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Art as Mirror Reflections of Voice Pedagogy through Past Masters of Art Week One - Doubting Thomas
Incredulity The quality or state of being incredulous : a withholding or refusal of belief : DISBELIEF Credulity Belief or readiness of belief especially on slight or uncertain evidence : GULLIBILITY Sometimes it is good to be gullible, other times to disbelieve; the trick is to know which when. I have been assigned a 9 week voice teaching placement in the Masters of Classical Acting course at the Central School of Speech and Drama. They have had two semesters of vocal technique and although two semesters seems short they have all of basics. This being their final term, the objective of the sequence is to prepare the students to first, trust their technique and second, be able to direct their own learning in their professional career, or how will they continue to move toward mastery? I am beginning with breath. What is breath? Merriam-Webster’s first definition of breath is a kind of “emanation”. Travelling down the lexicological path, emanation is defined as;
The painting The Incredulity of Saint Thomas, by Giovanni Battista Cima da Conegiano is of Thomas reaching into Christ’s wound between his right side ribs. Other wounds are visible on his hands and feet. Christ is central in the painting with Thomas reaching from Christ’s right side toward the wound, testing. He is planted with the back heel raised off the floor, upper body straining forward as though he is being pulled in by the gravity of the wound. The rest of the disciples are gathered around and although they aren’t testing the wound themselves, they are craning to see what Thomas has discovered, perhaps afraid to do what Thomas dares. Gathered in semi-circle, their faces express various states of unease. Should I look? Where should I look? I wonder if I should admire Thomas’s courage or condemn it? In the background is a wall with two tall, thin arched windows, like looking from behind a pair of eyes out over the Italian country side. On the left a road that leads up a hill which also holds a castle that is seen through the right eye. On has to assume that the road will take you to the castle because the eyes show separate scenes that may or may not be connected. Perhaps the road continues over the hill and away from the castle, there is no guarantee that the road leads to shelter. Taking this path is another leap of faith, another investigation. Breath for life is a leap of faith. We inspire without questioning that there will be air enough. Unlike food, which requires a special trip to the fridge, air and our ability to use it is everywhere we live. And yet most acting students fear that they won’t have enough breath, they doubt. They take in huge amounts for fear of running out even though they are surrounded by it; they are literately in the centre of all the air they could ever use or need. Thomas needed to discover for himself that Christ was there, was real, he did not or could not accept the words of others but needed to experience it. The inability to believe without experiencing it directly seems to me the beginning of science, not being cynical but critical. Growing up in the Catholic Church the story of Thomas was used by the nuns to illustrate the futility of incredulity, that the best kind of faith is blind. I could never do that. I would need to put my hand in the wound. Thomas seems to me to be the best kind of Apostle, one who accepts despite doubt, the one who leaps with his eyes wide open. Not blind faith, but visionary. Students who are able to blindly accept do not need us; they can leap by them selves, we are just conduits of information. But the Thomas in our class, oh the Thomas, as teachers, it is for Thomas we exist. If the goals of these lessons are to find ease in their breath-support for phonation, I am asking these students to trust something as insubstantial as breath, to allow air to support their heavy art. To stop being in their technique but to stand on top of it, to trust that the musculature of breathing creates the nominal concept of breath. No wonder they doubt. The wound the students need to put their hands into is their own fear, their own doubts. I need to show them this wound, to have them explore it so their fears can be allayed. It is through exploration of fear that it is dispelled and the lesson can be learned that there is no danger in letting go, but freedom. If I can bring the students to trust the leap, will they continue jumping on their own? Week Two - The Spirit Made Flesh
