Physical Theatre part 3 - Losing Essence

We don’t have directors who work creatively with actors and we don’t have actors who work creatively with playwrights and we don’t have playwrights who work creatively with designers and we don’t have designers who work creatively with directors….and so it goes, around and around. Now we do all know how to behave and get along (most of the time) and figure out together things that “work.” And we put those things that “work” onstage for the spectators to see. But out of this “working” environment periodically comes the actor or director who does not feel creative. And so they go on a quest for more creative means. Many go off and devise their own work, write their own plays, their own performances, make their own props, create their own particular space in which to perform. Some go so far as to make attempts to classify and organize a system or way of learning and creating stage art. Some see the stage as the empire and domain of the playwright (Playwright as God). Some see the stage as the empire and domain of the director (must have a grand vision and concept). Some see the stage as the empire and domain of the Storyteller (Actor who speaks words). And these ways of thinking shape how and what they organize as their way of working, as their method of creativity. All totally self-serving of course. The director/choreographer who envisions the stage as their domain invents ideas that make it so - such as “Viewpoints.” Here is technique that has little or nothing to do with the creative process of acting but some (or a lot) to do with generally making and keeping order on the stage. Similar self-serving approaches have been or are being invented (as we speak) for each of the ways that the world of the stage is imagined. Actors who understand that the stage is their domain but who don’t understand the creative process of the actor (or who don’t want to accept it for what it is) also invent a myriad of things to substantiate their view or belief. Let’s take Michael Chekhov as an example here. And so the possibilities and combinations of people feeling less than creative and their point of view about the stage gives us all manner of “techniques” and makes a muck out of what is creative and how creativity unfolds on stage. What is most often lost in these “techniques” is the human factor - the biological apparatus, the body that thinks and feels and desires and moves and senses and is - the one that has knowledge and awareness of past, present and future. To be fair, some techniques take up parts or a part of this notion. Movement but not feeling. Thought but not Sensation. And when it comes to the most burning of all questions for the actor and creativity, the fusion of the fiction and make believe of the stage with the very real and immediate in this very moment living and breathing person of the actor, what do we get? Most often the answer is a game of some sort, or the notion to simply “play like a child.” While those concepts may have their time and place and reason on occasion, they do not get at the core of the actors work. No, they just don’t. Nope, nope, nope. I’m shaking my head a hundred times. And so it comes down to the fact that if the essence of our art is not addressed in our training or in our application via our techniques, then its not even like we are leaving it to chance come eight o’clock performance time, its more like we are discouraging it and manipulating ourselves further away from its creative possibilities.