Your Travalanche Daily Digest for October 26, 2026
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Monday, August 09, 2010
links: New Moon on Monday edition
What do Don DeLillo and Stanislavksy have in common?
You may or may not be familiar with DeLillo, considered to be "a giant of the contemporary American literary landscape", as the intro to the interview states. I was an enthusiast in college. Some of his books I have liked (a lot) more than others, and I have not kept up with him over the years. I was introduced to him by the Duke professor Frank Lentricchia as a student at Duke.
Some of the books are just too damned difficult, and this is coming from someone who gets into difficult stuff. But if you want some to start with, you can't go wrong with White Noise, and Mao II is pretty good as well. Mao II is particularly celebrated for its prophetic vision of the ascent and influence of Islamic extremism.
Anyway, towards the end of the aforementioned interview, when the interviewer goes with DeLillo and Paul Auster to a traditional, boisterous New York deli, Auster and DeLillo get to lamenting the disappearance of the typewriter ribbon (neither writes on a computer) (yeah, I know, how quaint, especially in the deli and all). And this reminded me of the time I met Don DeLillo in person. Lentricchia and his then-wife Melissa were chaperoning a gaggle of young Duke students on a semester-long field trip to New York, and they would invite artists and critics of various kinds to come and talk to us. DeLillo was the headliner. Lentricchia introduced DeLillo to the academy, and so they knew each other. DeLillo described his writing habits, including the typewriter (yes, we had word processors in 1991), and he spoke about how he would write each paragraph on an individual sheet of paper, no matter how much of the rest of the paper remained unused. Presumably, this helped him to insure the integrity of each individual paragraph, and resist the temptation to see it only as a means of getting to the next one. And it shows in the writing, for sure: each paragraph, like it or not, is a carefully crafted microcosm of the larger work.
So this is where Stanislavsky comes in. The whole business of "breaking a scene down into beats" originates with Stanislavsky. In the "Units and Objectives" chapter of An Actor Prepares, Stanislavsky famously uses the example of a turkey cooked for dinner. He observes that it is impossible to eat the whole turkey at once, that it must be dismantled into smaller and smaller pieces until manageable, bite-sized portions have been arrived at. So it is with a role, and even with an individual scene: it cannot be effectively handled all at once. To give each phrase of it (to borrow a term from music) its due, it has to be worked at one piece at a time.
"Worked at" being the operative words. As Travis notes here, anyone who spends any amount of time in an acting class is taught to "break a script down into beats". Because the actor is learning to draw lines through her script, she feels like she is actually learning something. However, the process is usually fraught with problems. First of all, where to draw the lines? When the "action" or "intention" changes, students are told. Sounds good, but usually, the terms "acting" or "intention" are not given very rigorous definition, and so trying to draw these lines in a meaningful way becomes a pretty meaningless exercise pretty quickly.
The second problem is that usually, this "breaking things down into beats" is presented as an analytical process that precedes the rehearsal process, but whatever breakdown is arrived at is typically abandoned once the rehearsing starts. The lines drawn in the script have little or no practical consequence. Students run through the scene, confer about how it felt, rinse and repeat, and believe that they have rehearsed. They have rehearsed everything and nothing, nothing being the operative word.
What is important about the process of breaking a scene down, as far as I am concerned, is not where to draw the lines, but that whatever lines are drawn are respected in the rehearsal process. I encourage students to draw lines where it seems like the scene turns a corner, or that something new is starting. Someone changes the subject, or reverses direction. The writer writes "Pause". I tell them not to have debates with their partners about where to draw the lines, that they should just follow their noses. The important thing is that lines are drawn, and then the scene is rehearsed ONE UNIT OR BEAT AT A TIME. This challenges the actor to give each segment or phrase of the writing the focused attention it deserves BEFORE integrating it into the larger movement or trajectory of the scene. Then, AFTER the students have rehearsed the first two units individually, they can try combining them, and make sure how they understand how the first necessitates the second. I know that this is rare, because people who come to my class having taken other classes are usually familiar with the concept of breaking a scene down, but pretty much never have experience in using that breakdown as the organizational principle for their rehearsals. Yeah, I know, seems like it should be a no-brainer. But it most assuredly isn't.
No matter how talented you are, you can't put a whole turkey in your mouth at once. Break it down, my friends, break it down. And then live by your breakdown. The rewards will be considerable.
Sunday, August 08, 2010
sunday sundries
rehearsal clothes, "priming", and the land of make-believe
This scornful question greeted me once when I was in the midst of a
"Rehearsal clothes" figured into the calculation because, to my mind, any scene study class worth its salt will expect students to bring clothes to wear for their scene, i.e. "costumes". And getting into those clothes takes time, unless you want people to sit around in their clothes for the scene for the whole class, which is undesirable for reasons I'll get to below. At the Drama School, in the design department, with legendary costume designers like Jane Greenwood and Jess Goldstein at the helm, it was the practice to refer to the costumes for shows in which actors were dressed in a contemporary, more or less realistic idiom as "clothes" rather than costumes. A designer was said to be "doing the clothes" for a show or film if the costumes were contemporary, realistic ensembles. That turn of phrase has stayed with me, and I used it in the context on the message board. Hence the confusion and consternation of the person who wrote "What the hell are rehearsal clothes?" (I imagine they must have been picturing something along the lines of uniforms for martial arts classes).