The moment the nominal becomes phenomenal is infinitesimally large. Vocal onset makes the incorporeal become physical. Like a séance where the medium channels a voice from the other side, the performer uses the emanation of breath to power the glottis into physical action. It is a real act of magic, that moment when the unreal becomes real, the moment of creation, when we make something out of nothing. Why do we desperately try to shape the shapeless? To bring form where there is none? Is the act of creation, of words-of sounds, our bridge to the immortal; our attempt to circumvent the temporal by leaving our mark? The Two Trinities by Bartolome Esteban Murillo depicts the earthly trinity of Joseph, Mary and Christ with and the holy trinity of father son and holy-ghost. The connecting figure is Christ who bridges the void between the spirit and the flesh. God is centre-top surrounded by the angelic order of the cherubim. The Holy Ghost, depicted as a dove is halfway between the world and the heavens. Jesus appears to be about two or three and is standing on the penultimate step of a stairway that appears to lead to heaven. Although a child, he is superior his earthly parents who sit at either side holding his hands. Christ radiates. Why this painting? How we breathe is reflected in how we sound. Murillo‘s painting resonates the hierarchy of the Christian pantheon into the physical universe. The two trinities are bridged by Christ who is part of both worlds. For the performer the bridge moment is the onset of the vocal folds in preparation of sound after inspiring the impulse. If breath orders the thought, phonation cements it. The exercise in lesson four, borrowed freely from Joe Windley, (course leader of the Master of Voice at CSSD) of blindly breathing in an unknown scent is a clear example of how breath is reflected in onset. A ripe Stilton cheese creates an unplanned glottal explosion, orange peel an aspirated sigh, dried rosemary evokes the Dalmatian coast for a young girl from Croatia and a flood of tears accompanies a simultaneous onset, moan and vivid images of home. Why these reactions? Are they predetermined? If we were stuck in a simple clockwork universe of cause and effect, every time we receive the same stimulus what we release will also be the same. But reality is not like clockwork. Alfred North Whitehead, the early 20th century mathematician and philosopher describes reality as a series of moments that arise and disappear or “throbs of existence”. Like individual cells on a cinema reel they only tell a story in relation to each other. It is our relationship to these moments which imparts meaning. Whitehead calls this process. It is through process that reality is created and process by definition is never still. We are forever in movement. This movement, this dance with these moments is ever evolving because we are not separate from it, we are partner. Although we can observe these moments we can not be objective about them. We are connected subjectively, through inspiration and action to the universe; we are part of a system. There are infinite ways in which we can order the stimulus taken in on breath, but breath collapses the infinite and orders it on voice. This is our connection to the whole of creation, gathering, patterning and release. In each breath is a fulcrum on which reality is balanced. Concrescence, the process by which disparate things acquire unity is a wonderful word to use here. Like the Holy trinity of Father, Son and Holy Ghost being one god reflected in the entity of Family, consisting of individuals, breath and onset concresce to form a process that coalesce possibility with reality. Our need to make sense of existence and then express that sense to others is reality dissected, a moving moment. Week Three - Riding the Wave
Are we changing the energy we receive, or are we allowing it to change us? Taking breath through onset and onto sounded words makes impulse concrete. The nature of concrete is that it is amorphous until poured into a mould to shape and harden. It begins as potential shape. If we are open to impulse and allow it to enter, what pours forth is not known until released. We create it, before it was only potential. This creation then becomes the impulse of the next creation and so on until through concrescence, the unity of these individual moments shape beats, scenes and finally a play. Actors are often asked “to be in the moment”. But what does this mean? If you know what you are going to do before you do it, your performance becomes predictable and predictability is the death of acting. Being in the moment demands that you are not predictable, that you do not know what you are going to do next, only what just occurred and what you are after. Yet, in rehearsal each moment is rehearsed over and over again so how can it happen for “the first time”. It is this very repetition that allows freedom. Robert Benedetti in his The Actor at Work talking about repetition sums this up as; …you are able to perform your action without thinking about it, your mind is free to concentrate fully on the objective and to experience what happens “as for the first time.” In other words, because you could “do it in your sleep,” you are able to so it fully awake.The actor must make the unconscious conscious and then wholly unconscious again. The actor trains their instinct so that they can “be in the moment”. This is what technique is and does. Bulkhulzen’s painting shows two ships on the same rough sea. They are both at the mercy of the sea and yet both heading in the same direction. Although their destination is clear the route to it changes with each swell. Off to the side is a skiff also rising and falling with the waves. The sea is rough but the boats are not sinking. In the rough rise the boats cannot know where they will be from one moment to next but they know it will not be below the water line. The skills