YOGA for ACTORS parte 1

Introduction

This article explores how yoga might be adapted or re-imagined to directly help performers
deepen their performance technique. By performers I mean anyone who performs physically in
front of a live audience, though I will be speaking mostly about actors since I direct plays and also
teach acting and movement for acting.

I have been taking yoga classes for more than twenty years, recently completing the 200 and 300
hour teacher training courses through Yoga Works. My decision to pursue this training was
motivated by a desire to develop my ideas about how yoga can help the actorideas that spring
directly from my careers as a performer, a director, and a teacher of theater. Since I am writing for
a yoga-knowledgeable audience, this installment of the article will initially focus on discussing
those aspects of performance that I see as closely linked to yoga practice, as a way to get at what I
think yoga can do for actors. Unless yoga teachers understand the specific professional problems
of the actor, I believe they cannot offer the most effective trainingthat is, the training that will
help these students become, not just better at yoga, but also better at acting. In Part II, I will
address specific strategies by which yoga practice might better serve actors.

In the most general terms, acting teachers are usually recruited from two distinct groupsactors
and directors. Although I am a director, I am also an ex-performer: my experiences include 10
years as a dancer and physical theatre artist in Europe and the U.S. However, I do not bring an
actors sensibility to my teaching; my perspective is first and foremost that of a director. Like many
directors, I am looking to extend what is possible for the actor and, by extension, theater itself.
Moreover, I seek to remedy what I feel is lacking in the general abilities and performance culture
of the typical American actor. Contemporary American acting is largely circumscribed by ideas
having to do with the aesthetic philosophy of realism. The quality of this work can be very high,
but it tends to lack vision, being mostly a conservative response to the possibilities of the stage. As
such, it is incapable of ushering in the theatre of the futurea necessary effort required from each
generation of theatre makers. I feel that todays theatre needs to be animated by approaches that
are more theatrical, athletic, and experimental. In my own work, I am inspired by the pioneering
efforts in this direction of such figures as the choreographers Martha Graham and Jose Limon, as
well as the director Tadashi Suzuki and the theorist and teacher Michael Chekhov. These very
different individuals have each created visionary yet practical strategies for performers, and I
believe that yoga, properly understood, can be a similarly powerful tool to help theatre move
forward.

The Faces of Energy

There are four virtues that make the technical achievements of the performer possible. Profound
in how they develop over time, they are also the subject matter of the very first day of training.
Without them no real work is possible, no breakthroughs can happen, and nothing of any
excellence will ever develop. As such, they can never be transcended or put aside. Simply stated,
the actor is admonished to work with energy, commitment, awareness, and something
called sats. Sats is a Norwegian word that I first came across in the works of the theorist Eugenio
Barba which expresses the attitude of being primed to actthink of the inner preparation
required by an actor standing in the wings moments before stepping onto the stage, and you get a
fair sense of what sats is. Yet all these virtues are in reality only modifications of the first, of
energy in the broadest sense of the term. They underpin a special kind of energy management
that is the essence of all technique. It is even possible to characterize all the different systems of
actor training as doing, more or less, the same thingexpanding and developing the energy body
of the performer. This work is properly described as psychophysicalphysical effort infused with
psychological significance, energy in two forms.

Unfortunately, the word energy is hugely problematic because it is used to refer to so many
different things. Think about all the different kinds of energy described in the related systems of
yogathe five pranas of Ayurveda, or the subtle system of chakras and nadis of Kundalini yoga,
for exampleand you get a better idea of how grossly inadequate the unmodified word energy
can be. And yet it is pretty much the default term used to indicate any number of energy-related
concepts central to the performers craft. Unlike yoga, most theatre practice lacks a precise
terminology capable of describing the psychophysical reality of the performer in all of its faceted
glory. Still, it is common for anyone who has even a passing familiarity with theatre to observe that
some actors are exceptional, and others are not. In short, the quality and power of one actors
energy can be compelling, articulate, and moving. At the same time the expression of another
actor, of more or less equal intelligence and training, rarely rises above mediocrity. Throughout my
entire career in the performing arts I have heard professionals refer to the energy that some
people possess, and others do not, by such terms as presence, strength, and even gods gift. All
were intended to identify it when it was there while at the same time suggesting that there was
something perplexing about how to get it if you didnt have it to begin with.

