Photo: Henri Marzano

Advanced Class 23/24

“‘Surely there must be laws at the roots of the art of the theatre, just as there are laws at the roots of all true arts, which if found and mastered, would bring you all you desire?’
-‘Yes, the search would bring the actors to a wall.’
-‘Leap it, then!’
-‘Too high!’
-‘Scale it, then!’
-‘How do we know where it would lead?’
-‘Why, up and over.’
-‘Yes, but that’s talking wildly, talking in the air.’
-‘Well, that’s the direction you fellows have to go; ….fly in the air, live in the air. Something will follow when some of you begin to.'”

— Edvard Gordon Craig, The Actor and the Über-Marionette

The class time of the course was 100 hours, we met once a week. The participants were obliged to work on scenes on their own, do some readings and come prepared. There were also small video tasks the students had to solve on their own with a minimum of feedback. The additional working time for these out of class works was at minimum another 100 hours.

“General
Body: feel, stay loose in stance and movement, also take the body with you when speaking while standing.
Giving and receiving impulses, types of impulses.
Work on concrete things that can be measured or seen.
Analysing the text/play/scene: what is it all about, what are the roles about, what is their goal, what are the relationships, what is the past…
Improv: less ‘no’ and more ‘yes with additions’; going into the foreground and then back again, making offers, accepting offers.”
“Craftsmanship
There is a toolbox, with tools such as voice, body, spatial relationship, rhythm; each with options and rules that you can set up yourself.
Voice: soft-hard, pay attention to consonants, clarity, volume.
Rhythm = speaking, acting + pause and accents.
Tempo in speech, movement and volume.
Extremes in pauses, volume, movement, rhythm, outbursts, comedy.
Partner contact = lead and be led by partner, fight, chorus.
Use props to emphasise and portray action, speech, emotion etc.
Overall, the tools and rules should be used to bring variance into play, build tension and interest.”

Core topic of the course was the actor’s sculpturality, the higher degree of conciseness on the level of the audiovisual moving human image that is necessary to act with impact on the minds of our audience. We worked on developing the personal skillsets to build it and make use of it in artistic team work. A poetic image for this idea of a mature, self-responsible, strong-impact and beyond-ego actor was formulated in the image of the “Über-Marionette” by the actor, director and stage designer Edvard Gordon Craig in the year 1905.

“Meta, Overarching
Trying things out and messing them up and then drawing something workable from them.
It’s better to be too intense and then turn it down.
Test out tools, options and rules, even if it doesn’t make sense at first.
Try out very different variants, especially at the beginning.
‘Not being able to’ is funnier than ‘not wanting to’.
By trying out different variants, you have several options available in the back of your mind while playing.”

I restricted myself from making “arty” gradings, in my opinion this must be left to an audience. I only made an estimation of underlying skill by a heuristic evaluation of task completion. The grading was “pass ”/ “fail” plus “pass with excellence”, which we all agreed in advance should be super difficult to get. No participant failed. 8 participants passed. With 5 participants I agreed on a certificate of attendance because it was clear that they could not be full time attendants but wanted to take part.

“I also like her phrase “then we have a story”. I think I still have a lot to learn myself, but I’m slowly getting a feeling for understanding what makes a scene interesting and what you want to tease out of it. Above all, I think the idea of always trying to have both characters equally strong in a dialogue is always a good place to start.”

First Steps Towards a Competency Profile

My teaching does not derive from abstract educational goals, I work from the practical problems that we encounter in the very concrete process of creating theatrical scenes. All higher educational achievements are actually only the side effects of the building process that is in the core of our doing and they don’t happen in some moment, but in a slow development over time. This makes the delivery of a serious competency profile quite a far stretch. For the moment I can only offer first steps. I made a list, this represents the level of resolution I am currently able to look at it. I expect that the described skills could be clustered into groups or that some model could emerge. This is work to be done without loosing the context with the practice.

The participants have acquired

  • a basic theoretical and practical understanding of acting as the building of human images in the minds of the audience, the need for conciseness and an applicable understanding of the means to achieve it
  • an understanding of the distinction between the impression the image makes to the minds of the audience and the processes necessary to build that image
  • a sufficient overlap of self-image and behavioural image to create intentful human images “from within the image”
  • a practical and a basic theoretical understanding of hierarchical levels of control concerning human behaviour and the ability to shape behaviour conducted by lower levels of behavioural control by the conscious and formulated application of skill on higher levels of behavioural control
  • a self-understanding of owning an individualized toolkit that allows for proactive and mature craftsmanship (including the ability to create new tools, workarounds etc)
  • a personal library of structural, procedural, functional and teleological acting rules, tools and behavioural sets that allows for the building of behavioural units, larger sequences and team-built multi-agent scenes
  • heuristic observational skills and a basic understanding of how to go slow with conclusions
  • the ability to formulate own interests as well as problems, the ability to ask questions
  • the development of a basic toolkit for deep reading, including epistemic openness, practices of inquiry and the active search for contradictions and other patterns
  • the habit to talk about humans in a way that would allow to shape artistically what was talked about
  • the ability to develop a model of a scene and the ability to build that scene including all the negotiations with reality the model will be confronted with
  • the ability to state working hypotheses, go trial and error and continue with proper evaluation by oneself or by others
  • artistic decision-making under uncertainty, artistic risk taking
  • the ability to peel out an interesting story
  • the ability to develop characters from scratch and to unfold them in negotiation with others along the time of an improvisation
  • tools for the actor’s organization of space and interpersonal space in time, including proactive working with rhythms
  • interactionability utilizing transfer of forces, feedback loops and the behaviour of oneself and of the partner in gravity
  • a practical understanding of liberty-oriented principles underlying sexual and violent scenes including the means to develop such scenes in an exploratory, playful, creative and collaborative way with whatever (also less skilled) partner
  • a basic practical understanding of the specific requirements of acting in a chorus
  • the ability to collect images of the human including the ability to use an art museum as an “across the millenia” data pool for images of the human
  • a basic ability to recognize different images of the human in the work of playwrights and to shape them, following the emphasis of the playwright
  • the ability to choose props that act on the actor
  • the development of the personal means to remain a steerable and functional instrument also in not optimal rehearsal or performance situations
  • the practical ability to recognize feedforward problems in self-steering and to deal with them
  • the ability to cooperate with an acting partner and the ability to induce better quality on a weaker acting partner in practical doing
  • the ability to quickly react to ideas of the director and the ability to offer and defend own ideas as well as the ability to exploit the objections of the director to improve one’s own work
  • the ability to rehearse in front of an audience
  • the ability of responsible execution of tasks necessary in an ensemble structure
  • the ability to team-organize a public theatre performance
  • a basic understanding of personal responsibility towards formation, maintenance and improvement of a constructive artistic culture