and experiences of the sailors keep the boats afloat and on course. They do not fight the sea, which they know would be a futile, but ride its waves. The classes this week utilize improvisational acting games that deal with giving and receiving of energy tailored to vocal exploration. Viola Spolin’s work, originally used to bridge the language barriers of diverse immigrants in inner-city Chicago’s housing projects through games, focuses the concentration on problem solving freeing the participants from self consciousness. Like trying to remember a forgotten name or fact by thinking of something else, the game distracts the player, allowing freedom from thinking about what they are going to do by putting attention on what they want. The energy of the game becomes the rough sea upon which the players are tossed. If the student allows, this sea can inform as well as surprise. A question arises; are you changing the energy you receive or are you allowing it to change you? The best acting is reacting. True there are moments when the energy of the scene relies on one actor to make a sharp turn to change the energy, but even these moments arise from what has transpired before. Vocally, if the concentration is on what is being offered and that offer is allowed to infuse the breath with meaning, what comes out will be inevitable. The actor doesn’t have to work to make it happen. The energy will carry each moment with its momentum. By adding awareness on breath, onset and sound during play the performer can identify habitual as well as discovering novel vocal usage. They can also start to realize that technique can free them. Often students, when learning technique want to be in their technique instead of standing on it. Like the boats in the painting they will reach their destination if they allow their technique to carry them, if they don’t they will soon find themselves drowning in it. Week Four - The Living Word
If sound is what makes breath concrete, then words are the mould that sound is poured into. When speaking, does the body reflect the mind or does the mind realize the body? Where do words live? In the western world there is a deep schism between body and mind; most people believing that movement is in the body and speech in the mind. Yet watching people in conversation I have observed that the two work together. When the listener doesn’t understand what is being said the speaker tends to increase the amount of body language they use. They are literately embodying the word. On the other hand when the speaker is not sure what they want to say the body tends to physicalize the word before the mind conceives it. I have used this phenomenon to help actors to deconstruct an action they are playing when they can’t think of it by looking at what their hands are doing. While searching for a word to term the action, the actor’s hands might be punching, pushing, pulling or stroking subconsciously. They are surprised when they look down and see exactly what the action is and befuddled that they couldn’t think of it. Of course their body knew it all along. In the painting The Raising of Lazarus by Sebastiano Del Piombo Jesus’s body reflects the power of the words he is using to raise Lazarus. The King James Version of the bible reports these words as, “Lazarus come out!” a command, and Jesus’s body is reflective of a command, one arm bent and up, the other pointing at Lazarus as if he is channelling the power from heaven through his body. Around Jesus and Lazarus are the citizens of Bethany in various bodies expressing praise to repugnance and the King James reflects words that reflect the bodies. Are these words reactions or realizations? Whose words are missing in the story are Lazarus’s. I wonder what his first words would have been; imbued with words that raised him after four days dead, what would he have said and how would it have sounded? Where did those words live? The story of Lazarus demonstrates the power of words. Mystical texts are full of passages that give the spoken word its due. John 1:1 starts with “in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God”. In Islam and the Judeo-Christian traditions God speaks the universe into existence. The Cabbala (whose tenets include the creation of the world through emanation) uses systems of words that give the speaker supernatural abilities. Many cultures believe that to know the name of another is to have power over them. The Shintoists and Buddhists share in their earliest writings the concept of kotodama, the spiritual power of words that makes and changes reality. Spells become active when they are spoken, when written, only potential. If breath gathers impulse and orders chaos and sound collapses the potential of breath then words shape and sharpen the creation breath starts. Alone sound has meaning, but this meaning is preverbal, emotional. Words can carry emotion but words are also a code with agreed upon specific meanings, a code that only those who know it can crack. Like a magician’s hat that can hold a multitude of items, words pack in them a quantum of information. A word does not unfold slowly in the mind, it suddenly is, and when it is, it carries with it a packet of information that is complete. Electrons when they change