Now here is a curious fact: most actor training programs or approaches to acting technique claim
to be able to produce this type of genius. How reliable they are in achieving this goal in practice is
debatable, although some do seem to be better than others. Regardless, when it is clear the
desired transformation did not happen, the teachers all say the same thing: the actor is
untalented. Its easy to see why many feel that this aspect of a performers technique is a product
of grace, a genetic accident perhaps, or some conflation of forces, hopelessly complicated and
beyond our control all sentiments I passionately disagree with. In point of fact, there does exist
genuine understanding about what this special energy is, and about how to achieve it.
Unfortunately, these ideas are not common or are misunderstood in the standard training
regimens followed by most aspiring actors in the United States. It was because of this deficit that I
began incorporating the four concepts mentioned above in my teaching especially satsas a
way of working with energy and its vital connection to presence.

In his book The Paper Canoe, Barba develops a very sophisticated analysis of the problem of
presence and the nature of performance energy. Writing about energy, the basis of expressive
power as well as classic stage presence, he has this to say: For the performer, energy is a how.
Not a what. And yet it is very useful for the performer to think of this how in the same way as
s/he would think of a what, of an impalpable substance which can be manoeuvred, modelled,
facetted, projected into space, absorbed and made to dance inside the body. For the performer,
to have energy means knowing how to model it. To be able to conceive of it and live it as
experience, s/he must artificially modify its routes, inventing dams, dikes, canals. These are the
resistances against which s/he presses her/his intentionconscious or intuitiveand which make
her/his expression possible.

Energy As a How

Although Barba calls energy an impalpable substance, it is, nevertheless, imagined livedas a
hard physical reality that can be pushed against; as a visceral, flowing life force that can be felt
moving inside the body; and even as an energy projecting beyond the physical limits of the
performer into the surrounding space. At the same time, this imaginary construct or fantasy is
grounded in real experience. After all, it is not the mind alone that shapes itself to the fantasy, but
the body that contorts and dilates itself as the actual organ of the imagination. The micro-
movements of joints, the stresses experienced by the skeletal structure, the subtle sensations
created by the movement of muscle and fasciain short, the entire physicality is capable of
shaping itself to the parameters of an otherwise invisible, mental construct.

Take the image of a rose, its petals opening in the first, fiery, golden shafts of sunrise as the
inspiration for an actress speaking Portias monologue from the Merchant of Venice that begins
the quality of mercy is not strained. Fully realized by the actress, this image should affect
everything in, on, and around her body. As a result, the audience will not necessarily see a rose in
their own imaginations, but they will feel the unhurried, unfolding of rich, velvety, gloriously
illuminated intention because the actress is experiencing these same inexorable sensations in
every cell of her body.

A more practical example can be seen in auditions where actors compete for roles in theatre
productions. A common formula is to ask the actor to perform two contrasting monologues
usually one dramatic and one comedic. The dramatic monologues are quite revealing. Actors
generally choose something extremely tragic to showcase their range, but 90% of the time the
delivery is totally unconvincing. Of the various reasons why these monologues fail, two are worth
looking at more closely. Actors either fail to achieve the necessary intensity, or they overact. What
is generally not understood is that both are symptomatic of the same problem. Actors are told
and most believethat they must always be relaxed onstage. As a result, tepid actors never enlist
the musculature of their bodies to support their expression, which leaves us with the sense that
nothing is really happening. Similarly, those who overact are paradoxically doing the same thing as
the actors who underact, except that these actors understand that their presentation must
indicate some kind of extreme emotional state. So we get yelling, gnashing of teeth, tears,
clenched fists, and a contorted face while the lower and deeper layers of the body remain wholly
unengaged. Its only the surface, peripheral, and generally higher parts of the body that are used
to indicate feeling, and this results in an impression that, for all the histrionics, the emotion is
without depth. On top of this is the mistaken assumptiona kind of Goldilocks fallacythat it all
has to do with finding the proper degree of expression, so that there is not too much, or too little,
but just enough.

In fact, what both actors lack is a productive relationship with their physicality. In the Michael
Chekhov method of actor trainingone of the best, in my opinionthere is no such thing as
anything less than 100% acting effort. To do less because you are afraid it might be too much is
always bad acting because it lacks commitment. Chekhovwho was also considered the most
talented actor to come out of the Moscow Art Theatre by none other than Konstantin
Stanislavski is the author of a number of strategies designed to help actors realize their full
potential. According to Chekhov, the will of the body is in the hips, legs, and feet. This means that
the commitment of the actor, the power of their acting, is not just a psychological stance. It is also
a physicalattitude. It is this power that is alive in the actor, and that is not afraid to act. It is also
what we mean when we say an actor has presence, is strong on stage, or possesses gods gift.

