BY JEAN SCHIFFMAN | 

LAST UPDATED: NOVEMBER 5, 2019 (backstage.com)

Recently I saw the legendary Berliner Ensemble in its production of Brecht’s The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, and I was struck by the European actors’ consummate skills, particularly their movement skills. Of varying ages and physical types, they were all powerful, flexible, in total control, and deeply connected to their bodies.

Not long after, I saw a production by a local ensemble company whose acting I usually like. And I was equally struck here-distracted, in fact-by the actors’ woeful lack of those same skills. Several seemed distinctly ill at ease in the physical space as well as in their own bodies, didn’t know what to do with their limbs, gesticulated as if they were in an Italian comedy, stood with arms awkwardly akimbo (a sure sign of a physically uncomfortable actor), and followed the blocking without justifying it. One poorly trained actress never stopped bobbing and shaking her head, presumably to punctuate her dialogue.

For many of us American actors who didn’t immerse ourselves in comprehensive training programs and instead learned (or are learning) to act through scene-study classes, physical work was (and still is) under-emphasized.

Recently we’ve seen a backlash against the psychologically based training that’s been the backbone of American acting programs for decades. Masters like Japanese director Tadashi Suzuki, and Viewpoints director Anne Bogart (influenced by Suzuki, dance techniques, the teachings of Jerzy Grotowski, and more), have created fresh physical approaches to acting training. Many movement-conscious actors study Laban, Alexander, Feldenkreis, and other specialized techniques.

Strength, balance, alignment, relationship to space, a sense of oneness with your body-all that, of course, is part and parcel of good acting, even if you don’t plan to be Geoff Hoyle or Bill Irwin. And in fact, with theatre increasingly influenced by nouveau circus, Asian-Pacific theatrical styles, dance forms, and other non-naturalistic elements, movement training is more important than ever.

Kill the Gesture

Longtime Bay Area performer Leonard Pitt, who taught movement skills for many years in Berkeley, has a few things to say on the topic.

“I repeat over and over to students that you cannot move onstage as you do in everyday life,” he told me. “You have to think simplicity, economy, a sense of yourself in space.”

What do most actors do wrong? I asked him. “Their arm gestures undercut the text or fail to convey its meaning,” he said. I asked him something I’ve always wanted to know: Why do actors, onstage and in film, so often hold their gestures too long? “Actors freeze in gesture because they’re nervous, insecure, or tense,” he replied. “They fail to kill the gesture. They’ll point, and the arm kind of comes down, but not completely. It’s also a matter of knowing how to begin the gesture. If you know how to begin it, you can end it.

“As a general rule, gestures all have a circular form,” continued Pitt. “Even if a gesture comes off looking like a straight line, there’s a circle embedded in it. And it needs a beginning and an ending, like a musical phrase. Your arms are like birds, swooping and flying through the air. They have to be complete.”

He explained that what you do with your feet and legs, even though the audience may not be looking at them, informs your upper body. The experienced performer centers all movement low in the body; conversely, the inexperienced performer’s source of movement tends to be high. “Experiment with how your weight rests on the ground,” suggested Pitt. He recommended playing with moving your weight from the heel to the ball, and from one foot to another; give an impulse and push off with your heel.

What you do and don’t do with your spine is important, too. The experienced performer, said Pitt, has access to all four hinges: two hips, two shoulders. Otherwise, he warned, your spine will do the work your hinges should be doing, and you’ll look sloppy (not to mention put stress on your spine).

“Are you sitting down?” Pitt asked me. Yes, I replied. “OK, sit up straight on the edge of your chair, knees below hips, and feel the line from the top of your head to the bottom of your spine. Stand up and then sit down. The inexperienced mover will crunch her spine as she stands. The experienced mover will swing forward from the hip and keep the body straight and long. The torso has no work to do. Then you get efficiency and beauty.”

With this voice of authority at the other end of the line, I carefully arose-correctly, I think.

He reiterated, though, that you want to have choices. You might be playing a character who is tense and would indeed crunch his spine-but it should be a choice, not a default.

Pitt himself is not teaching currently, but there are plenty of classes available to actors in Alexander, tai chi, and other movement techniques, including circus skills, and the Dell’Arte School in rural Blue Lake, Northern California, has a complete and intensive program.

Sound Down

Is lack of movement skills strictly an American problem? British choreographer Angus Balbernie, currently in the Bay Area to create a movement-based performance piece with local dancers and actors (A Thousand Grey Birds at Venue 9 in San Francisco through July 31), said, “In European theatre, the body is much more a vehicle for text.” Balbernie is known for working with actors in an improvisational mode to “expand their movement options.”

Presenting a simple physiological model for the body-the proximal (the spine and pelvis, “through which all information travels”); the distal (arms, legs, hands, feet), and the spatial (everything “from the edge of the body out”)-Balbernie gives actors exercises that help them experience those three physical elements. In one exercise, for example, he has them move only their spine and pelvis. “How does that feel?” he asks. He then allows them to move arms, legs, head, and feet, and the sense of freedom they feel is, he said, like a champagne cork popping out.

His favorite exercise, though, is the silent joke.

“The truth of theatre is that what’s said isn’t what is,” he noted. Actors’ bodies, he explained, reveal the subtext. So he has one actor tell a joke. “We tell jokes for a variety of reasons: to avoid confrontation, to reveal ourselves, to hide.” While the actor tells the joke, class members block their ears and watch the actor’s body. “There’s so much truth in the silent comedian,” Balbernie said. “Beckett was a sadly funny writer. Keaton was a sadly funny comedian. Beckett told jokes with the sound turned down. My advice to actors: Tell jokes with the sound turned down.”

All this is by way of encouraging you to take movement classes if you suspect you may need them. The more plays I see, the more I’m convinced that an emotionally connected actor whose body is not fully under his or her control cannot give a fully convincing performance.

Speaking of legends and Europeans and supreme physicality and such, I’m on my way to see French mime Marcel Marceau perform at San Francisco’s Theatre on the Square. He’s 76 years old. The silent joke is indeed ageless. BSW