Ray Munro, Foxrock%26apos;s Artistic Director, introduces his ideas on liminal performances in a paper delivered at the international conference on Consciousness, Theatre, Literature and the Arts, in Aberystwyth, Wales, 2005: WITNESS CONSCIOUSNESS AND THE ACTING PROCESS My paper is an attempt to articulate a working process. I am a director. My process is to work with actors and designers to build performances. This process has developed organically over thirty years of studio and classroom work. I have been trying to articulate it over the last five years. This process usually includes a deep reading of the play. By a deep reading I mean my eyes are more often off the page than on the page. I also do the usual reading of the other works by the playwright, and familiarize myself with the politics, literature, and arts of the period. But as Kathleen Raine points out, “The books that poets study may be far different than those scholars think worthy of notice” (Raine xv), the reading that has become most important to me is my reading of the spiritual texts of the eastern and western tradition. These texts not only enrich my meditative life, they shape and focus my vision, and also help to clarify my artistic research. In fact, though these texts are concerned with meditation and the spiritual life, I am finding many direct applications to performance and the creative process. Conversely, the performance work I do then helps to elucidate the sometimes opaque meditative texts. *** A distraught graduate student makes his way to psych services. The clinical psychologist is still at lunch, but his friend, a philosopher, is waiting for him in his office. The student, clearly shaken and thinking this is the therapist, sits down and says, “I don’t think I exist.” The philosopher looks at his watch and seeing that the shrink won’t be back for another twenty minutes, asks the student, “Who doesn’t think you exist?” The student walks out cured. Somewhere near the beginning of their first acting class I say to my students, “If you could do what you are doing right now -- yes, just that-- in front of twenty or two thousand people you would all be great actors.” Well, why can’t you? This question shapes the course on which the students then take their first tentative steps. What is it? Why can’t I do what I am doing right now in front of two hundred people? Is it fear or self-consciousness? Yes, self-consciousness you will say. But is this self-consciousness or Self un-consciousness? We have been told since childhood that there is a quality that distinguishes the human being from the animal. Animals clearly have consciousness. They feel pain, express emotion and communicate with each other. But humans don’t just have awareness, we are also aware that we are aware. This awareness of our awareness is said to be what makes us human. But how much of our day, what percentage of our day, which means our life, is spent in that special state, aware that we are aware? In the first example, the student is ‘cured’ because the question ‘who doesn’t think you exist?’ led to a connection with his higher self, while still being aware of his everyday self. In the second, the student actors only conquer their anxieties, by shifting their attention away from their fear, and focusing completely on the play’s reality and their character’s situation. This is clearly shown in an early Viola Spolin exercise (Exposure) where the actors are asked to stand in front of the audience and given absolutely no direction. Very soon their discomfort and self-consciousness is made known by body language that shows them either very withdrawn or defensively outgoing. You can also just feel the tension in the room. After a while they are then instructed to count how many different colors are in the room. Their bodies relax and their faces become alert as they do the assigned task as they now have ‘a point of focus’ (Spolin 51). This detaching and focusing ability are themselves attributes of the Witness. Who is doing the detaching and focusing? Well, who is it that is reading this page? That which sees all but cannot be seen is Witness consciousness. Acting is unique in its ability to provide an example of Witness consciousness since in its practice we are always dealing with two levels of consciousness. In the best performances the actor “sacrifices” his ego and connects his higher self with the character’s constructed lower self. The joining of these two is the essence of acting. The ability to do so rests on our dual consciousness, our awareness of our awareness. The actor is easily able to have a clear, objective lucidity about the content of his character’s ego (i.e., hopes, dreams and desires) that would be almost impossible with content of his everyday ego. However, attaining objectivity concerning egoic content is the telos of virtually every spiritual discipline. One example is the attempt to view your emotions in the same way that you observe the clouds in the sky: the cloud passes by--your anger passes by. *** The middle of the nineteenth century was in some ways the height of intellectual materialism, and the systematic acting training that emerged out of that particular zeitgeist was the Delsarte System. The Delsarte system in the United States was a correspondence course. You sent away for illustrations, detailed diagrams really, that showed you how to play “love”: cross your hands over your heart and glance upwards. There were other lessons demonstrating “anger” or the gesture for “desire.” We still see vestiges of this style today in bad opera, musicals and dinner theater. If your character had to throw his champagne glass into the fireplace, you would imitate what you observed while watching someone throw a champagne glass into the fireplace. This was