Animal exercises in acting
June 20th 2007 01:38
So the guy who originated the lead for "Death of a Salesman" channelled a bear. And if you've been studying acting for a while, it's very possible -- it's not an urban myth -- that you'll be asked to tap into one or another form of animal imagery. Such exercises go back to Stanislavsky.
It's like this: -- When you're stepping into another character, how do you transform yourself?
Well, you can go from psychology to behaviour or behaviour to psychology -- inside out or outside in; -- or, more probably, you'll end up working both directions at once and hope that they meet somewhere between. -- But eventually everything has to be observable. And there's no guarantee that you'll be able to get the behaviour from the psychology alone; -- in fact, being cerebral might make you self-focussed, and unreactive on stage.
But if you're building from the ground up -- if you don't have a model? Where do you get this complete understanding of how another person behaves?
Well, it's a lot trickier. You can study profession (doctor, lawyer, cop, mechanic, prostitute), or a "subculture" (pregnant woman, gay male, cancer patient, clown, criminal, rockstar, card player, punk), or a race, gender, age-group, historical period, whatever -- and each of these things will have specific behaviours. -- Or, sometimes, when you're reading a script something particular will come to you -- a particular way of talking, a limp or a springy step, a particular gesture -- something that stands out -- and you can build a character using that as a starting point. Lawrence Olivier apparently had hundreds of individual pieces of behaviour memorized that he could call on.
But each of these things (doctor, clown, gesture...) is by itself generic and piecemeal. You don't have a complete way of life. You don't have specificity.
The point is that via the animal route you're spared a lot of work, and you get access to behaviours that you wouldn't have dreamt of from the armchair. And you can also get a psychology for free -- you can process information, see the world, through the animal. And that's very useful. After all, the end result, on stage, as in all art, should go beyond planning -- should be unconsciousness-driven creativity, should tap into autopilot, should surprise you as much as anyone else.
Two final thoughts.
-- Animal behaviour pushes buttons in us. Anyone who's been absorbed, staring at an animal move, will know what I'm talking about. Or anyone who's spent time staring at deep sea creatures, thinking about how they'd operate in the wild.
There's probably all sorts of reasons behind the fascination. We've been exposed to animals enough to know what their movements mean or threaten -- and we're cautious. Animals are loaded with cultural, symbolic associations -- noble stallions, cunning foxes, lowly dogs. And there's probably something hard-wired, instinctive -- the fear of hissing snakes.
So, ideally, from the perspective of an audience watching the end result, they'll feel it on a gut level. They're going to know something is up, but without consciously apprehending what. They're going to sense the presence of the non-human. Each detail will stand out. And each detail will mean something.
| 93 |
| Vote |
Add To: 
subscribe to this blog
Comment by Damo
GRRRRRR.
That's me being a bear.
It brings up memories of The Island of Dr Moreau by H G Wells.
Comment by Lacey
(I'm also commenting to link you to my blog over at Word Press: Editorializing the Editors. Hope you visit! And I hope everything is going well for you. Catch me online sometime if you have a chance, because I'm unemployed and not very busy.)
Lacey
Comment by Georgina Calvi
All Things Sustainable
Nice comments.
Comment by D. Armenta
The Florida Keys and Everglades
The Black Sheep Chronicles
What constitutes bad manners?
The male mystique
Debate Fan
L.A.M.P.
I disagree with the hard-wired fear instinct, though..I believe that it is learned. I addressed this with insects in this article-it's short, but I'd be honored if you'd comment.
House Centipedes
I haven't acted since grade 12, but I've learned a *lot* from watching animals, and have tried to integrate my observations into my teaching, especially scuba diving.
Thanks for another interesting post!
Comment by Adrian
Philosophy Blog
Dear Lacey -- always an honour. Haven't seen Mr Brooks yet (hasn't reached Australia yet).
Dear Georgina, well I think actors are overrated as well. I'm particularly surprised that people think that the opinions of actors (for instance, about politics) are worth anything much.
Mind you, as a craft, as an artform, I think acting is demanding. But the fact is, for most of the roles out there, it's quite an easy job...
Dear DA, was trying to think of Lee Cobb's name. How on earth did you access it so readily?
Thanks for the article link! It was very well-written, and I don't really have any comments on it.
In support of your position that fear is not hard-wired, you could cite such things as the apparent cultural relativity of disgust -- for instance, people in Italy eat cheeses full of maggots; and the best coffee on earth allegedly comes from dung. And, moreover, consider this video (defanged cobra becomes plaything for baby):
But the reason why I'm not convinced goes like this...
Firstly, it seems to me (I might be misinterpreting) that other creatures do flee from their natural predators. Fear can be a reproductory advantage. So I don't want to rule out altogether that evolution has favoured a human aversion to things that hurt or eat us...
Secondly, there might be genetic variation across humanity. So even if it could be demonstrated that some people are unafraid from birth, it's a leap to conclude that all people are.
Thirdly, it's hard to say what's innate and what's conditioned. If a particular culture is friendly with x, does that mean that there's no genetic fear of x, or could it be the case that a genetic tendency has been overpowered by social effects?