quantum state jump from one level of energy to another instantly, there is no journey between the states, no in between; words act in the same way. Words are whole and they contain transformative magic. They can change and animate the bodies and minds of speakers and listeners and collapse distance, making them one. Words bridge divides and transcend time. The saying “sticks and stones will break your bones but words will never hurt you” is so wrong. The pain we carry from childhood is in the names we were called not the spills we took. Conversely, kind and encouraging words, loving words can infuse us with warmth and can be called upon when needed for strength. The classes this week explore where the words come from. The first class uses gibberish as a foreign language spoken by a student who is playing an expert on some subject supplied by the audience. Meanwhile another student is fluent in that language and will translate for the audience. What the student playing the expert will discover is that although the words in their mind are clear, the gibberish stops that clarity being expressed when speaking so the body will begin to augment the words in compensation. The translator soon discovers that by imitating the expert’s body language the words, no matter how illogical will arise from movement. So for the expert the words are in the mind and embodied and for the translator the words arise from the body and realized by the mind. So where do the words live? This kind of exercise demonstrates that the word lives where it needs to live given the situation, but both mind and body are necessary for communication. Words are made physically through breath, onset, phonation, resonance and articulation, but mental process is also involved, otherwise the words being said would make no sense given the situation. The challenge is how to find the union between body and mind so that the words arise given the need. The next major exercise addresses this by devising in small groups a creation myth to be told with sound and movement. After the groups show their pieces, text is introduced to the groups to be incorporated. What deepens this process is that while devising a myth about creation, the students are exploring how they create words. The results of adding words will vary, some presentations not changing their movement but finding choreographed sections that seem to connect to the text, others whose whole myth changes as the words redefine the movement; and combinations of both. Through this process the students are able to put the two elements found in the gibberish scene together and find wholeness. The word lives in the whole person, where it originates depends on the situation. No matter where it originates, both body and mind are involved. The schism of movement being of the body and voice of the mind can be closed. Voice and movement both start with breath. If the students discover the connection breath makes between the body and mind, the words they speak will come from all of them. Allow the breath to order the chaos, the onset to reflect the impulse through sound and the creation of the word will be true. Week Five - Release in Space
If space is infinite, then we are always at its centre. (This week’s classes ideally would have fallen into week six) Why is it that as soon as students who are wonderfully released and resonant in a classroom cut off this connection as soon as they enter into theatre spaces? It’s because they see themselves as separate from the space. In fact they often see space as a powerful enemy that needs to be forcefully conquered. And yet space is the very thing we as teachers of voice are asking students to find, open and use in them selves. Antoinette Walsh, a fellow student on the Master of Voice course while talking about space said; “Just as we train the space of the actor’s resonating cavities, actors train the resonance of the theatre space”. If the students can stop thinking of theatrical space as separate and instead as a fourth resonating cavity to be used with the pharyngeal, oral and nasal they posses, how would the paradigm shift? Can they begin to see that small shifts in thought, posture, breath-support, laryngeal and vocal tract configurations that affect their voice, can be magnified by the fourth resonating cavity? Just by changing how an actor thinks about sound in space has a huge impact on the audience’s perceived quality of that sound. Asking a student to stand on the stage and send text to the back-row centre, and then asking them, without changing anything else, to be at the centre of a sphere of sound that contains that back-row centre seat, students sitting at the ends of rows hear a distinct shift in quality of the voice which they describe as fuller, warmer, richer and rounder; they feel included. The student on stage has only been asked to no longer think of the space as separate from them, something they have to transverse, but to be part of it. Similar amplifications of vocal quality through fine adjustments can be found physically by changing posture, releasing the stomach or unlocking the knees. Almost anything you ask the student to do will result in a vocal change intensified by space that the other students will be able to