The following scene from Anton Chekhov’s play “Platonov or The Fatherless”, that he wrote at the age of sixteen, was built by Pia Lettner and Stefan Fleischmann. The degree of artistic interactionability they show is remarkable.

Camera: Michael Heislbetz
“Can use the whole stage in a scene.
Can build images in the scenes / get sculpturality out of the scenes.
Use body weight to move partners/objects.
Deep reading skills – reading and coming to an interpretation based on the facts.
Can choose props so that they are animating.
Can consciously use eye contact and/or body positions.
Provoke contact with partner, recognise potential for conflict.
Can think musically about a scene.
Perceive moments.
Remains flexible and open in performance despite repetition.
Variety in the voice is audible.
Basic hum of the voice also carries quietly.
Something else that will not be included in the profile, but which I think is important to have said at this point: faithfulness to the text.”

At this place I think I should clealy recommend caution towards all too quick assumptions that people would learn these things “for life” in such a course. This must remain a topic of observation. For several reasons:

  1. Transfer and maintenance of knowledge remain big and open questions for education in general.
  2. We talk about a course of 200 hours, that is 8 ECTS points.
  3. The students have learned these skills in a cultural environment that incentivizes these behaviours (incentive by appreciation from the teacher, by consensus with the peers and by better outcome). An environment that does not incentivize the application of these skillsets is a fundamentally different environment and will probably require additional skillsets.

Both me and the students were aware of the problem that it might be more difficult to do certain things in a group that doesn’t share these cultural habits. We have therefore worked on skills to be able to bring these behavioural sets into a non-optimal rehearsal situation and to improve the problematic situation itself “by doing”. But everybody who has ever experienced really suboptimal teamwork situations will know that this is is a challenge. Further observation and evaluation is necessary here and I hope to get reports from the students after a year or two.

Readings

  • Edvard Gordon Craig: The Actor and the Über-Marionette
  • Sam Kogan: The Science of Acting, Actions
  • Jurij Vasiljev: Imagination-Movement-Voice, Textures of Voice
  • Jacques Lecoq: The Poetic Body, Bouffons
  • Bertolt Brecht
    • The Art of Acting
    • Study of the Role
    • Selection of Traits
    • Diversity for the Sake of Diversity
    • Singularity of Figure
    • About Historicizing
    • Relationship of the Actor to the Audience
    • About Gesture
    • Advice for the Actors

The course also contained small portions of theoretical material from other fields, as on embodied cognition (Vittorio Gallese) , on emotions (Lisa Feldman-Barrett) or on personality traits (Jordan Peterson).

Scenes

  • Bertolt Brecht: The Caucasian Chalk Circle
  • Anton Chekhov: Platonov
  • Anton Chekhov: The Cherry Orchard
  • Robert Harling: First Wives Club
  • Friedrich Hebbel: The Nibelungs
  • Adolf Hitler: Speech on Heldenplatz
  • Ödön von Horvath: Tales from the Vienna Woods
  • Ödön von Horvath: Kasimir and Karoline
  • Henrik Ibsen: Hedda Gabler
  • Anton Kuh: Zarathustra’s Monkey
  • Sam Levinson: Malcolm and Marie
  • Alexander Ostrovskij: The Forest
  • William Shakespeare: Macbeth
  • George Bernard Shaw: Pygmalion
  • Phoebe Waller-Bridge: Fleabag
  • Tennessee Williams: Baby Doll

Students

Jenny Blochberger, Georg Duffek, Stefan Fleischmann, Bernd Gordon, Valerie Heinrich, Pia Lettner, Mariya Olshanska, Aeria Rainer, Heide Rossak, Rica Salchinger, Joshua Schleinzer, Oliver Schluschanek, Katharina Tupy

“What I have learnt: Working independently. The biggest challenge was to stage Hedda Gabler in a short space of time in such a way that the scene was worth seeing. It’s good to know that it was possible and of good quality.”

The following scene From Henrik Ibsen’s play “Hedda Gabler” was built by the two actresses Mariya Olshanska and Valerie Heinrich for the final performance of the class. They worked completely on their own.

Camera: Michael Heislbetz

Further Material

Graduation Speech
Video: Wallpaper Company Christmas Party Improvisation