Vol. 3, No. 1, Summer 2004

[page 24]

James Forsythe
Brandon University

Spirituality and Actor Training

A Definition:

Spirituality: 1) Of the spirit or the soul 2) Of sacred things or matters. This definition might also include words like Balance, Unity, Faith, and Courage. As an actor I would be glad if my peers attributed any of those qualities to either my work or me.

A Thesis:

This paper intends to show that conservatory theatre teachers and acting teachers in specific are using the techniques and ethos of Taoism, Zen and First Nations spirituality in their studios. I will suggest what they are 'borrowing' and why they are doing it, whether they are conscious of this borrowing or not.

A Motivation:

I currently teach Acting at Brandon University. I have been a student of acting all my life. Through my teachers and my research I have come into contact with Carnegie Melon, Cornell, Yale, Manchester Metropolitan, The National Voice Intensive, The National Theatre School of Canada, The Actor's Studio in London, The Odin Theatre, and the University's of Alberta and Victoria to name a few. From a very young age I noticed that teaching methodologies in the field of an artistic, creative endeavor like the theatre are all basically trying to do the same thing: explain the unexplainable. What is it that brings about creativity and how do you make it consistent. My body and voice was trained to 'leap tall buildings with a single bound' (if you'll permit a reference to a Canadian hero). My mind was taught to analyze the psychological and sociological motivations of a playwright and a character. But how do I put it together to create the magic that I see when great actors transform before my eyes on-stage?

[page 25] In 1990-91 three things happened to me. I started teaching my own classes. I visited India. And I took a class in Meditation. Gradually I began to investigate Eastern religions. I was drawn to Taoism especially and I began to notice similarities in not only the exercises/practices but also in the theory between the religious student and the actor in training. What previously had been in the shadows of my consciousness was becoming obvious.

Examples of what I am talking about include Tai Chi, Alexander Technique, relaxation, Breathing exercises, Sharing Circles and Creative Visualization. I hope to prove that the main benefit of these techniques is at least fourfold:

I propose to examine four areas of Studio work that I feel have a direct connection to the spirituality of another culture. I like to call them Breathing, The Swamp, Alexander, and Sharing Circles. I will provide specific exercises, practitioners, and rationale.

Self-Awareness

Whether it is Stansislavsky, Boleslavski, Joseph Chaikin or Michael Chekov most teachers of Acting will agree that knowing yourself is an essential part of the process. And part of this self-awareness has to focus on what Stansislavski called "the inner creative mood," a synthesis of mind, spirit and body. The spiritual training methods I am going to describe contribute directly to the actors self awareness and are therefore at the heart of their training. I propose that the connection to spiritual training forms a natural 'bridge' from 'in' to 'out', from the body to the mind.

[page 26] 1. Breathing

We all have a body and a spirit that need to be receptive to themselves and the stimuli of the moment to moment reality of the given circumstances and style of the play. Joseph Chaikin calls this the presence of the actor. He says in his book of that title:

This idea of a central core of stillness, an area of calm in the storm of humanity is a common tenet in both Zen and Taoism.

In actor training the focus of the work on the craft of acting begins with relaxation. The quiet allows students to listen to themselves and their bodies. This marks the beginning of learning, of self-awareness. Actors must come to know the life force that moves within them and as with the spiritual student this awareness leads directly to the breath. The goal for both is the same. With focused concentration on the breath recognition occurs of "the living current" moving through the body.(2) Whether we call this meditation, relaxation, or creative visualisation, it forms the basis of most first year acting classes. It also provides the clearest evidence of a link to spiritual practices by placing the focus on the breath.

Dr. Chang Chung-yuan in his book Creativity and Taoism describes the breathing technique common to Taoist Yoga:

Zen breathing is very similar:

David Smukler, Canada's leading voice teacher is on the faculty of York University and Head of the National Voice Intensive. His mantra to students follows this pattern exactly as he tells them to, "let the cool air drop in, turn warm inside and release out warm."(5)

The following exercise is indicative of this technique and contains obvious reflections back to Taoist and Zen breath exercises. They are excerpted from David Smukler's vocal warm up:

[page 28] Smukler believes that breathing this way allows the breath time to travel to the belly that is, in Buddhism, the emotional centre of the body. In this way the actor, who is true to the reality of the moment, need not think about how the words will sound, he simply has to breathe. The breath carries the messages into the body, receives an impulse from the belly and then can flow up and out as speech. In Zen and Japanese Culture Daisetz T. Suzuki says:

2. The Swamp

The National Voice Intensive is, as its name suggests, a rigorous five-week workshop bringing together forty-eight performers and a dozen of Canada's premiere voice teachers. The central focus of the instruction is the teaching of breathing. From the very beginning sessions David Smukler and his staff instil the verbal and physical vocabulary necessary for the student to understand viscerally the philosophy being discussed. Through a series of exercises the lower belly is identified as the pivotal source of all vocal work. He refers to it as "The Swamp." That area of the body is sensitised by the employment of creative visualisation while the muscles of the abdomen and lower back are stretched and strengthened allowing the breath to descend into the belly and back ribs. A connection is then established, first with sound and then with words (using Shakespearean text as source material), between "The Swamp," breathing, and speaking. At first I found this to be disconcerting if not frightening because it removed my ability to engage my mind and my judgement in the process of creating a performance. But with practice I surprised myself by contacting a depth of emotion that I had previously been able to engage only by chance. My observation of the progress of others and myself convinced me that this freedom from prior control left the work more honest and more human. It was as if the words presented themselves to the speaker for the first time, the instant before they were spoken, all because the impulse was removed from your mind to your lower abdomen.

[page 29] And while my sample pool is by no means exhaustive there are Smukler trained or influenced voice teachers almost everywhere in this country (of Canada). And I found exactly the same attitude at Manchester Metropolitan University, Britain's largest University based conservatory school of Acting. There, Patricia Roy echoed fellow voice teacher Smukler, when she described her work to place the breath lower in the body to contact the emotional chakra or centre, which she refers to not as "the swamp" but as "mud." Whatever the terminology is being invented there is an underlying teaching goal to marry the physiological truth with metaphor. Roy said, "We have to constantly keep finding new ways to redefine our messages."(8) The use of spiritual tools is one way to provide some structure for that process. It provides a methodology for observation without judgement and for the discovery of mental clarity. She describes that clarity in terms of ". . . a unity between mind, body, and breath."(9)

Smukler summed up his thoughts in an interview:

Teachers use the spirituality of other cultures to form a framework for the work because we have abandoned in this century any kind of real structure. The majority of the world has moved away from an organized system of belief. So they are without a structure to back up the events of life. Because we have lost all structure we have this gaping hole in us that was called spirituality. We look at the actor and we used to have a very strong spiritual tradition in our theatre. Even in the nonreligious theatre there were spiritual traditions. What has happened in the twentieth century, (Margaret Mead and others have talked about this), we have taken the arts and moved them out of the society, we've separated them, made them culture.

Our students come to us with wounds instead. They have all these experiences and psychological awareness and no way to process it, no structure. Whether one agrees or disagrees with the structure there are no structures to rebel against. So the religion and spirituality of the mid-twentieth century has become [page 30] psychology. And that's not working. People are looking at all the things we investigated in the twentieth century and are saying, 'They are not working, they're not working." So you start looking at the other traditions, to help us get some sense of what is going on.(10)

For Smukler, using the spirituality of other cultures in his teaching comes out of the needs of his students and their mutual search for a structure. It is this structure that provides actors with the link between the psychological, the physical, and the intuitive.