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Inside Out: Emotional Intelligence and the Actor. Notes prepared for a lecture at the Cape Town Campus of AFDA (The South African School of Motion Picture Medium and Live Performance) A well told story on stage or on screen is emotionally engaging if the audience is able to relate to and identify with the characters. A skilful actor will infuse subtle nuances into a character’s display of emotions, in order to invoke an audience’s empathic response. The more emotionally intelligent the actor the more successful they will be in engaging an audience, allowing them to experience the world of the narrative vicariously through the eyes of the characters. It is useful for actors to have insight into emotions, the mechanisms of empathy and an understanding of why it is necessary to feel anything at all. The capacity for experiencing emotion can be seen in evolutionary terms as a vital survival mechanism. “Actions of all kinds, if regularly accompanying any state of the mind, are at once recognized as expressive. These may consist of movements of any part of the body, as the wagging of a dog’s tail, the shrugging of a man’s shoulders, the erection of the hair, the exudation of perspiration, the state of the capillary circulation, laboured breathing, and the use of the vocal or other soundproducing instruments. Even insects express anger, terror, jealousy, and love by their stridulation. With man the respiratory organs are of especial importance in expression, not only in a direct, but in a still higher degree in an indirect manner.” (Darwin, C: 1899) Darwin’s insights were based on a study of infants and the smiles and pouts of children, of the insane, of painting and sculpture, of cats and dogs and monkeys, and of the ways that people in different cultures express their feelings. And as we shall see, to this day these insights continue to inform the study of emotion and gesture.
2 Darwin concluded that, in essence, emotions form part of a primordial survival mechanism. And moreover, by necessity, they are not under conscious control. Because genuine emotion results in unconscious modifications of behaviour, gestures coloured by emotion tend to be more believable, more convincing, more likely to be taken seriously. Consider a scenario of a dog with a bone. Another dog approaches. The first dog emits a low growl. (Subtext: “Back off Buddy, this bone’s mine.”) The second dog, unable to take a hint, or just plain slow witted, continues to approach. (Subtext: “Huh? What’s your beef?”) The first dog bares his teeth. Growls more threateningly. The second dog hesitates. (Subtext: “You’re not serious, are you?”) The hairs on the first dog’s back stand up, saliva drools from his mouth and he snaps. (Subtext: “@#$%&***!!!!”) The second dog skulks away, tail between his legs. The first dog relaxes. The display of emotion has played a part in the survival of both dogs; here we see genuine aggression and genuine fear being expressed. Even though they may be different breeds of dog with different nuances of doggy dialect, the genuine emotional demonstration is universally understood. The capacity for empathy can similarly be described as a coping mechanism; it allows for the decoding of emotional displays. Empathy is defined as: “The ability to imagine oneself in anther’s place and understand the other’s feelings, desires, ideas, and actions.” (Encyclopaedia Brittanica:1999)
Staying with dogs, perhaps the name Pavlov rings a bell? The work that made Ivan Pavlov a household name in psychology actually began as a study in digestion. He was looking at the digestive process in dogs, especially the interaction between
3 salivation and the action of the stomach. He realized they were closely linked by reflexes in the autonomic nervous system. Without salivation, the stomach didn’t get the message to start digesting. Pavlov wanted to see if external stimuli could affect this process, so he rang a bell at the same time he gave the experimental dogs food. After a while, the dogs would begin to salivate when the bell sounded, even if no food was present. In 1903 Pavlov published his results calling this a conditioned reflex, different from an innate reflex, such as pulling a hand back from a hot surface, in that it had to be learned. Pavlov called this learning process conditioning. In other words, the dog’s nervous system comes to associate the sound of the bell with the food. He also found that the conditioned reflex would be repressed if the stimulus proves “wrong” too often. If the bell sounds repeatedly and no food appears, eventually the dog stops salivating at the sound. What has all this to do with acting? Enter another Russian, Konstantin Stanislavsky. He is generally recognized as the father of modern, naturalistic psychologically based acting. He is the one that re-focused the actor’s craft away from poses and indication and onto the stimulation of emotion. Early in his evolution of acting theory, Stanislavsky hit on the idea that actors ought to be able to do like the dogs in Pavlov’s experiments Stanislavsky reckoned actors ought to be able to find “triggers” that would stimulate a similar organic response that would, in turn, lead to natural and honest acting. As a starting point, Stanislavsky devised the “Magic If” as a means for actors to place themselves in the given circumstances of the text. They would be encouraged to ask themselves “What would I do if I were my character in this situation?” Then they were encouraged to explore their own emotion memory and develop the ability to bring back emotions they had already experienced. The memory event need not directly parallel the stage event, but should stimulate an analogous feeling, which in turn would provide the necessary emotion the role called for. However, Stanislavsky was at pains to caution the actor:
