothing more! But to be effective and even successful as an actor, one needs to apply some very clear and simple elements in preparation and presentation that go beyond any theoretical or abstract substance.

The Basics

Two fundamental things are necessary for effective performance:

• timing, and

• stillness.

Sure it might be assumed that one has a strong vocal quality and a life experience to imbue selected roles with truth and circumstances. And sure, you need to know the theories that give rise to various styles in performance. However, the essential element all actors need is a sense of timing and an ability to hold stillness. We then come back to the duration of the stillness held. How long is it necessary to feed a moment with power and strength by holding the moment?

So all you need is the power of stillness and the confidence to adjust your timing of speech or movement. It's simple. Deceptively simple! Silence and stillness are the two most challenging concepts for an actor's attendance.

The Application

OK. You're in a play and you can't figure out the objective of your character or your actions! Can I suggest you just go still within your rehearsal and think for a moment about what comes next. But go STILL! Find that moment where you have to really be challenged. Your timing might suggest a number of seconds before you turn to the other character or to the audience and then speak or act! This will no doubt suggest the ACTION for you and then the OBJECTIVE!

It's a case of the objective being preceded by the action. And the action is a result of stillness, silence and timing.

The Question

So what do you need to do to get that sense of stillness and timing?

For a start, you need to give up all extraneous events that clutter your ability to find stillness and personal silence. Detach from ambition. Detach from personal relationships. Recognise your destructive personal ego for what it is ... BULLSHIT! Focus!

The Deepening

Spend time in the silence and the stillness before attempting the timing of your durations and speaking. If you really feel the silence and the stillness, the timing will come. You will have processed the necessary reaction time to any event. But in that silence you need time to process what you feel or want as a character.

As an actor, you need to suffer your silence in order to discern what your character is about. Ironically, it also determines what you are about. Acting is a multi-faceted action. Yes, you need understanding of your personal instrument as Stanislavski suggests. However, you also need to know how to be still and silent in order to find the idiosyncratic elements that go beyond linear understanding of where you are going with your character. These idiosyncratic elements are the key to successful and memorable performances.

In Conclusion

So much actor training is as David Mamet suggests, privileged indulgence or at least analysis of acting rather than a specific approach. So do you want to succeed? Stephen Berkoff is a better advisor than most acting coaches that complicate the process so much that it replaces the actual moment of engagement with audiences.

Work on your ability to be still; challenge yourself to find the timing of your responses in your scenes. Just stop and BE...

Cheers

Can We Accept Our Own Betrayal While Creating a Work of Art or Theatre?

I attended a funeral of a friend some weeks back. At the end of the occasion, they played "always look on the bright side of death ..." from Monty Python's "Life of Brian". And this reminded me of the absurdity of all our existence and the weight we place on our own experience and even our ethics. The comical antics of despots in culture and nations is imaged and reflected in the comical antics of despots in families, communities, institutions and businesses of all kinds. And I wonder if so much of the rampant neurosis we see in society today is more the product of our inability to reconcile our idealistic perception of what ought to be OR what we would like to be with what actually IS! What if it is this inability to make this reconciling attribute more potent than any chemical imbalances in the brain that makes for our culturally insane society?

Erich Fromm and The Sane Society and Aldous Huxley

It is practically a truism that George Orwell's "1984" and Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World" are not futuristic works but are descriptions of much that is evident today. Orwell's world of fear as a control method and Huxley's "love your slavery" positions sum up so much of what is happening to this human frog in a socially and metaphorically tepid tank water that is continuously hotting up. Either situation is of course doomed to ultimate destruction; taking with it much of the human race! And so we "always look on the bright side of death" as the Monty Python group so ingeniously imaged in the late 1970s.

Theatre simply smiles and flicks the bird at the insanity of the brilliant personages in our society. The discourse of our intellectual gods entrenching the vaccine of indolence towards the deplorables who despise them is providing even wider schisms between the reality of what we see and know and the semantics of egoistic cleverness worthy of a Harvard Ph D! The clever ones who use language as a debasing weapon to construct totally absurd notions as absolute truths in order to placate very questionable agendas; these clever ones who have manufactured viruses to infect the most intelligent minds with perfect arguments to prove the great delusions as being necessary truths; such an intelligent and clever neurosis so obvious to the deplorable minds that cannot process the machinations of slight-of-hand academia will nevertheless create the dividing lines between Orwell's "1984" and Huxley's "Brave New World".

The Tik Tokers and Instagrammers gladly parade their never-ending despair in posts about their meaningless lives while the masters of the ruling elites cast despising glances and eye-rolling at the plain absurdity of whole generations contributing to their inevitable lemming-like plunge into nothingness! The insane society of Erich Fromm's "The Sane Society" (1955) was a companion piece to Huxley's fictional "Brave New World". Nearly seventy years later the largely hidden cultural neurosis of disorder is so evident with large scale drug companies the biggest beneficiaries of neurotic enslavement. And when it suits to label a certain disquiet or emotional response as a psychological disorder, the smart ones and the elite minds of academia are quick to find the correct label so easily contain the disturbance that can erupt if the elite were to see such response as more than some natural response to the absurdity of human condition!

Depending on where your ideological stance is placed will depend on what you consider this piece is actually talking about. While the metaphorical Nero is fiddling and the coliseum is packed for the circus, the real agendas are engaging allies and reinforcing the neurotic society in order to maintain and increase power. The political domain is of little consequence except in the construction of perpetual wars. Academia and academic institutions linked closely with the big corporations hold the real oligarchical power in the Western world. The Alliance with Jihadism while publicly opposing terrorism is the most obvious example of neurotic response! In bed with Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Pakistan and elsewhere, while bleating about the condition of Gaza, the USA and the West, and the UK, proffer financial gain over any consideration of ethics or the human condition. At the same time, the Deplorables or the Proletarians don't understand the mind speak of the elites and just know that their lives are being ignored and demolished. They are made to feel like ghosts in their own countries. Have a look at enclaves like Luton in the UK! Then have a look at peoples' experience in Alice Springs as still alien cultural precepts smugly over-ride any sense of personal belonging by indigenous populations!

So as we create theatre, does any of this ring bells? I haven't seen or heard such bells. Where are the Deplorables in all this? Simply seen as fodder for Donald Trump? Or other hard rightists in Europe? Or simply as a joke in China or Japan? Yet, do people's real lives that are disrupted by the machinations of elitist groups simply not matter.

This is the central question for theatre in this era. Yet it is not addressed nor is it contemplated as a true subject for writers. Where is the Arthur Miller who wrote "The Crucible"? Or the Ibsen who wrote "Enemy of the People"?

Do contemporary writers and theatre practitioners accept their own betrayal of their art and practice by not addressing the most pressing issues of the age? Cultural neurosis and cultural hypocrisy! Is it cowardness or self-preservation? One has to wonder if that same neurosis of "politically correct" conclusions isn't providing the straitjacket of conformity to the elitist rules dictated by unseen and covert shaping of agendas by the Ministry of Truth (George Orwell "1984"). Yet we are all so happy in a neurotic kind of way by the ease of Consumerism (Huxley, "Brave New World") that our main focus is on our sexual attraction and narcissistic feelings fuelled by drugs from the international global conglomerates!

Joe Woodward