perceive. Rembrandt’s A Women Bathing in a Stream depicts a woman wading out into the water starting to pull off her clothing and immerse herself. She is testing the water’s temperature, its properties before she dives in. The look on her face is one of relaxed anticipation, of looking forward to the plunge with pleasure. Although the woman is unnamed and may be Rembrandt’s mistress Hendrickje Stoffels, the elaborate red and gold cloak on the bank suggests a biblical or perhaps mythological figure. In religion and myth water has ritualistic elements; it has the ability to cleanse, to transport, to transform, and to give life. It is used to baptise and in last rites. It is sacred. Theatre is the child of ritual and storytelling, or the sacred and the profane. The resonating cavity of the theatre reflects this. Placing the student upstage and then asking them to walk to the downstage edge of the apron while speaking, those in the house detect a shift in sound. Good directors, knowingly or instinctually use this. As in Catholic mass where the transubstantiation takes place behind the alter and the homily in front, big theatrical moments such as those dealing with supernatural elements or demanding huge emotions happen behind the proscenium arch and asides or direct addresses happen in front of it. Being upstage takes advantage of resonance in the extra spaces of the flies over head and the wings on the sides being focused by the opening of the proscenium arch or alternatively minimizing the resonance for a more naturalistic sound by standing in front of the arch. Students quickly connect where they stand in theatrical space to where they are placing their own voice in their body from the lower chest resonances (upstage) to the higher head ones (downstage). This phenomenon works, to different degrees in any space. By being, as Michael McCallion in The Voice Book calls “…the centre of our voice”, the actor is defining and using the space as opposed to being separate from it. Space is no longer a fortification to be stormed vocally but an extension. Audience, performer, production and play become united through ritual and narrative transforming the space. The difference between performing and visual arts is that the dance between visual art and its audience is a solo act; the Mona Lisa hasn’t changed over time, we have. Performing arts, however are temporal; their dance is a partnership where both the audience and the performer change; each Hamlet is unique as the audience watching. This creation, the nightly dance between audience and the constructed birth and death of a separate reality, moves to the tune of words. The words of the play when released into space ritualistically transform, through concretion the theatre space into another world, the world of the play. This ritual creation of the world of the play, this immersion in the space by actor and audience, like ritualistic immersion into water is inherently sacred. In his article The Disintegration of Primordial Worlds and the Recombinant Nature of Ritual Space (Vivens Homo, December 1997) Lawrence E. Sullivan writes: (…)that a sacred space, empowered by its rituals, makes present again, in some strong sense, entirely other worlds. Sacred space recalls to life the unique qualities of space and time and the distinctive modes of being that had withdrawn from full view. (…)Sacred space plays a key role in introducing an ambivalence, uncertainty, or systematic doubt into the devotee, a doubt concerning the reality one can safely attribute to existence in time.The ritual creation of the world of the play can, for a period of time, recreate worlds that were lost. Through release of words the actor is not only transcending space but time itself. This transcendence has the power to transform not only space, time and audience but the actor: While acting as the controlling ritualist, one's historical existence is so recontextualized (…)that, ironically, one's individual meaning and significance risk seeming dwarfed by comparison(…)relate this uncertainty provoked by ritual space to stochasm, a randomizing feature of human thought that provokes imaginative recombinations of realities and thus stimulates change, creativity, and vitality.What Sullivan is talking about here is what we often refer to “giving yourself over to the play…” or more specifically in voice, “…to the words”. To be able to stop thinking of space as something outside of yourself but as possible extension of self, as a fourth resonating space in order to put your mind in the minds of others across space and time through words and find communion, will lead to the loss of one’s own sense of time, of space, of ego. Loosing yourself in the space will get you out of the way of imagination allowing “change, creativity and vitality” vocally. Theatres have a feeling to them. There is a presence, a certain ontological weight to them and like places of worship they tend to be built on top of older theatres because this weight attracts. Good actors feel this when they stand on the stage and audiences respond to it. Actors can use the weight of the space as a source of power if they are able to give over to it, to release into it, to be part of it. When everything is going well both performers and audience are transported through this space to another reality, the world of the play. Small physical and mental adjustments in the performer can translate through space to huge changes in vocal quality. By simply unlocking their knees, they may unlock an entire world. Week Six - The Shape of Words
