‘But goes thy heart with this?’

Yet again I was dazzled yesterday by the power of the Michael Chekhov Technique in my Masters class which gave me a different take on the play we are working with King Lear.  We did an exercise around the image centres of the character first taught me by the wonderful Dawn Arnold many years ago.  I remember saying at the time after we had done this exercise that it felt like the characters had come into the room and met each other, that the room at moments was full of the play we were working on. Many of my students, despite masks and social distancing had the same response yesterday.

The exercise is the culmination of a whole number of exercises, so if you are reading this as someone new to this work it may not work for you if you just jump to this exercise, without doing the earlier ones. But listen to what happened and you will get an impression of the discoveries made.

It involves finding the character’s centre, by imagining an image in a part of your body which for you represents the character’s centre, their soul, their engine if you like; what is powering them inside. You work with that image and react to it and it stirs the character’s sensations , energy and feelings. For instance, if you are playing Juliet and imagine she has the image of a lighted candle in her chest, you might get a sense of her determination and fragility. Imagine you are radiating that energy and if you are sensitive to it, , you will immediately feel different; you might even move differently. What I mean by that  is that it makes you feel like a different person in a very deep way.

Back to Lear. Each character working from their character centre entered the circle and slowly looked and exchanged their energy with each of the other characters; they radiated and received. I immediately got a sense that the people in the room were not the people in the room. They were a version, often a powerful one, of the characters in the play.

Once you can commit to this imaginative process, something can happen as you start to realise the possible relationships, resentments and passions which each character excites in the other. This can be really thrilling .

Yesterday, the most powerful one for me which opened up a lot of doors to the play was the moment Goneril met Cordelia. Cordelia was strong but still vulnerable. You could see Goneril really hated her . I felt the elder sister tried to dominate her but the longer they exchanged energy the weaker Goneril got. She kept trying to rally against her ( all this was incredibly subtle, there was no actual physical action) but Goneril could not win. When the actor playing Lear entered the space bringing the feeling of a repressed time bomb and really yelled at Goneril, I started to get a strong view of the family dynamic, of this raging volatile parent who could just explode in a moment, and who was incapable of really giving his love. Later I wondered whether everyone hated Goneril.

It made me consider that in this play perhaps the dynamic is actually about love and all the things that spring from it, selflessness, selfishness, jealousy, rage…when it has not been tended and acknowledged.

So my thoughts turned to Edmund and Edgar. In what seems like an insignificant lead up to the big first scene , Gloucester presents Edmund, his illegitimate son, to Kent, on the one hand boasting and on the other deeply embarassed by the young man. He barely lets Edmund speak. Could it be that Edmund’s revenge is also about a childhood with no love or respect? I have always considered Edmund a glorious Machiavellian villain, but this suggestion of a lack of love takes me and the play somewhere else.

It’s funny these discoveries sound very much like an acting technique which focusses on the intellect and the character biography and yet these discoveries were not thoughts but came from actions; ways of behaving, they sprung from interaction, images; and all this in spite of masks and social distancing. I am still surprised when these things happen to me and my students during Chekhov exercises, without much discussion where a new window to the play is suggested by a powerful exercise courageously performed.

An Atmosphere For ‘Calvary’

Members of our Full Of Music Class were asked by Declan my colleague and co-teacher, whether we imagined a feeling of Now or biblical times in our creation of Atmosphere for the short play CALVARY; most of the people said, ‘now’. Why? Here is a play by Yeats from the early 20th Century about Christ’s road to Calvary that feels so pertinent to right this minute. And  with the exploratory infinite tool of the Imagination we can build our bridge from what appears to be arcane material and bring it to the world.

Of course one of the great things about using Yeats is his absolute involvement with the polarity between MATERIAL and the SPIRIT. This particular play, rather like RESURRECTION is dealing with similar themes. The world we are shown in both plays is on the edge of an abyss, ready to tear itself apart. Michael Chekhov himself, through the Russian revolution, the uprooting and torturing of populations during the Second World War, the atomic bomb etc etc. was also living in such times. That is one of the reasons I think that Yeats and Chekhov fit so perfectly together. In our own sci-fi / biblical world it seems disturbingly pertinent.

We are co-leading the class and Declan was leading the creation of Atmosphere section which he did in such a way as to keep us completely free. This gave me the freedom  in this bit of the class to explore as a participant. People came up with amazing stuff; stuff you could build into a  whole production which would give you what Chekhov calls a Feeling of The Whole; rich and diverse responses that could bind a whole piece together.

In order to reveal something of how this works, I would like to share what I saw and experienced because as the Atmosphere became specific it created a whole world for me, a way of being and relating this archaic and arcane play to now, without, and this is important, too much intellectual interference. I did not have to think about this ; it emerged from my imagination.

Atmosphere is one of the most powerful elements of the Chekhov work. For those reading this who might be unfamiliar, Chekhov asks us as artists to create atmosphere around us for the play. It creates an Imaginative response to the play which does not involve us talking endlessly about it but is more akin to the alchemical response between reader and the written word. It can often be surprising and deep. 

What did I experience in my Atmosphere of Calvary? ? I felt a heavy dryness. Sometimes blisteringly hot; other times cold. And a road. The place was a flat desert like a Salvador Dali painting. There was also a pavement on each side of this road. This pavement was made of brown warm stones. It was safe and comforting to stand there….. As a member of the mob my energy and focus was into the centre of this road. Between the pavement and the road were dark wooden sleepers and in the road itself where Jesus walked, sharp stones and broken glass. The road was not straight but jagged like a piece of the broken glass of which it was made.  This was the path of Jesus, ,He was walking slowly and had a determined look on his face. His forward energy was strong and lifted though his feet were bleeding. Though he was in pain he was already somewhere else. The mob were terrified of him though they yelled and swore at him, rooting their feet firmly on their warm stones, feeling safety in numbers and their energy rooting them down ; though they were also magnetised towards Christ as if he was taunting them by his very presence. They were afraid that they too could end up on that bloody path. When we were asked to take on the Archetype of the Mother and created a shape for her, I felt one foot on the glass and another foot on the warm stones. This was not my path. I could not take that path and yet I suffered it and felt pulled towards Christ.  

I thought about this a lot when the class was over, realising how much deeper was my understanding of the play through creating this imagery and how particular it was. I considered other characters in the story and with my own work with the group we got more variation and more depth again. It made me consider the other characters, the soldiers, Lazarus and Judas and made me wonder what they were doing there, confronting Christ. were they too on the road of shards or were they running on the pavement , keeping up, accusing him from the sideline as they pushed past the other observers? As i write this, I think of the the road to Calvary suddenly like a river, with everyone else responding from the banks…. a different image which would create a totally different response, a totally different feel, a totally different production. 

Gloomy I know but amazing that the imagination has this power.  

This class continues for two more weeks and then we move on to no small parts, an online class dealing with using Chekhov technique to work on small roles. email chekhovtpi@gmail.com