Action and Intention

Doing the fundamentals

I had a hiatus last week. Partly the UK bank holiday and partly the letting go of the production of Boudica by Tristan Bernays, which I directed at Falmouth University. A confluence of circumstances meant that Boudica was the first production I have directed for five years. For the last thirty years or so I don’t think a single year has gone by without me directing at least one production and most years several. All of that contributed to making this production a bit more special and I think I needed a moment to put that in place in my head.

What it has also made me do is thing about fundamentals more. Last year my department at Falmouth University went through the periodic review process that happens around every five years in all universities. That means re-evaluating and re-writing our courses. We did them all at once. Here at Falmouth my subject of Theatre Arts is part of the Academy of Music and Theatre Arts. We have BA (Hons) courses in Acting, Dance and Choreography, Musical Theatre, Technical Theatre and Theatre and Performance. I teach mostly on BA Acting.

The review process forces us to consider what we are teaching, why we are teaching it and how we are teaching it. And wider circumstances do change. For Acting, my current thinking is that the fundamentals don’t change but how we encounter them and therefore, to an extent at least, what they mean does. A big part of that is generational. In other words, when I was a student I was taught in certain ways and the fundamentals came to mean certain things to me. The world has changed and so have students. So the ways we teach need to adapt.

This year, and I am speaking in academic years here so we are close to the end of this one, I began by teaching a re-written set of classes in acting fundamentals. I was teaching the Stanislavsky based classes. For those who may not be actors, Stanislavsky was a Russian actor, director and teacher in the first three decades of the 20th century. His work dominates approaches to acting to this day for reasons I may well delve into in the future. There is also a lot of questioning of whether the dominance of approaches directly and indirectly associated with Stanislavsky is a good thing to which I will also return.

There are a lot of exercises that are either directly Stanislavsky or are devised by other actors and teachers following his principles. These exercises and approaches have dominated acting and actor training in the UK since around the 1960s. It is entirely possible to take the view that Stanislavsky did not actually invent anything but rather codified and described what was already true about how to act well. It is also entirely possible to take the view that his ideas are now so engrained that they simply appear to be true precisely because they have become so dominant. If you are an acting geek (I definitely am) then these are fascinating conversations. If you are a student or young actor trying to figure things out for yourself you are probably less concerned, at least for the time being, about where it all comes from and much more concerned with whether it can help you or not. That is entirely as it should be.

For some time now it has seemed to me that the most fundamental things about acting are action and intention. Straight away, if we want to go the acting geek route, there are lots of things to say about what words we use. Objective, task, activity. What has and hasn’t translated from the Russian? But let’s save that for another day too. What we probably care most about is what is the fundamental concept behind the word and what does it mean in practice.

When I was training at East 15 Acting School in the UK in the 1980s tutors would say things like “acting is all about action”. The clue was in the title, they said. We would nod and maybe write a note down, but it didn’t sound like something we could use. Similarly tutors would talk about the importance of understanding and playing our character’s objective - the word used in the original translation of Stanislavsky’s work made in the 1930s. I distinctly remember finding this confusing. Among other things the word objective sounded weirdly cold, almost managerial or business orientated. That is one of the reasons that to this day I prefer the word intention.

At its most simple I would say one way to describe what an actor does is play the actions of the character within what they intend to achieve. The words sit on top, but it is the words that seem to be everything when we first pick up a script. Learning the lines seems to be the most important thing when in reality it is the least. If we understand the intentions and the actions specifically and accurately enough then the words become inevitable - as long as the script is well written.

The way I first learnt this was by doing it. Sometimes that meant writing those things down. When does each action change? How is it accurately described? To what purpose is it being done and when does that change? Some techniques lead you to sometimes write more words down than the character actually says. That can seem academic and detached. Some techniques mean not writing anything down, relying on improvisation and a gradual merging with the written text. That can seem laborious and never-ending. I’ve usually landed somewhere in between these two extremes as a teaching approach. This year I tried teaching both extremes in different sessions and it both worked and didn’t work, in the sense that some students strongly felt aligned with one approach of the other - worked - some felt neither was right for them - didn’t work.

But there is another category too - the students who may not have grasped yet what the fundamental idea is. Paradoxically, that might be the students who will one day reach the fullest understanding. The truth is the concepts are extremely simple but the implications of that simplicity are highly complicated. Sometimes the simplicity makes it seem to good to be true. Sometimes we are drawn to the complexity as that makes things seem more important. The key may be to keep challenging our understanding of fundamental concepts as we grow and change. I certainly think that is the case.

I say all this because as I let go of what was a really positive production experience I am already thinking about how I may approach teaching the fundamentals to a new group of students who will be joining us in September. How can I best present these exercises to reveal what the fundamental concepts are? How can I introduce ideas without the need for detailed textual analysis that also retains specificity? How can I open the possibilities of how simple it really is without it seeming like it’s too easy?

That is what I am thinking about this week.