jwilzewske: acting

Showing posts with label acting. Show all posts

Saturday, June 23, 2007

Hargis: Music to Live For, Aided and Abetted by Gestures

CMT: Ellen Hargis is a member of the Newberry Consort and The King’s Noyse. As a soprano, she’s one of America’s preeminent early music artists, specializing in repertoire ranging from ballads to opera. She’s performed at many of the world’s leading festivals including the Adelaide Festival (Australia), Utrecht Festival (Holland), Resonanzen Festival (Vienna), Tanglewood, the New Music America Festival, Festival Vancouver, the Berkeley Festival (California), and is a frequent guest at the Boston Early Music Festival, where she’s sung title roles in Baroque operas and recently served as assistant director and Vocal and Gesture Coach for the production of the Lully opera, Psyché.

DSM: Her discography includes repertoire ranging from medieval to contemporary music. She’s recently recorded the leading role of Aeglé in Lully’s Thésée for CPO Records, released this month. Recent releases also include the premier recording of Conradi’s opera Ariadne. She’s featured on a number of Harmonia Mundi recordings including a critically acclaimed solo recital disc of music by Jacopo Peri, and in Arvo Pärt’s Berlin Mass. Ellen’s on the vocal faculty of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, and teaches numerous summer courses in early music, including the Longy International Baroque Institute in Cambridge, The Lute Society of America Seminars and the Vancouver Baroque Vocal Programme.

CMT: Ellen’s sense of operatic gesture is superb. Every dramatic action requires a justification, a rationale that can be apprehended by the audience, and Ellen’s Psyché direction ensured that the connection between action and justification—through appropriate visual scale of the gestures, and the reinforcement and repetition of gestures consistently by the various actors—was clear and convincing and natural.

DSM: But ‘clear and natural’ doesn’t have to mean ‘tame’. The gestures of Venus, performed by Karina Gauvin, called to mind Martha Rosler’s “system of harnessed subjectivity” in her short film, Semiotics of the Kitchen (1975)—in which the artist blithely traverses a seemingly benign range of various kitchen utensils, punctuated by sudden violent actions, followed in each case by calm returns to composure.

CMT: Repeat the gesture at least several times, pausing at the end of each repetition to allow the gesture's ‘radiations’ to flow through you. Walk around the stage. See yourself doing the gesture inwardly. You generate a kind of “pull” through repetition and radiation of the gesture, and awaken a sense of urgency in the character—which can be amusing or heartbreaking or other things, depending on what the gesture is and what it signifies.

DSM: Allowing your breath to release with each “pull” helps, too—it adds to the power and complexity and emotional richness/truth. The “pull” reinforces the emotional truth, makes it more vivid. Nicole Potter has a lot to say about this in her book on acting.

B y distilling characters or scenic moments to their core gestures, you can achieve performances that are so psychologically complex that it would take reams of paper to describe them.”
— Nicole Potter, Movement for Actors, p. 22

CMT: When multiple players are on stage, as is usually the case in opera, special considerations arise. There are often multiple activities going on at once, which is confusing since a viewer can only really focus on one activity at a time. It’s important for actors to coordinate their activities to make the overall action on stage understandable and coherent. One way to lend coherence to multi-player action is to give it focus. If one player has the primary role in the current action, then the other characters should direct their attention to that character.

DSM: This helps the audience to see where to direct their attention, and avoids extraneous action on stage that can distract the viewer.

CMT: Giving focus doesn’t simply involve staring at other cast members, though. Each player must have an intention at all times, and display that intention. So if a player is focusing on another player and listening to what that player is saying, the first player should react to what the other player is saying or singing, and display that reaction. Action on stage involves a continual give-and-take among the players, where action leads to reaction, which entrains further action. When done right, these actions and reactions combine into a continuous flow, and that propels the drama forward—as we saw done so well in the BEMF production of Psyché!

DSM: In Psyché, I saw human beings, fully-dimensional characters. I saw suffering and joy in their eyes; I saw their lips tremble; I saw Venus’s face darkened by rage, jealousy and pain; I saw Psyché’s face brightened by love and relief. Obviously, it’s a big difference to see the opera live, at BEMF. I saw completely human people, fighting, suffering, loving and expressing all shades of human feeling, from the brightest to the darkest. Light and shadow is the leitmotiv that comes to mind.

