There is a brief moment when all there is in a man’s mind and soul and spirit is reflected through his eyes, his hands, his attitude. This is the moment to record.

Yousuf Karsh

Yousuf Karsh was a portrait photographer. Born in Armenia and forced to leave during the Armenian genocide, he moved to Canada and made his living capturing faces in his little black box, and printing them out for the world to see. The subjects of his photographs include Mohammed Ali, the Kennedys, Albert Einstein, Grace Kelly, Ernest Hemingway, Fidel Castro, Audrey Hepburn and even Pablo Picasso himself. Karsh was the creator behind the iconic images we see of these giants of history. His quest was to find the inner secret hidden within every man and woman, and to reveal it. He would put his subject in front of the camera and wait for that revelation which would come, if it came at all, “in a small fraction of a second with an unconscious gesture, a gleam of the eye, a brief lifting of the mask that all humans wear to conceal their innermost selves from the world.” It was in this brief moment that Yousuf Karsh would bring down the shutter of his bellows Calumet and immortalise this flash of spirit before the veil was dropped, and it retreated back into the murky shadows of pretence.

In many ways over the last few weeks, I have felt like a photographer, only this time without my Nikon F3. The moments of greatest importance for me have been neither the grandest nor the loudest, but more the quiet, magical moments of minutiae that have shown me brief glimpses of the spirit out on that black rehearsal floor. The moments of fleeting eye contact, a brief touch of hands in passing, a slight smile in the crook of a mouth – these are the things that excite me most about this cast and this process.

Our exercises with Kali have been fun and loud and boisterous, and we have indeed learned a great deal about the vast world of the body. I wish I could say that I remember everything we worked on. I do not. There are entire exercises that even now, as I chase after them, slip from my mind – I don’t anticipate them ever coming back. I don’t remember all our catchphrases. I don’t remember all the movement exercises. I certainly don’t remember all our titles. But I do remember Thomas’ spit on the ground, his eyes growing wide, questioning, and asking me whether that moment could support our laughter. I remember Jaya’s furrowed eyebrows as she demanded I give her back her morphine. I remember watching Sam and Mike work the scene in which Astrov gloats about kissing Yelena, and I remember the betrayal in Phil’s eyes as he looked at me in that moment. “How could you?” We were just two observers, two actors watching a scene, but the moment grew. Suddenly, I saw how that kiss will have consequences for everybody. I saw betrayal and heart ache become real things that happen in the real world. A world apart from and so a part of Chekhov’s words. I remember Nick’s breath on my nose as we moved across the floor, pushing and pulling each other, repelling and yet holding on with all our might because we were afraid that to separate was to break something beautiful. I remember walking in a circle holding hands with Ashley, singing a song I didn’t know and feeling safe in the warmth of her hand, knowing that between us, we’d come up with a tune that suited us. I remember Faye glancing up at me from the floor through a mess of hair, eyes full to the brim with child-like urgency, asking “Do I look stupid?” I remember a suspension with Aurelia, a reach towards Sam, and a quiet and tender audition with Cynthia.

All these micro moments  are surges that come and go in an instant, that reveal themselves only for as long as it takes for them to touch you, and then they are gone. For me, this is what acting is about.  It is about breaking through the Act to the magma of spirit beneath, and hopefully catching a glimpse of its light. It is about the moments that make your heart skip a beat, and cause your throat to catch. In a way, it’s almost like falling in love.

Jeff, Kali, Jules – you may all deplore the fact that I cannot write a blog post about any one activity or exercise that I will remember and be able to repeat. But what the last few weeks have given me have meant something different. I have had the privilege of recording a few moments of soul for myself, and storing them in my little black box in the back of my mind, just as Yousuf Karsh did with his camera. I have seen life, and I am learning how to keep searching for it. I am learning when the exact moment is to close the shutter, to grasp the spirit of my fellow actors and hopefully to soar with them for a few glorious moments.

If there’s any one thing that I would like anyone to get from reading this blog post, it would be this: the next time we are all together in a room, working in calm or in clamour, try to be a photographer. Seek the spirit and hold on to it as long as it will allow. Then, and only then, do we cease to pretend.

