At the beginning of his book, Stephen Callow writes a letter to himself upon entrance into drama school. “My main purpose in pursuing this course is therapeutic. Perhaps that’s what all acting is to all actors; and perhaps all acting is almost accidental, a sort of symptom, or cure, of an illness produced, like the pearl, by grit. This could be the beginning – not of a new life – but of life itself.”
At this point Callow has basically summarized the entire experience of getting into drama school complete with a perfect description of his body seizing up and his leg shaking uncontrollably during his audition. This passage seems a little psychic to me. At least I probably would have kept the insight that I was attending drama school was for primarily therapeutic reasons to myself. It seems embarrassingly self-centered and egomaniacal. But now we know it is not. We don’t work to service the ego, we work to transcend it. We don’t work to understand ourselves better for purely selfish reasons, we work to understand ourselves better so that we may understand and instruct humanity better. We center in on ourselves to experience others from this core which we all share, and hopefully to guide others to it as well.
We all bear within us the potentiality for every kind of passion, every fate, every way of life. Nothing human is alien to us. But inheritance and upbringing foster individual experiences and develop only a few of our thousands of possibilities. The others gradually sicken and die. Life today is narrowly circumscribed, and poor in feeling. The normal man generally feels once in his life the whole blessedness of love, and once the joy of freedom. Once in his life he hates bitterly. Once with deep grief he buries a loved one, and once, finally he himself dies. That gives all too little scope for our innate capacity to love, hate, enjoy, and suffer. We exercise daily to strengthen our muscles and sinews that they may not grow feeble. But our spiritual organs, which were made to act for an entire lifetime, remain unused, underdeveloped, and so, with the passing years, they lose their vitality. – Max Reinhardt
I’ve found to that when we can do the work for ourselves improves it enormously. Besides being more satisfying, the results are better when I can weld my own ideas, feelings, experiences, and fancies to the technique that is being given or the method being taught. It’s a constant battle - hard to fight, but necessary – to bring as much of yourself into the work as you can, to make it your own, and to own it.
Callow describes our scholastic experience even more when he talks about the students’ sense of being involved in a uniquely important and secretly special work. He compares it to working in intelligence during the war. He describes the insecurity of being surrounded by a group he sees as superior at everything dramatic. He describes how easy it is to work tremendously hard, but not be doing well due to a miscomprehension of the work. He stayed up late to “think of droller and droller quips to use in improvisation.” It was like losing my virginity, he says. Only it wasn’t Simon Callow (his ego) who had to lose his virginity, it was something deeper. “My devotion of Outer Man – putting him through his paces, making him do this funny voice or that, or indicate this emotion or that – was total”
What his school was first asking for was simplicity based on action because everything in a play is done in order to achieve a want of some kind. This resolves to the formula of objective, action, obstacle, activity, and super objective that we are dealing with now. They had the same problems in his class that we are having in ours: confusion, lack of specificity, absence of meaning. I though this was profound: “For me, the biggest problem was to show myself wanting something. To want something is to put oneself into a position of frightening vulnerability and then to pursue a course of action to achieve that want is to show oneself at one’s most naked. It can be very ugly.”
“Follow your impulse,” his teacher would say, “as if you may never have another.” The teacher was Doreen Cannon, a student of Uta Hagen. “Emotional truth, she demanded. Oh, did she ever.” Later on I love when he explains how, “suddenly, for the first time, I was acting. Not performing, or posturing, or puppeteering. I was being in another way.” Giving in was the essential experience for him, and I agree. “Leave yourself alone” they’d been telling him since he got there. “It was here, if anywhere, that any talent for acting that I might possess had resided: the knack of throwing off self-consciousness and finding, however briefly, a pool of liberated energy which was nothing to do with how I presented myself in life.”
He talks about his movement work, with the purpose of exploring sensations, as the heart of acting. The sensory work we do with Nate never ceases to amaze me. I never would have imagined such depth was available, and now that I know I want it all the time. The beautiful work that we’re doing now as we move into the DRUNK project is so exciting. To explore the basis, the foundation of our humanity, to think that everything else about us was built on top of this, and how unexplored it is. How unfamiliar to be sensual, to crave touch so desperately, to be overwhelmed by the simplest of sounds, movements, or sights. How utterly everything can affect us when we drop the guards we didn’t even realize inscrutably surround us for lengths a universe could fit into. That’s what it often feels like when I’ve dropped those defenses. It feels like there is a universe between my mind and anywhere else on my body. I love that feeling.
A genius quote from Ruth Gordon, “it’s not enough to have talent – one has to have a talent for having a talent.”
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