The words live is in the whole person given the need and situation but where they leave is through the mouth. If the eyes are the windows to the soul then the voice is the car that carries that soul out of the garage and down the street to visit others. Each word has a distinct shape that is the result of the individual phonemes that give that word meaning. This shape can impact the listener both mentally and physically. Why can words chill, fan a fire, cause uproars, nauseate, make us bubble with laughter? How is it they affect our body? Words have shape that can be used corporeally. This tactile reaction is more than just the meaning of the word unfolding in the mind, it is the result of the listener’s body responding to the sonic properties of the phonemes and how those phonemes are vibrating the air. Whisper a sweet nothing in a lover’s ear and feel them shiver. Watch a child freeze as a parent raises their voice in warning. Words not only affect those who hear them but also those who say them. The corpus of our vocabulary reflects essentially who we are, where we have been and what we have done. The shape of words and sound they carry are haptic. In the Life section of the Guardian (09/06/05) an article written by the University of Central London neurophysiologist Mark Lythgoe titled The World at our Fingertips he tells a story about a man who born blind, later was able to see. What is remarkable about this man was that when at a museum a display of a lathe was behind glass and because he couldn’t touch it he couldn’t see it. “…He was effectively blind to objects he hadn’t touched: he had to make the connection between the feel and the image of the lathe before he could see it.”This suggests that the connection between sight and touch is intimate, that what and how we see is somehow influenced by our connection to shapes. In Van Gogh’s Chair we have an essential combination of shape and sight. This painting seems so simple. It might as well scream chair as it could be mistaken for nothing else. The shape is Platonic, the form transcendent or idealized, it emanates “chair”. Yet it also tells a story. The pipe and tobacco on the seat promises a return or tells of leaving. Or perhaps Van Gogh is alluding to psalm 102,1-3 “Hear my prayer O Lord…For my days are consumed like smoke.” This makes sense given this painting s response to Gauguin’s Armchair which is inspired by Luke Filde’s engraving The Empty Chair-Gad’s Hill which is of Charles Dickens’s armchair, drawn on the day of his death. Both Gauguin and Van Gogh turned to literature to fuel and shape concepts born from their imaginations. The tension set up between the eternal chair shape and the transient smoke is reflected in finding the perfect word, releasing it knowing it will only hang in the air for a moment and then be gone. Like breath, words can only be held for a short time before being released. Van Gogh’s Chair captures the eternal and the temporal. Onomatopoeia means the formation of words in imitation of natural sound. The shape of the onomatopoeic in the mouth bypasses the brain and transfers movement directly into the body. The first lesson this week takes advantage of this movement by tying it to Laban’s efforts. The students explore the shape of sound through a series of onomatopoetic words connected to the eight Laban efforts. This connection between sound and movement serves as the basis of “being in the body” for voice work. Mark Lythgoe begins his Guardian article: In 1972 John Berger pointed out in his book Ways of Seeing that “seeing comes before words”. That is sight before language. But in terms of your development, touch comes before both. In fact, it may well be through the haptic sense that you learn to know and find your place in the world…As early as eight weeks into gestation you are able to respond to a gentle touch on the cheek. By twelve 12 you begin sucking your thumb…At 32 weeks you are able to decode a rich array of sensory information from the world in the form of temperature, pressure, and pain and touch is the medium for this knowledge.By using the inherent physicality of onomatopoeia to bring the body into the voice the students can begin to understand how shape is reflected in sound. The word spatter not only sounds like the thing it describes but carries in its phonemes the shape. Spatter, through its opening fricative and then scattered plosives, like Van Gogh’s chair, captures the essence of the thing. Words that are not onomatopoetic also can convey shape. Mound takes a journey through sound that transcribes the shape of a mound by arising from a closed phoneme at the front of the mouth, rising up and back and then announcing its end abruptly with another closed phoneme further back. Circle ends where it begins. The Spatialization of Form Hypothesis, coined by linguist George Lakoff offers a possible explanation for this phenomenon through the birth of language. According to this theory language is