4 “An artist does not build his role out of the first thing at hand. He chooses very carefully and culls out of his living experiences the ones that are most enticing. He weaves the soul of the person he is to portray out of emotions that were dearer to him than everyday sensations.” (Stanislavsky, K: 1936) In the early nineteen twenties the West was ripe for Stanislavsky’s influence. In London’s West End, the theatre was so unreal, and the acting styles were so false, Stanislavsky called it “rubber-stamp” acting. The style was typified by a series of codified gestures, and codified grimaces, and to some extent codified dialogue. Hollywood was similarly infected; consider the quaintly flickering black-and-white images of the silent film era. Theda Bara was one of Hollywood’s leading performers in the early years of cinema, and the first “talkies” were only to arrive in 1927! However … In 1923 and 1924 Stanislavsky’s Moscow Art Theatre made a trip to the U.S. and performed in New York. Among the excited audience members was Lee Strasberg, of the “Group Theatre”. Strasberg adopted Stanislavsky’s work and began to teach in a similar way at the Group Theatre, starting workshops that were devoted to the stimulating of emotional triggers. Actors were taken through intensive workshops where they were encouraged to explore their inner lives through the use of their imaginations and evoking sense memories. His “Private Moment” exercises would typically require the actor to delve into memories associated with a personal object, for example. They would be encouraged to recall physical sensations associated with that object. They would go on to explore other sensory feelings, such as touch, smell and taste, associated with this object that possesses for them some emotional content. Lee Strasberg’s work became known in America as “The Method”, and actors from the Group Theatre were the primary beneficiaries of the training. They matured as performers at roughly the same time that Hollywood started hitting its stride (1940’s). By this time the “talkies” were entrenched and with the introduction of technicolour, the film medium was demanding more naturalistic performances. The press generally
5 credited Lee Strasberg and the Method with the success and appeal of this generation of Movie Stars.
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Not everybody loved Strasberg’s Method, however. Some performers actively hated it in fact. And some thought the ideas behind it were good, but they couldn’t stand Lee Strasberg, who has been described as a very self-centered and controlling man. A division happened. The popular histories have it that Stella Adler, a member of Strasberg’s group, went to Paris and met up with Stanislavsky who was doing some work there. The great man learned from Adler what it was that Strasberg was teaching, and he said he had changed his mind about the best way to approach acting. Stanislavsky had shifted away from finding emotional triggers and onto a search for commitment and physical action. Stella Adler went back to New York and told Lee Strasberg what Stanislavsky had said. Strasberg said he didn’t care; he was going to keep teaching what he was teaching because, after all, he was famous and it must be working. Adler left and started her own school, teaching the principles espoused by Stanislavsky in his later years. So did Group Theatre member named Sanford Meisner. He wound up later at New York’s Neighborhood Playhouse and created what we now know is the Meisner Technique. Today, Meisner Technique is one of the most widely taught approaches to acting. It is rooted in the Repetition Exercise, which is designed to help new actors learn how to truthfully listen and respond. At its simplest level this involves two actors facing each other. One makes a simple observation about the other as in “you have green eyes”. The second actor repeats this back as “I have green eyes” and the phrase is repeated back and forth in this way. Meanwhile the actors observe each other closely and respond, without artifice or contrivance, to the changes they perceive. The responses register in the body and in how the line of text is offered. The exercise can be done very simply in this way or within detailed pre-set circumstances. At first the actors are themselves, and because this is so, they make no assumptions before the exercise starts about how the interaction will develop. As the exercise develops they can assume fictional identities within fictional circumstances, but although they know the facts of the scenario, the use of repetition ensures that they remain connected to the moment rather than trying to manipulate the story of the
7 scene. The circumstances, the objectives and the emotions all remain in the subtext, affecting but not dictating how the relationship develops.