the mimesis of the visible (I use the word mimesis following Hamlet’s injunction to the Players to hold a mirror up to nature. I’ve heard that quote a hundred times and never really thought about it. But of course you don’t hold a mirror up to see nature. You hold a mirror up to see yourself. And if we want to think for a moment from a spiritual perspective that the Spirit is not something epiphenomenal to matter but that matter, the world of our senses is a manifestation of the Spirit and that we are all plays of that consciousness, then we would be holding a mirror up to our Self, “…. a glass to see the inmost part of you” as he says to his mother later in the play. That inmost part of you is the Witness.). The end of the nineteenth century brought us Freud in modern psychology and Stanislavski in modern acting. Stanislavsky’s method examined not just the physical actions but also the character’s thoughts. Those thoughts that engender the emotions, that move the arm, that throws the glass into the fireplace. By imitating the psychological or soul processes that would occur within the character the actor will manifest the appropriate, corresponding physical action. Additionally, actors must translate the acting text to make it their own so that the words and actions may be performed in truth. After you have thrown the glass into the fireplace, let’s say you turn around to see your old faithful servant bringing in Aunt Hilde’s samovar. Your brilliant line is something like “Ah, Aunt Hilde’s samovar!” Now you yourself do not have an Aunt Hilde, or a samovar, much less any servants. But you do have an Aunt Agnes, and she does have a magnificent tea set beloved by everyone, including yourself. And your cousins did used to wait on you when you were you young. It is these mental images that get you to the imaginal locus, the place you need to be in order to say “Ah, Aunt Hilde’s samovar,” with truth and integrity. The actor takes the written word, lifts it off the page up to the soul realm, touches it with breath and voice, and imbues it with a personal, private warmth of feeling, derived from the translated thoughts and mental pictures. This is the mimesis of the invisible. Stanislavsky introduced the mimesis of the invisible to acting theory as Freud introduced the subconscious to psychological theory. After the wars, the mid-twentieth century in the States brought us the analyst’s couch, the fifty minute hour and the method acting techniques of Lee Strasburg. Some time later there were the very important developments brought to us by the post-Freudian psychologists especially those associated with the human potential movement and transpersonal psychology. Some of these were incorporated into the acting theories of Robert Benedetti and Robert Cohen. Robert Cohen’s work has a wonderful lucidity and the useful concept of reciprocal characterization. This I believe was a true step forward from traditional Stanislavsky. Cohen points out that character do not think of themselves as characters any more than you do. Romeo is not thinking, “I wonder how Romeo would woo Juliet?” It is not he but Juliet that loves beautiful blank verse and, being pretty good at it, he uses it to get her to fall in love with him. Playing a character now becomes how the actors characterize the other characters and situations in the play which then draws out their behavior. The interaction is observed by the audience and it is ultimately the audience that determines character. This eliminates the distanced imitation of a fixed image no matter how nuanced and replaces it with a living perception to which the actor reacts. The actor takes all the objective information culled from his preparation and turns it into a subjective experience. So, in the coffee shop the actor says he is playing a paranoid; on the stage he says you are trying to kill me (Cohen 88-90). This is also a description of the isolated ego that justifies every action by claiming to react only to the situation presented. Moving through life judging situations as either “Good for me”—“bad for me” “good for me” –“bad for me” as Georg Kuhlewind has shown. * * * And that is pretty much where we are now. Thinking the character’s thoughts, feeling their translated emotions and allowing that inner life to emerge in expression and gesture is where we are now but it also forms our present border. This is a border not only in performance but also in consciousness. Using normal consciousness, we are only aware of thought after we have had it. As with the wind, we see the branches move, but we don’t see the wind blow. We are not conscious in the process of getting the thought (Steiner 34). Doesn’t it make sense that we would try in our consciousness to incorporate the process of thinking, and as actors include in our mimesis not just thinking the character’s thoughts but the actual getting of the thought? Doing that means moving beyond the word-bound thought to an awareness in and of the very process of thinking. When you become alive in the process of thinking, you approach the liminal threshold. Therefore, there is a shift from the ordinary cognitive or psychological paradigms to spiritual epistemological models. The best books on acting in the twentieth century were written by Jung and Freud. It could be that the books on acting we will look to in the new century will be supplemented by our traditional sacred texts and the accounts of spiritual researchers. * * * Probably the most important single activity for improving our Self- awareness and developing objective consciousness is meditation. In any of its myriad representations from mantra repetition to centering prayer to zazen, it forms the foundation to any artistic approach to the liminal. One way to build toward and prepare for this