CMT: I could hardly separate the singing from the orchestra, so harmonious was the fusion between all the elements of this production: voices, instruments, gestures, lighting … like a broad stream that just carried us away.

DSM: Ellen Hargis’ stage presence is simply phenomenal. In the various BEMF performances in which she appeared last week, what struck me most about her stage skill was the simplicity of her body language. She didn’t have to gesticulate and pace around on the stage to be expressive. She projects an aura of mobility which gives her individual gestures weight and emotional power. In her workshop at BEMF, Ellen explained the agile placement and orientation of the body—the torso, hips, arms, legs—so as to be readily and fluidly able to move to the next location on the stage, and the next.

CMT: The word ‘impressive’ is insufficient to describe Ellen’s physical presence on stage—as we saw in her performances at last week’s Boston Early Music Festival. Her beauty and smile are so striking that you can feel the audience focus on her and, at that moment, I wouldn’t have been surprised if the musicians lowered their bows and the whole audience got to their feet.

DSM: Interestingly, she isn’t the kind of singer who appeals to everyone instantly. When I first saw her I was surprised by the low tone of her soprano voice—but I soon found her singing superb and profoundly moving.

CMT: When music moves you to the extent of rendering you speechless, you utter platitudes like “This is music to die for.” In the case of Ellen Hargis, I would invert it: this is music to live for!

DSM: Dr. Elena Nicoladis and her research colleagues have studied the hand gestures of bilingual children as they told the same story twice, first in one language and then the other. The researchers were surprised by what they saw. The children used gestures a lot more when telling the story in what they considered to be their stronger language. These results seem counter-intuitive. You’d imagine the children would be more inclined to use gestures to help them communicate in their weaker language. Based on these results and the results of earlier studies, Nicoladis believes there is a connection between language and memory access and gesturing.

CMT: What they believe is going on is that the very fact of moving your hands around helps you recall parts of the story—the gestures help you access memory and language so that you can tell more of the story. In other words, it’s not that the gestures are all outwardly directed, for the purpose of emphasis or persuasion or clarity of communicating what is already queued-up to be told; instead, it’s that the performative process, including gesturing, serves to “lubricate” the speaker’s memory and verbal expression centers in the brain—enabling “more” to be told, than what would otherwise have been queued-up. Benjamin Bagby says something that amounts to the same thing in the round-table discussion that’s included on his Beowulf DVD.

Initially, we thought gestures were related to meaning—that they mean things on their own. But now we believe they are more deeply related to language.”
— Elena Nicolaidis, Univ Alberta, 2005.

DSM: Even with a libretto to follow, there’s no question that well-devised gestures can have this same “lubricating” expressive effect in opera! This BEMF production of Psyché is ample evidence of that!

G esture has therefore this Advantage above mere Speaking, that by this we're only understood by those of our own Language, but by Action and Gesture (I mean just and regular Action) we make our Thoughts and Passions intelligible to all Nations and Tongues.”
— Thomas Betterton, 1710

CMT: In Russian theatre we have Otkaz (Refusal/Reversal). The ‘otkaz’ is the preparation for the action, the wind-up before the pitch. The inhale before the speech, the bent knees before the jump. Basically preparing and storing up energy needed for the intended imminent action. And we have Posyl (Sending Out, To or Away). The ‘posyl’ is the execution of the main action. It’s the path from C to B passing through the point of origin, A. Just like a ball thrown by a pitcher, the energy held in the body during the ‘otkaz’ is released and sent in the direction of the action. Because it passes through the point of origin, A, the posyl is seen by the audience as the path from A to B—containing the energy collected from the otkaz. Without such energy, the posyl has no momentum. If it’s difficult to understand an actor—if her/his lines seem unconvincing—it’s usually because she/he hasn’t prepared and gathered the energy necessary for the line. Hasn’t used the otkaz.