spatial. It states: … the acquisition of grammatical competence occurs when linguistic information is routed to and processed by spatial centers in the brain. Specifically, it is claimed that linguistic expressions are processed as if they were objects with internal structural configurations. That is, they are processed in terms of certain basic image schemas, namely part-whole and linkage schemas critical to the recognition of the configurations which define complex physical objects.Words echo the physical shapes they describe. In the Lythgoe’s Guardian article he relates research that supports this hypothesis: Imagine that you are wearing a blindfold and holding two shapes, one like a piece of shattered glass with many jagged edges, the other a softly rounded blob. I’m going to give you two nonsense words, “booba” and “kiki”, and I want you to associate each with a shape. My guess is that you would partner “booba” with the rounded shape and “kiki” with the jagged one. If you did, you’d be one of the 98% who would do the same. (…) Could this simple representation of the characteristics of shapes that we have touched (or seen) as sounds or words be the building block for language as a form of communication?If words have shape, can the release of sound on words also contain shape? Sound is both physical and conceptual. As demonstrated in the lessons in the theatre space simply by changing the notion of how sound is released, perception of that sound will change because the physics of it acoustics change. The string exercise allows the students to experience how they can change the shape of sound with partner. By sending text through the string and then, in turn drawing the words through the string, sound becomes objectified and manipulatable. It also opens up the possibility that the shapes of words can exist separate from our selves. If the shape of the word can be found in partner and brought into the world of the play this way, will it have a larger physical affect on the partner? And if it does, can this same effect be used to vocally enrich the physio-acoustic experience of the audience? Week Seven - The Weaving of Text
What is text without a voice? Ink. Words and sound have shape. So does text. Text comes from the Latin textus which is also the root for textile. Textus has as one its definitions tissue; meaning: …a rich ornamented cloth usually of silk interwoven with gold or silver threads : a fine lightweight fabric often sheer or semitransparent;Imagine “a fine lightweight fabric often sheer or semitransparent” woven by the actors, floating out and over the audience where it wafts gently down draping them. As layer upon layer of the tissue build one on top of the other the tapestry of the play is created. Domenichino’s strangely moving fresco Apollo Killing the Cyclops depicts the Cardinal of Pietro Aldobrandini’s dwarf standing next to a tapestry recounting Apollo exacting revenge on the Cyclops for supplying the thunderbolts that Zeus used to slay Apollo’s son, Aesculapius. At first glance the contrast between the dwarf and the tapestry seems to be comic, but further study reveals that the tapestry is hung in front of a barred window (which probably illuminated it at certain points in the day) to which this dwarf has been chained for some unknown offence and our perspective shifts. The contrast is no longer comic but cruel. He is being shamed standing next to the idealized beauty of Apollo and the giant stature of the Cyclops. Like an aging parent of four forced to stand naked next to a fashion model, the tension between the idealized and the flawed creates an initial queasiness, turning into pity and then fear that we may be so compared. And yet taken as a whole, the fresco tells an engaging and bittersweet story. The dwarf is, although different than the tapestry, not separate from it. They depend on each other to reveal their true natures. Alone both the dwarf and the tapestry would be interesting objects to look at but together their contrast leads to a complexity that magnifies their qualities. It is in context with each other that the story is revealed and movement achieved. Taken in as a whole, the aesthetic judgements of brilliance and repulsiveness blur and merge, revealing true beauty in their humanity. The women who make Persian rugs sing as they weave, these songs have been passed down the matriarchal line for centuries. Each rug has its own song and each is literally sung into existence. The weft and warp of the weave echo the notes and meanings of the song, working together to create a unique object world renowned for its artistry and craftsmanship. What actor does not desire the same? Sometimes actors (and I include myself here) feel like the dwarf in the fresco; small and ungainly next to the words of some great dramatist. Yet if the audience was only interested in the idealized it would stay home and read the bloody play. They come to the theatre to see the actor struggle to create the weave. Resonance and articulation weave words, words weave denotation and connotation into meaning, and actor and audience weave the experience between them into theatre. The lessons this week investigate this weaving. Most actors learn their lines visually. Strange since lines are