I’m going to start by saying how impressed I am with the blog posts that precede mine. Reading about what everyone took away from this process outlines one of the most rewarding aspects for me, which was the sharing of experiences, and learning from one another. For this and many other reasons, I found Kali’s three-week workshop to be hugely gratifying, and I am extremely thankful that we were able to have her here. I think her presence has impacted our production for the better, and I am excited to see exactly where her influence is manifested in the performances.

It is hard for me to put my finger on what exactly I learned from this whole experience, given that I am still in the process of putting it all together in a way that is meaningful and effective for my role as Marina. I definitely think the emphasis on pure physicality was one of the most valuable lessons for me. The stripping away of the “brain” (i.e. the part of us that wants to analyze every word of the script and turn it into an action or a feeling or a state of mind) in favor of the more instinctive, lizard-brain, physical part of ourselves helped me a lot with understanding how to approach a role and embody a character. In order to present a character in a believable way, we need to find some middle ground with it, some overlap we have that allows us to enter into their world and respond to situations and stimuli the way they would, without losing that part of ourselves that makes it “real”. We need to understand them on some level, and I think the physical level is the first place to start. It is the foundation. Once we have that, we can build on it, add complexity, give it shape and depth. I feel like what I’m saying sounds really abstract. But trust me it makes total sense in my head. I just don’t know if my Kali train of thought is agreeing with my Duke student train of thought. Hopefully you all get what I mean, in some sense.

I think every exercise Kali had us do was beneficial, and I learned something new every time. From acting out scenes with our fingers, to gradually using every part of our body, to all breathing in unison, to holding something in our right hand that we’re afraid of and something in our left that we’re excited by, to giving titles to certain actions… Everything was valuable and impactful, and I think we are a stronger cast as a result of it all. I am confident that we are starting our blocking, etc. rehearsals in a great place. Now, as a result of writing this blog post, I am convinced that my brain has turned into jello and is now dribbling out of my ears, which will actually make it pretty hard for me to focus on something like financial accounting, which is what I need to be studying right now…unfortunately… So that’s it for now. See you all on Wednesday!

This year in Uncle Vanya I approach theater for the first time and with a fresh view. Acting has always been something I liked from a distance, something I knew I could be fond of, but other passions seem to have taken over my time and I now wish my encounter with this art could have been earlier. However during these three short workshops with the mesmerizing Kali Quinn, I made the link between theater and another passion I always had: dance.
Simply put, dance is an art of rhythmic body movement to music. In dance the body is pushed into sequences of define shapes and forms, working on the strength, the speed, the control and the coherence. Dance movements can often be unnatural, but it is through unfamiliarity of movements that you gain more conscience of your body. In this movement workshop, we were guided to let free of our bodies through warm ups and all types of exercises, in order to gain this conscience. However in my understanding, we had a different starting point and took a different path compared to my experience with dance. Less as a confined exercise of shaping the body and more of a personal exploration, everyone created their own forms and “choreography” from what they were feeling. Movements were guided and the extension of ideas and emotions, sometimes imposed by ourselves and sometimes imposing us. For example one of our warm up exercises where you put something you are exited about in one hand and something you are afraid of in the other, and feel how the body changes while concentrating on either one of them, and a common observation is the hand holding the thing we are afraid of is always heavier. An idea takes transform to an inner reaction which then takes physical form. Naturally, excitement makes you have high expectations, so physically expressed in elongating the body upward and suspending a long breath in the chest. However fear gives you a ball of pain in the stomach, which adds a huge weight and pulls the pelvis downwards.
As Kali repeated in class for several times, “What is true in the physical world is true in the metaphysical world, and vise versa.” Besides working from a state of unawareness to awareness, we also started with the body to get to the inner world of the character. On the last exercise did on the last workshop we had to represent our character in each act with one pose and a line, and this is the exercise that help me the most in building my character. I had difficulties to place Maria’s representations in the play. I once thought because she appears and talks few through out the play that I had little materiel to work with and a huge blur. However all the readings we did before as a group and watching others putting in place their character through out the workshop exercises imprint unconsciously many information about my characters’ personality. Putting myself into the body of the character brought to the surface the general understanding I had for my character to specific manners. I have never worked that way around in the past, and surprisingly I got more out of it then.
I had doubt about how to model and to perform my character with the little presence in the play. But during the workshop watching others work I learned how to make my presence important while not being in the heart of the action. The exterior body expression in important in acting, but the source of all actions, intention and performance in general is the universe each comedian builds for them. To help myself maintain in the role, I tend to think all the characters on the same dimension, their life in linearity, and the play as a zoom in of the picture. My character is a part of the play but center of her life.
This workshop is eyes opening for my first contact with theater. I am glade to have such amazing opportunities to work with this group of people that constantly pushes me to be at their height and wanting to be as good. I not only want to thank Kali for all I’ve learn in the workshop, but also every single one in the class, from whom I have learned as much.