awareness is a concentration exercise, where you focus the mind for approximately five minutes on a simple everyday manmade object. The less intrinsically interesting the object is the better it is for the exercise. The sooner one comes to the end of everything you can think about the object, to the end of content, the sooner the real work can begin. This requires pure thinking because the idea, the function, is not the image or a word; and words and pictures should therefore not be present in consciousness during the exercise, yet consciousness must remain awake, only without pictorial or already thought content. For normal consciousness this object of meditation is nothingness, yet it is possible to succeed and to think that, without it becoming a “something,” a past thought. In fact, an idea, or a function can only exist in current thinking, never as a past thought. Thinking therefore must never fall out of its process, as it normally does every instant, even during intensive thinking (Kuhlewind 168). The practitioner gradually becomes aware of the forces and streams that go to making up his or her cognitive process. He or she also becomes aware of the distractions that keep them from fulfilling the chosen task. Eventually this practice points to and strengthens the connections to the Witness that can keep the mind focused on a pencil for example, or simply on awareness itself. The ability to move from self-consciousness to Self awareness, and to keep the mind on what you choose, is equally as important to performance as it is to meditation. In performance we find our fears and distractions objectified and magnified by the audience, the stage and the crews, blocking, lines and cues. To fulfill that simple sounding injunction to ‘keep the mind on what we choose’ there must be a place beyond the mind, a place of transcendence where we the actor can direct its actions. So, there will be a move toward transcendence in any case, either upward as we are suggesting or downward as Aldous Huxley identifies: Without an understanding of man’s deep-seated urge to self-transcendence, of his very natural reluctance to take the hard, ascending way, and his search for some bogus liberation either from below or to one side of is personality, we cannot hope to make sense of our own particular period of history or indeed of history in general, of life as it was lived in the past and as it is lived today (Huxley 23). Downward transcendence fits our typical picture of the self destructive artist, who attempts to break out of the strictures of the isolated self through drugs, drink and or dangerous sex. I wish I could bring comfort to the cozy moralist in all of us and say that of course downward transcendence doesn’t work but unfortunately I can’t as the biographies of some of the worst lives are of our greatest artists. We can also find downward transcendence in the “thrill” and attraction of much popular entertainment. It is our stated or unstated desire on going out Saturday nights. It ranges from “getting wasted” and “blowing your mind” to “losing yourself” and “forgetting your troubles.” But this bogus transcendence has provided much more destruction and rationalization than transformative art works. And in our educating the next generation in the arts surely we can ask if there is not another way. For the last thirty years in working with actors I have used the Dis-identification/ Identification exercise from Roberto Assagioli’s The Act of Will. Starting with the body you Dis-identify by stating that you have a body but you are not your body. You are aware of your body, so it is impossible for you to be that or who would be aware of it? (“Who doesn’t think you exist?”). This process continues with the rest of the categories of consciousness, the emotions, desires and thoughts. All these you can be aware of, so you cannot be any of them. You have emotions desires and thoughts but you are not them. The actor is asked, if you are not your body, feelings, desires or thoughts-- well, then, who are you? He then Identifies, that he is a pure center of consciousness, the Witness, capable of observing, directing and harmonizing all the psychological processes and the physical body (Assagioli 213-217). By practicing this exercise and other related ones the actor gradually starts to identify with the Witness rather than the ego and is able to observe the fears and distractions rather than identifying with the fears and distractions. As Krishnamurti tell us, there is a big difference between fear and the awareness of fear. This dis-identification with the content of consciousness also allows for a certain fluidity of personality so the actor can take on a different persona. Problems arise when the actor is overly identified with some aspect of his own personality (i.e., intellectual) if he has to change to play a character (e.g., the stereotypical professional athlete) he will view the change either consciously or unconsciously as a diminishment. Robert Cohen points out that this becomes more character assassination than character acting (Cohen 87). The first and last step is to move through the abstracted, dead word on the page to the wordless word behind it. Then move back again, to incarnate in the soul, the breath, the voice and body of the actor. One of the techniques I have developed for approaching the liminal in performance is called Big Book. This approach encompasses Stanislavsky’s psychological insights with the new dimension I am trying to outline here. Practically, what happens is the actor cuts out from the script all the character’s lines except her own and pastes them in a large sketch book. She then writes out her own lines, in her own hand. This process alone engenders a deeper relationship between the actor and the