Where Do We Go From Here?

by David Bridel

IN ADDRESSING THE QUESTION “What does the future hold for actor-training in the U.S.?”, I initially thought to begin with the matter of adaptation – how we, as acting teachers, might stay ahead of, or at least in touch with, the cultural curve as it affects our industry. The business of acting is changing with great rapidity. Today’s drama-school graduates are as likely to be making You Tube videos as they are to pick up under-5’s on a soap, as likely to voice video-game characters as they are to join a fringe theatre company.

I recently had the chastening experience of directing a graduating student as Eddie Carbone in “A View from the Bridge” in his last conservatory project – a role that he performed with great sincerity - only to learn three weeks later that he’d been cast as one of Fox TV’s “Five Most Eligible Bachelors in America.” From Arthur Miller to Reality TV – some startling new career paths are in the making. Yes, I’m certain that the entertainment industry is evolving more quickly than we, in our ivory towers, care to admit; and I’m also certain that we need to address this matter at length. But though a necessary conversation, it occurs to me that we may find it a depressing one. With Reality TV in the ascendant, celebrity mania continuing to run rampant, and the pernicious influence of mammon corrupting everything from casting to theatre programming around the country, the industry we aim to serve appears to be making an ever-dwindling investment in the craft of acting. Thus, on consideration, I posit that a genuine dialogue concerning the future of actor-training must address what takes place within our programs, not to be distracted by the dizzying landscape without that awaits our intrepid graduating actors. I will take the liberty of leaving the industry to its own devices – for the time being.

I believe that an education brings about a reckoning: asks the student to admit to who they are, for a specific purpose - that they become better prepared for what it is they might do. Know thyself, yes – but know thyself in order to stop thinking about thyself; to turn thy gaze away from thy navel and out into the world. Education helps students to reveal where their own principles and values agree with or, more interestingly, contradict those of the world in which they live. Therein, after all, lies a tension, a seed of conflict, and the motive for action; a confluence of factors that mirrors the acting process itself.

I once had the great fortune to have lunch with a Spanish neuroscientist who had, in his youth, been a relatively successful actor in his homeland. (He wanted to conduct experiments with nodes attached to actor’s foreheads to trace flashpoints in the brain and compare imaginary to authentic neurological activity. But that’s another story.) I asked him what method he had followed, as an actor, in the creation of his characters, and he replied: “That’s simple. I deduce the values that the character holds, and then I know what he does and why he does it.”

This, over a bread roll and a salad nicoise, was my Damascan moment. Thanks to my neurologist’s uncomplicated response, I suddenly understood that self-knowledge is more than emotional honesty, or physical agility, or vocal freedom; that playing action is more than understanding objectives and executing tactics. The foundation of who we are and why we want others to change is planted in the earth of our values. And so it is values – which we might describe as the beliefs that we would die for – which underpin our relationship with the world, which bring us out of ourselves and into communication and conflict with others; and so it follows that values are the true subject of character, fictional or otherwise. I propose that it is our job, our mandate, to draw from our students, as the raw materials of their real and imaginary personae, the value systems upon which upon which their points of view – and thus their desires – and thus their actions – are based. And most importantly, through the prism of theatre, we are to encourage them to practice the debate between belief systems that exemplifies the dialogue our world so sorely needs.

For if values are the tectonic plates of our cultures, defined by their vast edges, edges that move with inexorable force against one another, then the theatre – as befits the great humanities – offers us the chance to rehearse and prepare for the necessary earthquakes and volcanoes, reminding us of previous conflagrations, warning us of future ones. The theatre is our laboratory, our petrie dish; it conducts experiments in the clashes of values and civilizations, and yet, paradoxically, it confirms our commonality at one and the same time, making scientists of us all. The stage offers a vital juxtaposition of antagonism and co-operation, a yes and a no together. It promotes characters that do things we would never do, but at the same time it requires an act of collective make-believe in order to help them do it. Without us, Othello cannot murder Desdemona. We may not admire, respect, agree with or condone his deed, but we do advance his grisly ends (and her grisly end) through the willing faculty of our imaginations. Great theatre implicates us in every last zealotry, makes empathetic the worst of convictions. When we leave the auditorium, our own values are sharper in consequence, they have been cut on the edges of a collision; and yet our tolerance for the other is that much deeper too, for we have seen into the heart of the enemy. There is nothing more important for a culture to do than test its capacity for compassion like this, and there is no better place to do it than in a room with other people.

So perhaps there is one basic question we must ask ourselves, as a matter of principle, and as a premise for all other questions to follow: how can we bring the student into contact with the value system that is the foundation of his or her own world? To accomplish this magnificently difficult task, I believe that we must ask our students to create their own work.

But isn’t it the work of the actor to interpret the word of the writer? Actors aren’t authors, after all. Where is the precedent, you ask..? There are precedents, scattered throughout the long history of the itinerant player… But suffice it to say, have you ever noticed that people who grow their own vegetables are invariably splendid cooks? So it is that the best actors, or the best-trained actors, must continually be asked to plant, and then water, and then grow, by which I mean create, their own stories. Only by demanding acts of personal creativity from our students can we truly bring them face to face with themselves, make them responsible for who they are and what they might do; promote a sense of themselves as artists, as agents of change, as masters of their own destiny, and eventually as inheritors of the tradition of theatre, bringing people into the same room at the same time to debate the past as they dream up the future.

