“All Art aspires to the condition of music. ” Walter Pater
The first time I read this quote was as an epigraph to a chapter of Michael Chekhov’s On The Technique of Acting. I knew little or nothing about Walter Pater but this quote rang so true that it stuck with me. In fact, I had been starting my ensemble classes with a period of gibberish and a moment where everyone became an orchestra, with different conductors from within the group, for more than twenty years before I read this quote. It is a great way to focus people on what working in an ensemble might be, making the whole group into an orchestra, playing nursery rhymes under the instruction of ‘the conductor’, whose passions, feelings, pace and emphasis on who was playing the solo, guided the “musicians”. It taught and illustrated some rules about ensemble, but the deeper core of what ensemble might be was not fully revealed.
What is it about this quote which resonates with me so much? Michael Chekhov understood that we as performers transmit intangible, invisible things to our audiences, that we are the channels for these feelings and sensations and that we transmit them in a similar way to the musician with their instrument: the music emerges for us to listen, explore and experience. An Orchestra expresses the intangible and Chekhov believed that actors through their performances should do the same.
Yet how can we approach this? Chekhov said, ‘we have to be full of music’. This tells us that not only do we need to suggest the idea that a play has the same sensibilities as a piece of music, but that in order to be true artists we have to imagine the music flowing through and from and out of us; this intangible substance full of depth, variety and joy.
Furthermore , if you have been involved with acting training to any extent, you will have heard teachers talking about actors as having an instrument. This is not just their body, their intelligence, their energy, their voice, their physiognomy, their experience, their ability, but all of these things together; the meshing and influencing of all these elements is what we need to utilise to create exciting performance. It is an integration , a synthesis of Voice, Body, Imagination and Feelings. It creates a real sense of openness between performers and the audience. If we do not encourage this fluid instrument, then what happens? We become stuck in certain genres, ways of feeling and certain roles; the things we believe are our strengths and the things we are ‘good at’. At the sign of any uncertainty, we revert to our ‘default’ mode, a comedic twist of the mouth, an intense distant stare , a dramatic averting of the face, ignoring our scene partner so we can continue to play the role in our own selfish way…. all performers have been there.
You may even apply this theory of holistic integration to your everyday life. It makes for more open encounters and experience.
What does it mean to train your instrument? Chekhov explains it thus:
”The body of an actor must undergo a special kind of development…. an extreme sensitivity of body to psychological impulses….so that they will convert it (the body) gradually into a sensitive membrane, a kind of receiver and conveyor of the subtlest images, feelings, emotions and will impulses.” To the Actor. Michael Chekhov
This is what we mean by ALL ONE THING , the title of this two day workshop which my colleague Declan Drohan and I are running on April 20th/21st here in Galway City .We are taking bookings now and you need to email chekhovtpi@gmail.com if you want to book a place or find out more about it.
Max Hafler - Radiating /Receiving 
In Plato’s texts, there’s always a myth at the end of the dialectics that provides the missing wholeness that in some way synthesizes the positions which had been at odds in the dialogue. But this synthesis is not achieved discursively, but in some kind of intuitive way. (Matthew Regal)
Not totally on your theme but I thought this was interesting and I just read it lol!
Sorry …Segal, Matthew was the author not Regal.