Energy As a What

As a director I look for and cultivate actors that seem to posses a tightly knit ball of chaotic energy
buried somewhere deep in the belly or lower abdomen. These actors give the impression that
anything is always possible. No matter how tightly choreographed a scene might become in
rehearsal, the audience should nevertheless feel that they dont know what will happen next
conceivably anything. It is impossible to take your eyes off of this type of actor. As a training
exercise, I will often set my students the following problem: The curtain rises. You are on stage.
The blocking we have agreed on is that you stand in one place, motionless, apparently doing
nothing. Twenty minutes later the curtain drops. Can you keep the audience in a state of
expectation for the entire twenty minutes?

I dont dance anymore, but when I did, my training was mostly in ballet. Early on, I was lucky
enough to fall in with a studio that followed a modified approach to ballet training pioneered by a
New York teacher named Maggie Black. She developed her approach in the 1970s as a response to
the problems encountered by older dancers, dancers who were injured by reprehensible training
methods, and the special needs of tall, long-limbed dancers, who were much in vogue at the time.
Blacks approach deemphasized the need to slavishly simulate the traditional ballet form in favor
of strengthening a key part of the body that could serve as the foundation for all ballet-related
actions. For the purposes of ballet this area encompassed the abdominal floor and the very tops of
the inner thighs; all movement was supposed to radiate from this tightly knit, highly articulated
nexus of muscle, ligament, and joint. In effect, the entire physicality of the ballet dancer was
conceived as centered in a part of the body roughly corresponding with the crotch. This had the
effect of informing the movement with a sexually charged athleticism. Though not blatantly erotic,
the simple fact that the entire life of the dancer emanated from this center created a form of
ballet that audiences, choreographers, and dancers alike understood as a celebration of youthful,
barely post-pubescent exuberance.

Despite my involvement with ballet technique, I was never a ballet dancer per se. I was actually a
modern dancer who got a lot from ballet training. If there is a style of modern dance that I identify
with most, it is the style developed by the influential American choreographer Jose Limon (about
whom Ill have more to say later). Nevertheless, it was when I was getting my masters degree in
modern dance from UCLA that I encountered the modern dance technique that opened my eyes
to the deeper significance of the physical life of the performer: that of Martha Graham, who is
acknowledged as the single most important figure in the history of American modern dance.
Graham codified something called the contractiona violent engagement of the lower abdominal
muscles that was capable of welding the entire frame of the dancer into an unified structure while
simultaneously reducing the burden of the larger, bulkier muscle groups associated with physical
locomotion and gesture. This was the powerhouse of Grahams special brand of movement, and as
such, it was a new center around which the dancer could organizer her efforts. It seemed to me
then, and still does, that there are only these two ways of generating authentic modern dance
movement: one is the traditional lifted dancer (found in ballet with hips turned out or in modern
dance with the feet in parallel), and the other is the Graham dancer.

Years later I encountered this center again, but this time it came in the form of a theatre training
developed by the Japanese theatre director and innovator Tadashi Suzuki. Being Japanese, Suzuki
is heir to the centuries-old theatre traditions of Noh and Kabuki. Yet he is best understood as a
director working within western theatre traditions. For example, he is on record as saying that it
was his special mission to rediscover an energy possessed by classical Greek theatre, but that has
subsequently been lost. There are a number of suggestive similarities between the Graham and
Suzuki techniques, and what I have to say about one will generally be true of the other. First and
most important is their shared focus on the center of the body. In the Suzuki technique much is
made of developing a powerful, irresistible core that is the source of the actors expression. The
idea behind this is to promote the will of the body as a force of nature to be unleashed on stage,
and to do this requires a very demanding physical training. Imagine a very powerful person
standing behind you with a big stick, who shouts Move! And you move, the impulse emanating
from a place just below and behind the navel. Despite the fact that you only slide one foot forward
about 6 inches, an observer might describe your movement as exceptional, undismissible,
emblematic of the full force of inexorable fate.

The Suzuki theatre company in Toga, Japan, is known for its stagings of the classical Greek plays
Medea, the Agammemnon, and other works that, if not specifically belonging to the classical
period, are classical in attitude. Now, consider the fact that Graham created an unusual amount of
work that dealt with classical Greek myths and stories. Moreover, any opus of hers that wasnt
obviously based on these sources can nevertheless be understood as classical in tone and bearing,
expressing a monumental, even heroic modethe modern ballet, Appalachian Spring, for
example. It is difficult to separate the inordinate amount of attention paid by each artist to the
power center in the belly from the kind of work they were each prone to make: the physical
choices that performers make have aesthetic consequences.