My own pedagogical lineage reaches back to the work of Jacques Lecoq, who virtually resurrected the notion of actors as creators through the institution of the ‘autocours’ at his school. Once a week students, in small groups, are asked to present material of their own making for the edification of the entire population of the school. These projects may fit within certain parameters at certain times. They most definitely draw upon the techniques, disciplines, and territories that are addressed in the classroom. But crucially, the decision making process is always left to the students. Once a week! Can we imagine for a moment the rigor, the risk, and the responsibility involved in producing new work on a weekly basis? Think how many choices must be made…

Which brings me to the heart of the matter. The necessity of choice. How many times have we berated our students with the criticism, nay, the mantra: ‘You didn’t make any choices!’ But how do we teach a student what a choice is? I once had the great privilege of apprenticing with master teacher Earl Gister, who would, religiously, pose the same question to his students: did the speaker, with a given line of text, want to make her scene partner feel ‘good’ or ‘bad’? Masterful how simple the question, and extraordinary, comic, so dreadfully poignant to witness the panic spreading over the student’s face as she was obliged to make such a concrete decision. Er… good. No, bad! No – good?!?! A choice is, of course, not only a selection but also an elimination; a standing up for one thing at the expense of another. In selecting material for a self-created piece, in choosing a form, in articulating a language, in giving a grammar to that language, a student is continually working with elimination, continually seeking to reveal story in much the way that a sculptor reveals a sculpture — by discarding what is extraneous or unclear. Slowly but surely, what emerges is not only material, but a point of view in relation to that material. This is good aesthetic practise, and it is also the most stringent of personal disciplines. Week in, week out, flexing the muscle of storytelling through eliminations, decisions, and choices, brings out the individual’s core orientation toward life itself – the way that he sees the world. It is a vision that is invariably prompted by values, and one that, once developed, can nurture an artist for a very long time. It is no accident that Lecoq’s graduates include some of modern theatre’s most determined visionaries, including Simon McBurney (Complicite), Arianne Mnouchkine, Julie Taymor, Theatre de la Jeune Lune, Footsbarn Traveling Theatre, and exquisite actors such as Geoffrey Rush, Emma Thompson, Sacha Baron Cohen… It is not simply good luck and a dash of talent that have taken these artists to the top of their professions. It is the capacity to relate their work to a perspective that has passed the test of repeated inspection.

Many of our existing programs have borrowed from Lecoq’s vision in one way or another. NYU runs a Freeplay class. SUNY Purchase recently instituted the one-person show for 4th year undergraduates. Mel Shapiro at UCLA has developed the marvelous Activist Project, which I have been lucky to see on several occasions. In all cases (and many more besides), students are obliged to develop their own material and present it to an audience. These are priceless components in our programs. I urge us all to examine their potency, to question how it is that a self-created piece of work suddenly unlocks a student’s previously guarded secrets. It is not simply that he is surprisingly poetic, or reveals a flair for comedy, or connects emotionally with a character. Or rather it is the sum and source of these things – self-created projects are, in the best of cases, and with remarkable frequency, a venue in which the student defines the self and, by virtue of placing the definition in front of an audience, has a visceral experience of that elusive paradox – difference and sameness. I am not like you, and yet you finish me. The diamond gets a little sharper. And yet I might also observe that in the average modern curriculum, self-created work, if it exists at all, occupies a marginal place: frequently one project over the course of three or four years is deemed sufficient. But once a week, folks! That is the example that Lecoq has left us, and it is one that we would do well to heed.

While we have them, we must inspire them, of course. It is not enough to prep them for the auditions that they hope to land when they leave, auditions for an industry that is chasing, if not eating, its own tail. It is not enough to verse them in the classics, as if three years of purity will ameliorate a lifetime of contamination. I think it is our responsibility to go further. Young actors who have told stories of their own are invariably better positioned to tell somebody else’s. By digging into their own foundations, a journey that they often navigate with great passion, they create a set of tools that can be used when digging into a character. Most importantly, for me, the self-creation (or Freeplay) model is a model that relates a person to a principle to a population. That’s why I have insisted on a Freeplay component in every one of a USC Grad Student’s six semesters of training. And that is a model I would like to propose as an integral part of our training of young actors in the future.•u2007

Based on a speech given at the Second National Congress of Acting Teachers, The Actors Center, NY, June 16 & 17, 2007.
Printed with the permission of the author.

DAVID BRIDEL is a director, choreographer, playwright and teacher. Head of Movement for the MFA Program in Acting at University of Southern California (USC), he is also Co-Artistic Director of the Franklin Stage Company in upstate New York (www.franklinstagecompany.org). Mr. Bridel has also directed across America, in Israel and Europe. His choreography includes “Ariadne auf Naxos” (Los Angeles Opera), and “Salome,” “Das Gehege” (Bayerische Staatsoper, Munich). His many plays include “I Gelosi” and “The Death of Mayakovsky,” which both premiered at UCLA.