M ovement is the most powerful means of expression in the creation of a theatrical production. Deprived of words, costumes, footlights, wings, auditorium, and left with only the actor and his mastery of movement, the theatre would still be theatre.”
— Vsevolod Meyerhold, 1914

DSM: Ellen’s workshop stressed that we must always bear in mind the ‘when’ and ‘why’ of gestures, or else the ornaments will merely be ornaments—of little consequence to the energy and meaning of the performance. Indiscriminate use of gestures is a kind of incontinence—it belies a lack of understanding of when less is more. She alluded to “that landscape painter who knew how to paint cypress trees well, and who then [stupidly] painted them into every landscape everywhere.”

CMT: She also noted that the ‘accessibility’ of stage gestures does depend upon a certain amount of cultural literacy among members of the audience—a general literacy of physical/kinesthetic “grammar” that these days is faltering. So companies producing baroque operas today have the additional burden of gently informing or illustrating for audience members the 17th century gestures that are essential for their understanding and enjoyment of the performance.

DSM: There’s also the matter of timing. As Ellen emphasized in the BEMF workshop, the gesture usually precedes the action or line that it references. The gesture’s typically an ‘otkaz’-like “set up.” It may even be paradoxical or silly if it’s synchronous with the action or line.

CMT: The gesture isn’t only a “set up” for a positive verbal disclosure or declamation. Ellen points out that a gesture can also anticipate an impending ‘withholding’ of information—a secret, an emptiness, a negative whitespace. Gestures span the full range of rhetorical devices—something that was ably illustrated by the Psyché cast—aided and abetted by Ellen’s expert coaching and direction. I was glad to see that Heidi Wilson, the Wall Street Journal music critic, noted this in her review. I was glad also to see that Heidi was enthused about the notion of getting investors interested in producing this Psyché in Paris and/or New York . . .

S eek not to know what must not be reveal’d,
Joys only flow when hate is most conceal’d ...
Let me no more with powerful charms be press’d —
I am forbid by fate to tell the rest..”
  — Indian Queen, Act III
    (opera by John Dryden and Robert Howard,
     music by Henry Purcell)

Monday, February 12, 2007

Authenticity Re-Loaded: Music Performance as Acting

T rue ihsas is possible at every performance because the munshid is a true Sufi believer. When he sings the words that describe his beliefs, the feeling always flows spontaneously from him. The munshid’s music is thus always an aesthetic expression of an authentic mystical condition. But the secular musician is more like an actor. At best, feeling may be artificially and temporarily synthesized to support expression, but even this much cannot be guaranteed since there is no special belief system available to assure the correlation of the music with feeling.”
— Michael Frishkopf, Tarab in the Mystic Sufi Chant, in Colors of Enchantment: Visual and Performing Arts of the Middle East, Sherifa Zuhur, ed. American Univ Cairo Press, 2001.

DSM: There was an interesting remark that Sandy Yamamoto of the Miró Quartet made the other day, about how she enters into her part—about how she prepares herself before the Miró Quartet commences performing a piece. She was, I think, basically describing a sort of ‘sense memory’ for the character of the piece—or, more precisely, a ‘sense memory’ for the character of her part.

CMT: I think the performer has a duty to enter into the mind of the composer, to “get into character” for a piece—just like an actor. While interpreting the piece, the performer imagines the feelings of the composer, and responds and reacts to the expressions of the other performers—or even the atmospherics of the audience—in the context of her/his own experiences.

DSM: In the Nineteenth Century and the Romantic period, the sense of being authentic or ‘true’ to a work was so much about being true to the composer’s emotional content, which the artist was obliged to render accurately and faithfully. In the Eighteenth Century and earlier, the notion of authenticity allowed more scope to the performer. But in every era, being true to the emotions leads performing artists to take liberties with the text—take liberties with the notation on the page. The rationale that’s offered by those who choose this approach is generally that the musical text is something that can and must be modified as part of the performer’s role in a performance, much like an actor or director suggests or requests a line change to stay more true to a character.

CMT: There was a strong reaction against this in the late Twentieth Century, of course—a trend toward “authentic-qua-textually-fastidious” performances, using period instruments that made it possible to hear the works as they might originally have been performed. I suppose that’s part of the milieu of historically correct Civil War reenactments these days, the Society for Creative Anachronism, Massively Multi-Player computer gaming, and so on. But if you have hundreds or thousands of actors as in re-enactments or Massively Multi-Player gaming, the concept of adherence to a text breaks down. Overall, you get expressive dyssynchrony, incontinence. And yet each of the players/actors is locally continent and consonant with the performances rendered in his/her area, in his/her locale. You have a confederation of artistically expressive nomads and nomadic cliques, in Deleuze’s sense.