Stella Adler’s emphasis on physical expression of psychological truth is not surprising. She had spent some time with Stanislavsky in 1934, a full decade after Lee Strasberg had latched onto some of the Russian’s early teachings. In the interim a great tradition of Physical Theatre had been developing in parallel to Stanislavsky’s work, spearheaded by one of his contemporaries at the Moscow Arts Theatre – Vsevelod Meyerhold. Meyerhold had been exploring uncharted areas of stage and audience relationships. Whereas Stanislavsky had found psychological solutions for the actors’ problems, Meyerhold had attempted to solve them in another way - via the circus and the Commedia delI’arte. Biomechanics was an attempt to escape from naturalistic acting. After the Revolution in Russia there were great revolutionary movements in the arts, particularly in the theatre. They felt that naturalistic theatre was elitist and not appealing to the peasants.. So they aimed to create a theatre that makes the maximum use of all the technology at their disposal. Part of this technology was their understanding of the way the human body works. Meyerhold said “We must train our actors so that they can do all the things with their bodies that a conjurer can do, or an acrobat, or a dancer, that any athlete can do.” And they trained them like athletes. They even sent them to do theoretical work at the Pavlov laboratories. Since the early 1990s several neuroscientific studies have been conducted, confirming the effectiveness of affective memory techniques for actors. American Neuroscientist Nicholas Hall, together with researchers from Arizona State University and the University of South Florida proved that emotional states have a powerful influence on the immune system. But more significantly, Strasberg’s emotional memory techniques were the tools they used to induce pure emotion in their test subjects. In a controlled environment, the researchers used trained Method actors to explore the impact on the immune system of extreme sadness or extreme happiness. Electrocardiogram readings, diagnostic tests on blood chemistry and other data on vital signs revealed that emotion is closely linked to the functioning of the immune system. Previously scorned homeopathic approaches to healing were thus validated,
8 but ironically the research also served to widen the gulf between exponents of emotional training for actors and those opposed to it. Many opponents of emotional training for actors are of the opinion that Method actors should be focusing their attention on their fellow actors rather than wallowing in the visceral arousal of their emotions. And indeed, does the term “acting” not describe an ACTivity? “Act” is a verb. And we have been taught that a verb is a doing word. In order for an emotional truth to be communicated effectively, there needs to be action. Physical action. We return once again to the scientific research laboratory for the latest insights into acting and emotion. Susan Bloch is an experimental psychologist and neuroscientist. She is concerned primarily with human brain function, animal learning and visual perception. For the past twenty years she has been concentrating on the psycho physiological study of human emotions. Psycho – Mind; Physio – Body. She has been exploring the mind-body connection in evoking and controlling emotional states. This she has called “Alba Emoting”. Bloch considers emotions to be a “functional state of the entire organism – intuitively holistic.” (Chabora, P in Krasner: 2000) She has divided the study of emotion into three levels: Physiological – dealing with visceral, endocrine, chemical, molecular and autonomic respiratory reactions; Expressive – dealing with muscles, posture, gestures, facial, vocal and controlled respiratory movements; and Subjective – the internal, subjective and personal feelings. (She stresses that what we “feel” is a product of emotion.) These three levels of emotion are always interacting and reacting to each other. Bloch and her colleagues worked with actors in a series of workshops dealing with basic emotion. They attempted to measure what happens when someone is
9 experiencing a pure emotion. They spent two years measuring variables such as heartrate, blood-pressure, temperature, breathing, facial and bodily postures, using emotional memory techniques and deep hypnosis. On analysing their data they recognised specific repeated patterns of breathing, facial expressions, body tension and postural behaviour. And, what’s more, the measurable patterns were repeatable. By initiating and controlling the contraction of muscles at will, and consciously modulating breathing patterns, relatively mechanically, one can start to experience actual emotion. This is called an emotional induction. Importantly, just as specific emotional effector patterns can trigger a pure, basic emotion, a different effector pattern can neutralise the emotional experience. You can literally step into and then step out of the emotion. But how new is it? Charles Darwin wrote: “When our minds are much affected, so are the movements of our bodies; but here another principle besides habit, namely the undirected overflow of nerve-force, partially comes into play.” (Darwin, C: 1899) And Shakespeare had some insights of his own: Norfolk, in speaking of Cardinal Wolsey, says-“Some strange commotion Is in his brain; he bites his lip and starts; Stops on a sudden, looks upon the ground, Then, lays his finger on his temple: straight, Springs out into fast gait; then, stops again, Strikes his breast hard; and anon, he casts His eye against the moon: in most strange postures We have seen him set himself.” (Shakespeare Henry VIII act 3, sc. 2.)
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Bibliography Darwin, C. The Expression of the Emotion in Man and Animals: 1899 New York D. Appleton And Company Encyclopaedia Britannica 2004 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. Krasner,D. (Ed.) Method Acting Reconsidered. 2000 New York: St Martins Press. Stanislavsky, C. An Actor Prepares. 1936. New York: Theatre Arts Inc. Meisner, S. On Acting. 1987. New York: Random House Braun, E. Meyerhold: A Revolution in Theatre. 1998. Iowa: University of Iowa Press.