meant to be spoken. No one knows for sure how old language is. Some paleo-anthropologists argue for a million years based on fossil skull casts. Neanderthal remains have been found that include a hyoid bone indistinguishable from our own. Written language appears relatively late, less than 10,000 years ago, and literacy for the majority perhaps one hundred years ago. The amount of time language has been recorded is a very small portion in relation to its use. What happens if an actor learns the lines aurally? Kirsten Linklater’s exercises termed “dropping in” carries the work of Cicely Berry forward with a series of exercises that allow actors to learn lines in this way. By hearing the lines for the first time instead of reading them, the actor is freed from the chains of the page. The actor also experiences the words and lines one at a time, as they were meant. By not knowing where the words will lead, speech unfolds idea by idea until enough has been said. Working in this way with partner also forces the actor to listen to what is being said instead of reading ahead to what the response will be. Visual memorization creates a spatial relationship to the where the word is placed on the page. Aural memorization allows the words to reside in the physical actions of speaking and listening, the intended functions of communication. Like viewing Domenichino’s painting where the true story is revealed the longer you look, dropping in exercises directs the attention on to a concentrated level of listening that reveals what is really being said. By not knowing what you are going to say next you are free to just listen, to inspire the words being offered. Often actors are so concerned with their own lines that their impulse to speak comes from their words instead of their partner’s. If they are able to truly listen and trust that the words will be given to them as needed can they let go of needing where they are going and instead discover what they weave as they go along? Can they hear when their tapestry is finished? The acoustic threads of the actor’s weave are resonance and articulation. By simply sounding the vowels and then the consonants of a text the actor is able to separate the threads of the text, discovering as they go along the physical, emotional and intellectual qualities they possess. Then the sounds are rewoven into the whole word but with new awareness. The words become richer in complexity which reveals a second set of threads; denotative and connotative meaning. Like Domenichino who uses the juxtaposition of tapestry and dwarf to reinforce impact, the actor’s connotative connection to the writer’s denotative meaning creates a unique tapestry each time the text is sounded. This fresh re-weaving of meaning through sound, the mix of the ideal and the flawed, or sacred and profane connect text, performer and audience who keep coming back to see plays that have been produced for hundreds, even thousands of years. Current theories of physics searching for Einstein’s dream of combining the fundamental forces of nature into a single, elegant unified theory are pinning their hope on string theory. String theory states (and this is a great simplification) that every point of space is occupied by an incredibly tiny thread (about a millionth of a billionth of a billionth of a billionth of a centimetre) that, depending on its resonant quality, defines reality. The implications of this theory are profound. Rick Groleau’s article on the PBS Nova Elegant Universe website states: (…) absolutely everything in the universe—all of the particles that make up matter and forces—is comprised of tiny vibrating fundamental strings. Moreover, every one of these strings is identical. The only difference between one string and another, whether it's a heavy particle that is part of an atom or a massless particle that carries light, is its resonant pattern, or how it vibrates. All objects, not just fundamental strings, have resonant patterns associated with them. Pluck the string of a violin and you hear mainly one tone. This is the string's fundamental resonant pattern, or frequency. And the instrument's resonance doesn't stop there. The body of the violin has resonant frequencies, which work to amplify the sound created by the vibrating string. (…) With the strings in string theory, however, the vibrational pattern determines what kind of particle the string is. One resonant pattern makes it a photon, for example, while another makes it a heavy particle found within the nucleus of an atom.The universe, according to this theory is tapestry of resonance. Each point in space is occupied by a string vibrating a note. Reality is created through the weave of these resonant threads and their connection to each other. Sound is defined by Daniloff, Shuckers and Feth in The Physiology of Speech and Hearing, as “…a disturbance travelling through an elastic medium”. This disturbance is vibrational. The elastic medium that connects the words to audience is not only the air set into sympathetic vibration with voice but the actor who is willing to stand chained, small and ungainly next to what he weaves. When the tapestry is weaved freely and fully the actor is no longer separate from the universe, they are the universe. |