DSM: Well, it’s an artifact of western music history that the composer’s emotional conception of the work often dominates our thinking. The western myth is:

composer’s emotions → as-composed expressions → textually literal practice performance → intended emotion elicited in audience members.

But in fact the causal chain of events is more this way:

composer’s emotions → as-composed expressions → studying score/rehearsing → emotions elicited in performer different from composer’s emotions → performer’s understanding of the work’s meaning and creative ideas for expressing those ideas through the performance → refinement of concept, including input from critics and theorists → practice performance, with adjustments to create emotionally authenticity → intended emotion elicited in audience members.

The classical musics of non-western cultures are hardly so composer-centric—Indian and Asian and Middle Eastern music, for example.

CMT: And your arrows are re-instantiated and can change substantially from performance to performance by the same performer. They can be dramatically different from performer to performer. The big mistake in western music theory and western performance practice is supposing that there is a complete, finished work that existed in the composer’s imagination and is totally and unambiguously specified by the score and its annotations. No one would make such a mistake in theatre. One true and authentic Hamlet only? Preposterous!

DSM: You have to invest yourself in the dynamic of each rehearsal. You have to understand that your fellow ensemble members need to do many preparative things before they get to the point where they are ready to get themselves into character and immerse themselves in the piece in front of them.

CMT: And how different that warming-up and tuning and other pre-preparation is for a pianist than for string players or wind instruments. How different it is even among different instruments within a family! So each performer has to keep quiet, be patient with the others, and each has to observe and understand what’s going on—has to gauge what remains for the others to finish doing before they can get their ‘game face’ fully “on”.

DSM: One thing a composer learns is that, in general, musicians aren’t too interested in why they’re doing what they’re doing. All they want to know is: What do I need to do? When do I need to do it? For many performers, if you start to try to explain the meaning or intent behind the composition, their eyes glaze over. It’s interesting that theater’s the exact opposite of this. A good actor or actress won’t do anything until they’ve understood everything. The insist on knowing about the playwright’s motivation, about his/her intended nuances and connection of the lines, about the characters psyches and personal histories, and so on. By contrast, the average musician isn’t very interested in this. The great musician, though, tries to inhabit her/his part, much like an actor would do. You don’t have to be an opera singer for this to matter. It’s equally important for instrumentalists to conceive of who the character is whose voice they play in a piece. They need to inhabit that character in performance, to deliver an authentic and compelling performance.

CMT: Are you implying that musicians also need to adopt some specific framework for their acting—like “sense memory” in method acting, for example?

I t does not matter so much what the actor thinks, but the fact that he is really thinking something that is real to him at that particular moment. The make-believe thinking that may coincide with the play is not real enough.”
— Lee Strasberg, ‘A Dream of Passion’

DSM: Well, yes. One of Strasberg’s reasons for personalizing the actor’s imagination in getting into character was to enhance the realism. According to Strasberg, the actor needs to include in preparation some specific objects from her/his own personal life, reacting to those familiar personal objects rather than the set or props of the play. In discussing the use of “sense memory”, he emphasized that it wasn’t enough for the actor to attend to memories in an abstract way. Only by means of a concrete sensory binding to these personal objects can the emotions be reliably evoked. It’s not enough to say, “It was really hot.” Instead, the actor must define how she/he experienced a particular heat remembered from her/his own life. By deliberately recalling a sensual memory, the actor reacts to the internal object, and that then becomes the foundation for a very realistic performance. You must “really think something that’s real.” You’ve got to hold that in your mind, as an anchor for what you do with the text. If successful, the emotionality impresses the audience by virtue of its realism—the realism is supposedly greater because those actual objects from the actor’s own life are what’ve invoked it.

CMT: But the undesirable side-effect of method acting—criticized by Joseph Chaikin and others—is that, in order to inhabit the character, the method actor involves himself with the character’s inner dilemma. “But the character,” Chaikin says, “if he were a living person, would be doing the opposite—trying to relieve himself of his unhappiness, and trying to respond to the circumstances around him.” Chaikin deplores the way that the “eyes of this actor are always secretly looking into his own head.”