If you’re nice enough to read this post–which I realize is long AF–know beforehand that I take a multi-paragraph detour that will, I promise, return back to Vanya. If you really want to go straight to the Vanya stuff, skip to the asterisks(***):

Sibyl Kempson, the New York playwright who spent a two-plus week residence at Duke for the New Works Lab Theater–of which I was a part–, took a very minimalist approach with respect to the direction of her experimental, free-association play-in-progress, Let Us Now Praise Susan Sontag. Especially in the earlier stages of the rehearsal process, when the text was still new to us, she was very hands-off. She didn’t do any line readings for us, she didn’t give us any guidelines for physical or emotional “character traits,” and she left blocking and scenic interpretation largely in the hands of the ensemble. Even near the end of the process, when presumedly the actors had grasped meaning within the text on their own, she only occasionally intervened, and then mostly to shift the blocking for the sake of stage picture, continuity, or various presentational aspects not observable by those onstage.

As I understand it, Kempson took this hands-off approach partly because she herself admitted to not having all the answers, and partly because of her own philosophy on the artificiality of acting and performance. If I were to describe some of her views on acting, it would be like this:

Performance is by nature at risk of becoming artificial. Character choices, imagined circumstances, the elements of make-believe and pretend… These things can hold back a performance and increase the distance between playwright, theater company, and audience. Additionally, if the director/playwright exerts too much control upon the actors and their performance of a piece–by telling them how to perform their roles, for example–the meaning of the performance is then injected into a piece from without, rather than being born from within.

As a member of the cast for the staged reading, I at first struggled to connect to this unorthodox (avant-garde?) production process. I wanted more information about the play, it’s meaning, trajectory. I felt the absence of a directorial crutch…

The process of rereading and re-performing the text over and over, however, resolved many of the questions I had about the performance. I learned more about what I was doing just by doing it, not by asking questions. By moving in the space and using the text as a kind of audio-guide, I simply began to embody my role by happenstance. It felt very natural.

Kempson did not explicitly command us to adopt any specific character traits during our performance. She did, however, make a comment regarding individual performance that immediately made me think of our performance of Vanya. She said….

***

A Fluid Cast

“I want you to toe the line between being in character and out of character. An audience member shouldn’t quite be able to tell the difference.” -Sibyl Kempson

Now, I’m not sure whether we want the lines between our bohemian-actor-roles and our Uncle-Vanya-roles to be quite so blurred; I think use of onstage costume changes are partly there to emphasize and underline the shift in physicality between offstage and onstage personas. Nevertheless, the sentiment behind Kempson’s direction feels like it applies to our production. In Uncle Vanya on 42nd Street, the NY ensemble “toes the line” between character and actor from the moment they appear onscreen. And in the pre-script opening scene of our production at Duke University, I think we toe this line from the moment we “enter the rehearsal space.”

It’s this theme of seamlessness… I keep coming back to it during the rehearsal process. When, at the end of the movement workshop series with the wonderful Kali Quinn, we were asked what amazed us most about the process, I said:

What amazed me most was the seamlessness with which our cast transitioned from a casual, pre-rehearsal group atmosphere to the intense, focused, and emotionally vulnerable unit that we consistently formed during our process.