Another example: near the beginning of this section I mentioned the work of choreographer Jose
Limon as being the most influential modern technique on my own dance career. Limon was part of
the next generation of American choreographers after Graham. When he was developing his own
brand of movement, he did something that is not generally fully appreciatedhe placed the
center of the performer in the breast, identifying it with the heart. When I was studying Limon
technique in San Francisco, my teacher, Aaron Osbourne, talked incessantly about the heart, how
it was the center of the technique and the true organ of vision for the dancer. Aaronone of the
last, great, male soloists to come out of the Limon companywas fond of describing the heart as a
setting sun. In this way, Limon announced the nature of his artistic obsession. In the history of
American modern dance, this marked a significant shift from the Graham aesthetic because those
who work from the heart center are predisposed to speak about different things, and to speak
about them differently. Limon was anything but classical; he didnt want to put larger-than-life
figures (tragic or otherwise) on stage. Instead he wanted to talk about the human condition,
symbolized by the crown of thorns of Christ and the suffering heart of the Virgin Mary pierced by
seven swords.

The one thing I do not want to do is suggest a progression from the base of the spine, to the navel,
and thence to heart centersomehow aligning the evolution of theatre and dance styles with the
chakras. Instead, what Im trying to do is demonstrate a principle. Consider one of the several
techniques devised by Michael Chekhov that involves creating temporary, largely imaginary
centers in the body. Exactly as we have come to understand the value of the center in my previous
examples, all movement and motivation is understood to flow from this temporary center. A
center in Chekhovs method can be anywhere and possessed of any characteristic even those
not traditionally associated with that part of the bodythere is no hard and fast rule outside of
respecting what works. Whether it is imagined as a tiny, hard bead at the tip of the nose; or as a
setting sun in the heart; or as an irresistible force of concentrated will deep in the vitals, the
temporary center is a proven, highly effective tool for the actor. By imagining any number of
custom-made centers endowed with various qualities at different places in, on, and about the
body, it is possible for actors to totally transform themselves, changing everything about how they
move, speak, and even think.

Gertrude Stein once said of Oakland, the place she grew up, that it was a place where there was
no there there. This is easily one of the most common and fatal problems an actor can facewe
see them, and yet we dont because they dont seem real to us, lacking a center. There are
perhaps cultural reasons why we produce so many ineffectual individuals, incapable of insisting on
their own physical presence in time and space. In my opinion, some of the philosophies and
techniques that purport to help actors have actually contributed to the problem. They do so by
misrepresenting the true nature of the quality of ease, and by demonizing meaningful, physical
effort. The result is that these actors cannot succeed unless, somehow, they can acquire a center.
Some have a center to begin with, and others do not; and some that have it are not consciously
aware that they do, but benefit from it nonetheless. A full understanding of the value of the
physical center, allied with a practice that promotes competency in exploiting this kind of energy,
can lead to miraculous results.

There is a memorable story concerning Michael Chekhov. By the end of his life he was living in
Hollywood where he had a studio, and where he trained actors. During this period of his life, the
story goes, he was demonstrating an aspect of his technique involving something called the
imaginary body. To this day, the people who witnessed this demonstration claim that this notably
small Russian manabout five and a half feet talltransformed himself into a nine-foot giant. As
an experienced audience person I can vouch that these types of experiences are both real and
fairly common, especially at the upper end of the theatre-going experience where one is apt to see
amazing performances.

When I was a student at UCLA my choreography class was visited by another Japanese theatre
artist, also named Suzuki, who was a choreographer in the recent Japanese dance tradition of
Butoh. He taught us a piece of choreography, the final gesture of which included instructions to
touch a dot floating in front of the body. Touching the dot would cause it to expand into a large,
dark hole. When this happened we were instructed to step inside, the hole promptly closing
behind us. In this way we were supposed to disappear. Our efforts were less than satisfactory,
involving recourse to mime, symbolism, and desperate pretending. Then he performed the
sequence. To this day I still have a vivid memory of the dot and how it expanded to reveal a dark
void. But more amazing by far was his disappearance. Clearly, what I saw with the imagination and
what my eyes actually saw were two different things. But the importance of the eyes was totally
diminished, while that of the imagination became my primary reality. And whats more, this was a
shared experience for everyone present.

http://www.robert-allen.net/archives/portfolio/yoga-for-actors-part-i