DSM: By contrast, the psychological realism of early naturalism relies on imagery derived from analysis of the text itself. Necessary to drive realism into the performance, the “inner image”, according to Konstantin Stanislavsky, is text-based ‘make-believe’ rather than referencing an actual personal object. But even though this may be less intense and more detached, it still lends character and nuance to the delivery of the lines. I think more musicians are closer to Stanislavsky in their performance practice than they are to Strasberg, don’t you?

CMT: Maybe. But, either way, in order to inflect the individual parts of a speech with different emotional nuances, it’s helpful to the actor/musician to be able to shift among the inner images in a carefully planned order or sequence. How detailed you have to be depends on the motivic complexity and length of the piece. This is true regardless whether you’re a method actor or following Stanislavsky’s or some other approach. The method of blending role and personal experiences is valuable—maybe it’s inevitable.

DSM: You can over-do this, though—this blending of personal life and role. Even Strasberg advocated other training techniques such as improvisation to “stimulate a continuous flow of response and thought within the actor,” balancing the tendency to be “looking into one’s own head.” He wasn’t a ‘method bigot’.

CMT: So the technique of adding realism by psychologically motivating the performance in personal terms—rather than a Stanislavskian, text-derived motivation—has various alternatives. One was recently recounted by Lindsay Crouse in discussing her testimony in Sidney Lumet’s ‘The Trial’. She imagined that the act of giving testimony was a confession directed at personal life and that such a confession was instrumental in enabling her to move on. The instrumentality of the confession in enabling her character to ‘move on’ in her life was the conceit that powered Lindsay’s highly authentic, realistic testimony performance.

DSM: Yes. And in Casablanca, Bogart probably ferried some of his marital problems into his role. In his film noir roles he may’ve brought some of his disillusionment with Hollywood. It’s hard to imagine how he could’ve totally ‘checked that at the door’ at any rate.

CMT: More than the infeasibility of completely compartmentalizing and distancing our concrete personal lives, it’s hard to see how an abstract entity such as a character’s ‘personality’ can be brought into the imaginative work in order to achieve the performance we want. It’s likely that concrete and highly personal objects inevitably affect our creative performance. Better to arrange it deliberately instead of allowing it to be happenstantial. The deliberate incorporation of concrete personal references helps us to manage what would otherwise be glaring contradictions—belying the fractured assumption of one coherent, simplistic personality. If we take the concept of auteur to refer to those un-simple aesthetic properties that are essential in a composition’s overall design, we’re able to acknowledge a chamber musician’s actorly contribution to the collective creative enterprise of the ensemble. But rather than taking the premise of a controlling will or one coherent composerly intellect for the work, the performers and listeners should look for what’s most valuable in the work—should look for what elements embody most of the meaning. That still leaves plenty of room for discovery and for spontaneous, dynamic interpretations. It still leaves plenty of room for nuance and surprise.

DSM: These aspects remind me of Deleuze’s writing on music vs. Adorno’s writing. Deleuze: the theorist of immanence and dynamic ‘becoming-music’ and univocality of being. Adorno: the theorist of irreducible contradictions and static plurality and structural multivocal conflict.

T o improvise is to join with the world, meld with it.”
— Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari, ‘A Thousand Plateaus’, 1987, p. 311

CMT: Very tactile, very multi-sensory, very kinesthetic—‘haptic’, to use Deleuze’s fancy word. Deleuze allows for both a haptic act of seeing and a haptic act of listening. Haptic vision is a mode of seeing that, from the artist’s easel, summons not just the eye but the ear and the touch. Haptic listening is a mode of hearing that, from the performer’s instrument, summons not just the ear but the eye and the touch. The senses aren’t alienated from each other, they’re intertwined. This inter-relation and interchangeability and cross-talk among the senses was part of what Sandy Yamamoto was implying by her comments the other night, I think. You compose the sounds; you imagine them in advance of your attacking the first note. Authentic music performance in this way becomes a wholistic composing of the senses—like an actor’s multi-sensory composite performance. No matter how many times you’ve performed the work before, you must imagine the senses again, compose the senses again.

Sandy Yamamoto, inhabiting a favorite musical character