I remember playing around in a pseudo-devised theater club in high school, where we did similar movement exercises (though not in such detail) as we did in Kali’s workshop. I don’t ever remember feeling so close to the cast during such a process.

I mean, the machines we made with our bodies! We were fully interlocking gears, which ground together to make sound… An assembly line for feeling and experience and action.

Surely, the movement workshops solidified the sensation of cast unity that we felt in the very first group audition on the first day of class. But what of individual character work? Where did Kali leave each of us?

Breaking: Body Answers Head’s Questions 

As for Sam and I’s collective understanding, and thus my own understanding, of the role of Uncle Vanya, I actually ended the process with more questions than with which I began. Which is a good thing, in this case. I came in with the simple question (and I put this question in my left hand, because it scared me):

How does Vanya manifest in my body?

Such a simple question. Too simple, I think. Unanswerable on paper. But because Kali was able to separate the elements of physicality (for the sole purpose of, as she said to us on the last day, uniting them with a stronger adhesive for a finished product), I now have broken this question up into many smaller questions. The first few questions that free associate to the surface:

How does Vanya open his hand? What is the Vanya finger puppet? —- (clammy, not quite arthritic but red-and-white-knuckled, cracks his joints too often out of boredom)

When he ridicules the professor in Act 1, where does he feel from? —-(the head, so as to entertain with intellect; but he feels the recoil in the hips, although he lounges on the bench so as to conceal the intensity of his pain)

How does Vanya sleep? —- (snores, apneal, shoulder tucked in the crick of his right arm)

Kali’s work made me a more conscious actor. I can identify many more of the choices available to me, and I feel much more in control of my body. I mean, just having such questions at my disposal… Is. Overwhelming. So many toolboxes. Before this process, I don’t think I would have A) have ever taken such questions seriously or B) have tried to answer these questions with my body and not my head.

Sure, if you’ve been in a couple shows, you’ve learned to “try leading with your _____” or “imagine that your character lives in your ______.” These little tricks are great starting points, but Kali showered us with complexity, duality. High-low pitch for gestures, two different rhythms in each half of your body, separate volumes for each line… I feel like every new term is a musical scale that you have to go home and practice and play around with everyday until it becomes natural.

(Finally) Feeling At Home in Vanya

It’s so great when everything feels natural. You know what I’m sick and tired of? Playing a character that I have to force myself into, one that feels distant from my own sense of self.

At the start of the class period, when I saw Sam auditioning as Uncle Vanya, when I heard him play in our read through, when I saw what he brought to movement workshop… I was very intimidated. I questioned whether I was well-suited for the role:

I asked, “Am I even like Vanya as a real person? Wouldn’t this be much easier if I was like Vanya in real life?” The answer doesn’t matter, I’ve decided. And, the question is flawed in itself. By describing the role of Vanya and my own personality as two entities that are solid, permanent, and predetermined, I’ve inherently created a fixed gap between the two points. Instead, I have both the option to move closer to my vision of Vanya on my own, or simply bring the vision of Vanya closer to my own sense of self.

Really, it’s the case that both options are available to me. I can blend elements from my understand of the character with my own physicality. Something I really want to do is give Vanya an injection of 21st youth, of real teenage fever and power (hey, I’m still 19 at heart!). I envision Vanya as a 47 year old teenager, anyways:

My absolute favorite moment from the workshop was when I got the privilege to play around with a piece of Vanya’s text (“Lit from within? That’s a cruel thing to say.”)…

Say it from the head, then the heart, then the gut. Now move it through all three places in order–head to heart to gut–during a single line reading.

When I moved into the gut, I remember a specific physicality I had. I was placing my hands on my high thighs, fingers laid flat across the inseam, elbows bent, a little crouch in the knees, shoulders back… I simultaneously felt like I was laying down smack in some kind of rap battle (the comedy) and yanking a knife out of my abdomen (the tragedy).

It was intense, yes, but something about that moment was relaxing. I didn’t leave that rehearsal feeling drained, as if I had pretended to be someone I wasn’t for three hours. Instead, I was energized. I didn’t feel like a character stitched together out of logic; I felt seamless.

Thank you, Kali.

-Thomas