Fourthly, it's not straightforward to go from "people aren't instinctively afraid of centipedes" to "people aren't instinctively afraid of anything" -- lions, loud noises, heights...
But I suppose my main response is that my suggestion was supposed to be very tentative, merely a possible factor in our experience of animal imagery, and the tendency could be very slight...
There are hard questions here about what it would take to confirm or falsify a hypotheses of innateness. I'm going to write up a lecture description where someone considers this question in the context of the innateness of logical axioms.
From an interview with Piaf, I think by "Tom Ryan". Now, the text of it is a little scrambled, but from what I can make out, Cotillard didn't actually go through the process of imitating Piaf. I'm curious what she did work on then, with her acting coach. And I wonder if her process can be used by other people.
All the time she was shooting La Vie en Rose, says Marion Cotillard, she barely slept at night. Edith Piaf, the peerless French chanteuse whose life was being brought to the screen, had always slept badly. Now she did the same. "One hour, two, three was huge," she recalls in her careful, glamorously accented English. And, after two weeks, I started to be afraid because that never happens to me before. I can sleep 10 hours without waking up. Really!" So: no sleep. That was the deal.
Cotillard, at 31 one of life’s instinctual hard workers, was not about to betray the role by succumbing to the lure of sleeping pills.
"So I just decided to be focused on everything I was doing, especially when I was cutting things to prepare the dinner or climbing the stairs. My nerves were telling me I was not tired, but you have to be tired when you don’t sleep. So all I could do was be careful. It was my reality." It continued to be her reality, she says, for four and a half months.
[...]
Cotillard, however, manages to give even the tiniest moment in La Vie en Rose a sense of depth. Piaf was, she says, a very powerful personality; she, in turn, is such a powerful presence on screen that she temporarily eclipses the original.
"The first and only thing Olivier told me," she says, "was that he wanted to see me in there. Because we all knew I couldn’t disappear."
[...]
Cotillard is beautiful, fresh, radiant: in short, nothing like Piaf. They shaved her hair back to create Piaf’s high forehead.
Her eyebrows also were shaved off and redrawn as fake lines, a la Piaf. Make-up for the older Piaf -- she died at 47, but was so ravaged by successive addictions that she looked at least 30 years older -- took between three and six hours.
Cotillard actually enjoyed those sessions, she says, because her perpetual exhaustion meant she always slept while the make-up artists pleated in the wrinkles. Although, she adds, the fumes from the latex and glue on her face did give her some extraordinary nightmares.
The film’s great trick, however, was to make Cotillard look about a foot shorter. Piaf was tiny -- only four foot eight -- while Cotillard is tall and gangling; as we talk, she periodically rearranges her long limbs along the couch. So she worked in bare feet while everyone else wore stacked shoes; and they built oversized tables and chairs designed to dwarf her. Her short-waisted dresses gave her the proportions of a much smaller woman.
"And I contracted my body somehow," she shrugs, "to make small." When it came to evoking Piaf as a person, however, she didn’t want to use any tricks at all. When Dahan approached her, all Cotillard knew about the life and times of Piaf were a couple of signature tunes, the fact that she wore black on stage "and had a body language very specific". She proceeded to watch all the available footage, both of performances and interviews, and to read biographies. But she didn’t do anything towards mastering that specific body language. She didn’t practise Piaf’s speaking voice. As for the songs, she didn’t even consider singing them. The last thing she wanted to do, she says, was try to imitate the real Piaf.
"Because there is no life in imitation," she says. "You become a mimic and the emotions are gone; to imitate someone, I don’t think you have to understand the inside of the person and I really wanted to do that. Because it is a role also. You have to consider it as a role becanse it is..." So she just read, watched, absorbed and had faith that when she started filming -- Dahan did not want even to rehearse -- a character called Edith Piaf would emerge from within.
"I felt that the combination of all the images in the footage I watched for three months and my journey inside, I would say, would create something on the set. And some really little things during my preparation revealed to me that this was possible." One day, for example, a friend came to have lunch with her while she was working with her acting coach. "I was eating and he said, Do you see how you behave? And I realised this was not my behaviour. I was not eating my way." Later on, momentarily afraid that her approach would not work, she simply read one of Piaf’s songs to herself. "Just to hear if something was happening. And it was." What was? "I didn’t hear my voice in my head; I started hearing something that was close to what I wanted to do. Anyway, she laughs, if you did try to imitate Piaf, she would surely come after you. She would say, 'What are you doing?'."
[...]
"During the shooting I was never alone. Really I... But you just have to be aware that someone is with you. I knew that when I was home, I was not totally me. I knew my humour was not mine. I knew the way I was walking was not mine. But because I knew it, it was not dangerous."
[...]
"I discovered many things about my capacities by doing this role," she says. "When I started work on the project, I thought no one person could do all this. But I knew one thing about myself: that I can work hard. I was afraid but I knew that, with work, I could do something. And I discovered a way to abandon myself that I didn’t know. I discovered that work is not enough. You have to find the place where you abandon everything of yourself. Then you can let something else happen."
Comment by Anonymous