Anyway, I have always insisted that students pick out rehearsal clothes for their scene, and that they bring them to class and change into them. Further, I urged them to do this when they rehearsed outside of class: bring the rehearsal clothes and change into them, do not wear them to class, do not wear them to rehearsal. This had the effect of making life a little more difficult for the less motivated students in the class: they might be inclined to show up in street clothes, and, if their scene permitted, to claim that these were what they were going to wear for the scene. However, with my edict, even if they were wearing street clothes for the scene, they still needed to bring clothes to change into.
But aside from that, why put people out in this way? Why demand that they find special clothes to do their scene, even if the character might dress similarly to the way the actor dressed in everyday life. Well, there are a few reasons for this. First of all, I am a firm believer that the actors greatest enemy, in terms of his/her preparation anyway, is the temptation to ignore some aspect of the character's life or experience, rather than shining the light of awareness on it. I sometimes call this the "get it off my desk" syndrome. There is always pressure from the part of our minds that fears challenge and change to assume that its better to let sleeping dogs lie, not look under that rock, and just assume that some particular aspect of the role does not call for inspection or reflection. Actors have to work hard to counteract this, and developing the awareness of this danger (for that is what it is) and cultivating the habit of examining every conceivable facet of the role takes hard work and dedication.
The clothes worn by the character, or by the "Who-am-I" as we say in the class, are one more instance of this. Clothes make the man, as the maxim goes. What we wear is an important part of our self-presentation, of the way we play the role(s) that we play in the various contexts that we move in and out of. Reflecting on what kind of clothes the character would be wearing, given the situation of the scene, is both good for the scene AND for the actor's developing practice of considering ALL aspects of the role.
But I am getting at something beyond all of this. It has always been my conviction that changing into the clothes for the scene can assume a kind of ceremonial significance: in putting on these clothes, I am now entering another persona in another world. Acting is living truthfully under imaginary circumstances, as Sanford Meisner said. It's entering a land of make-believe. And changing into the clothes can become a ritual that speaks to the whole person of the actor, body, nervous system, and mind, and says: "Now we are becoming Blanche DuBois" or whoever.
It turns out that the latest brain science bears me out. As I mentioned in previous posts, I am reading a book called Mindsight by Dr. Dan Siegel, which proposes that an understanding of how the brain works can be combined with mindfulness and other mental practices to promote mental health. Last night, I came across the following:
Finally, implicit memory creates something called "priming," in which the brain readies itself to respond in a certain fashion. When his mother arrives home, the boy anticipates a hug. Not only is his internal world primed for receiving that loving gesture, he'll move his arms in anticipation when he hears her car in the driveway. As we get older, priming continues to operate with more complex behaviors. If you've learned to swim, when you get your bathing suit on, your behavioral repertoire for swimming is primed and readied to engage when you jump in the pool.
And when the actor puts on her rehearsal clothes, her whole being primes itself for what is about to happen. This only happens, of course, if the act of doing the scene is repeatedly associated with putting on the clothes: actors who don't wear the rehearsal clothes when the rehearse, only when they perform, will have no such experience.
Note that Dr. Siegel talks about priming in the context of "implicit memory". Briefly, implicit memory is the recall of things in which the act of recalling is not consciously registered. He uses the example of how once we learn to ride a bike, we don't have to remember how to ride the bike each time we do it. We recall it without intention or conscious effort. So with priming, the behavior that happens to prepare for some encounter or activity happens unconsciously. You could say that as the clothes are donned, they speak to the actor's nervous system and prepare it to play the role in question.
The same goes for creating an environment for the scene. Recently, I had a student who was doing a scene in which his character was in a conference room at a hotel in which he had just finished giving a lecture. The student informed me of his intention to go out and purchase a bunch of chairs for Friends and Family Night, and then return them the next day. I gently explained that the environment was to be created for the rehearsal process, so that by setting up the environment every time they rehearsed, gaining familiarity with it and using the setup as a springboard into the land of make believe, they would be getting themselves ready to act. Bringing a bunch of chairs for the performance only was not going to help anyone act, and would probably undermine him and his partner, since it would be introducing a new element on the day of the performance.
When actors act in projects, in films or in theater, they aren't going to be setting up the environment, but they do need to be attuned to it. The practice of creating an environment for a scene and setting up each time they rehearse, allowing that arrangement of rehearsal furniture to become an altogether different place where the actor leads an imaginary life, is a great way of developing the awareness that provides for that kind of attunement when they walk onto a movie set.
Here's a talk that Dan Siegel gave with Goldie Hawn about his work. The first part of the video is Goldie talking, he comes in about halfway through. He gives a good overview of what he's about.
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