words. Now, instead of writing out the whole sentence, she divides the sentence into separate thoughts, and places those thoughts onto different lines. If there are five different thoughts, there will be five different lines. By dividing the line into separate thoughts the actor never memorizes sentences but a series of thoughts. During performance she is thinking thoughts and images in a sequence instead of saying lines in a right order. This example is from Samuel Beckett’s Footfalls: M: A little later, when as though she had never been, it never been, she began to walk. M: A little later, when as though she had never been, it never been, she began to walk. (Beckett 46) Then, because it really is a big book -- it has lots of space around each separate thought--the actors can record their impressions, memories, images and personal translations (e.g., Aunt Agnes for Aunt Hilde) for each thought line. These cognitive entities will then inhabit the imaginal locus the actors will speak from when we hear them saying their lines. But we are still on the psychological level. The next step, after the actor has done all the physical and psychological work is the Dissolving Exercise. This exercise provides a bridge from the psychological to the spiritual. It is based on a contemplative technique by Georg Kuhlewind (175-181). As he explains, when you began to learn to read you were very conscious of every letter. But to understand the word you have to get past the letters. To understand the sentence you need to transcend the single word. This technique then extends that process. Drop the words one by one, while maintaining the meaning of the sentence. Again, from Footfalls: M: What age am I now? What age I now? age I now? Dissolve all the words down to the last one. I now? I? The last word now contains all the other words in the sentence. Drop that word and what you have is the wordless word, the Logos, that from which the first speaker spoke, from which the author wrote, from which the actor must speak, from which everyone must speak to say something truly new. From that wordless word the actor then fills her soul, her breath, her voice, her body, and she speaks the line. In this way the actor creates the line as she speaks it. Another way to recognize and work with this Logos level is with an exercise I call Reverse Mirror. It starts with the basic exercise called Mirror in which two actors face each other in silence. As they move they reflect each other from head to toe. After a while, the kinds of movements, their shapes and rhythms, become a form of speaking between the two actors. With my exercise the process is reversed. Instead of the actors moving to communicate, they first become aware of the wordless Word between them, the Logos, and only move when they feel it attenuating. This is working with the idea that speaking happens when true communication breaks down. Thus the speaking (moving) signals both the falling out of communication, and the actors attempt to reestablish it. Does this work change how the audience will experience the play? Will the show look different? One of Stanislavsky’s actors asked him if, with all their work, the audience would see the difference. Stanislavsky’s reply was, probably not, but they will remember it a lot longer. I am convinced that Stanislavski was right. The actor’s intense inner work does affect the way the audience experiences the piece, though possibly in an indirect way. Every time I do the traditional Emotional Scale exercise with my actors and students, I become persuaded again. In this exercise, the actor sits quietly with eyes closed. He or she then construct images from their own emotional past or personal mythology that elicit a corresponding emotion and is referenced by a number on a scale from 1 to 10. The actor starts at 5 which is ‘neutral’ and proceeds downward, 4 ‘a little bit off,’ 3 ‘bad’, 2 ‘very bad’, to 1 ‘the worst’. The actor then makes her way back up to 5 and then proceeds to go through the high end of the scale up to 10 ‘ the best’. Once they have their images and their numbers, the actors practice going up and down the Emotional Scale. It was in my directing them down to the lower numbers -- though the actors were sitting quietly in the chairs, most not showing any emotion – I could feel the temperature in the room change. It was palpable. We are united in many unseen and unspoken ways. It was the actors’ honest engagement with an image alone, not their words or gestures, which transformed the atmosphere in the room. This points the theatre beyond the word, the gesture, the thought, the image, to the Unseen, the Unspoken-- the theatre can then become a place to heal us in our thinking and speaking. It may not look different from the outside, but it will stay with you a lot longer. Works Cited Assagioli, M.D., Roberto. 1973. The Act of Will. New York: Viking Press. Beckett, Samuel. 1976. Ends and Odds: Eight New Dramatic Pieces. New York:Grove Press. Cohen, Robert. 1978. Acting Power. Palo Alto, California: Mayfield Publishing Company. Huxley, Aldous. 1980. Moksha, Writings on Psychedelics and the Visionary Experience 1931-1963. Editors Michael Horowitz and Cynthia Palmer London:Chatto %26amp; Windus. Kuhlewind, Georg. 1988. From Normal to Healthy. Trans. Michael Lipson. Great Barrington, Massachusetts: Lindisfarne Press. Raine, Kathleen. 1990. Yeats the Initiate: Essays on Certain Themes in the Work of W.B. Yeats. Maryland: Barnes and Noble. Spolin, Viola. 1963. Improvisation for the Theater. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press. Steiner, Rudolf. 1995. Intuitive Thinking as a Spiritual Path: A Philosophy of Freedom. Trans. Michael Lipson. Hudson, New York: Anthroposophic Press.
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