“Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.”
An image is a key to a character, to a scene , to a piece of music, to a world. Using images is so transformative you can, with ease, become someone else.
When we were children we can all remember being told we were ‘imaginative’, like it was something a little disturbing, a little delicate to have access to this strange place.….it somehow implied an inability to really connect to the everyday, and the cruelty which was sure to come our way if we became too fanciful and lost, as if we would lose touch with ‘reality’ altogether.
What many adults of that time did not realise is that understanding, respecting and developing imagination actually equipped us to deal with the problems of the everyday world. Not only that of course, you were not either ‘imaginative’ or not imaginative’; this was something you could develop through the way you saw the world, and, as Michael Chekhov explored, through concentration. Those of us who had troubling and difficult childhoods know this dream-world was not only an escape but a logic, a way of actually finding solutions to the world that we were living with. There was a way to connect our images into conscious thoughts, feelings and impressions which gave us a depth and richness.
And of course it is vital for us as creative artists, or we will be trapped forever in our immediate life, our immediate response to elements of all our characters.If we want to believe that we have a greater potential for different characters, we need our imaginations.
An analogy I suggest is when we read a novel and then we watch the movie of the book. The movie is great because it means we can sit back and watch the imagination of others lead us. But it is not our imaginative life which powers our creation. We are passive. When we read the book we are co-creators with the author. Imagination, rather than putting us into a dream state, makes us active participants in the real world.
For an actor or performer of any kind, the trick is to connect the image to our world , to make it manifest; for the artist to be a conduit for what this image can offer the artist and his/her audience, to enable this image to transform them into someone else.
In my next online course, Image Power, which begins on the 24th April at 4.30 Irish time (once per week for four weeks) through a section of the Michael Chekhov Technique we will explore these possibilities using images for mood, character, and atmosphere…
“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.
some participants of Be Here Now our most recent weekend course
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.
When you go into a session, be it online or in the room, you need to have some kind of burning question, which initially can be quite amorphous but needs, by the end of the session at least, to be there in your consciousness. Sometimes this question reveals itself as you go along, or perhaps what you thought was the question is jostled out by an interesting more fascinating question or area of enquiry. The Question makes me feel like an explorer. It gives me a focus and action to perform through my teaching, thereby giving a stronger weight and potency to my teaching; as Michael Chekhov would call it, “a spine”. In addition we need to provide, as best we can in the time allotted, the prerequisite skills to the participants to enable them to explore.
When Declan Drohan and I were preparing our recent in-the room weekend workshop Be Here Now, I felt initially very comfortable with the subject matter and then a little challenged. Of course there are strong and obvious Chekhov areas to explore and develop to working in the moment, most noticeably radiating and receiving and concentration but i didn’t feel wholly satisfied with the usual route.
Thanks to Dawn Arnold and others in our Thursday discussion group, I have been encouraged more and more to look into the Chekhov Archives held online by the University of Windsor . These records of many classes and lectures given by Michael Chekhov himself are an absolutely invaluable resource. There is a good search engine and you can enter a keyword and topic and locate all mentions/explorations of this area. there’s the link!
Our subject was about being present in the moment. So I typed in, “presence’ ; I found a class from June 9th 1939. Declan and I both read it and we decided it must at least form part of our sessions.
Chekhov’s three areas of emphasis were Presence, Radiating, and Significance.In the lesson he states, “you can’t radiate without being present , and you cannot be present without radiating”. On the surface, Presence is one of those words in acting like ‘Ensemble’ ; it has many different meanings and is bandied about. I would define Presence as a state of Being which we understand and know (whereas ‘Radiating’ is about sending your energy out into the space.)
Why this was such a key moment in our planning was because in his lesson, Chekhov did not lead with the Body. This is almost unheard of. The body and Imagination are the twin keys to the work. His emphasis was that the body stayed free and did not lead the exercise in the way so much of his practise does. If anything, the body had to stay out of the way of the other elements; at the most merely follow them.
“ We, as actors, are showing on the stage, not only our bodies….If we have not developed our psychology, we are compelled to show only our bodies , our make-up, costumes etc which are not important.”
He encourages us in this exercise to actually detach the body and really let it follow.
This idea felt very foreign and exciting and it wasn’t until we got people to act their scenes with Presence and Significance that this consciously not leading with the body became absolutely riveting to watch. The body like all parts of our instrument can often be stereotypical and move into default. Having what Chekhov called “Free Bodies” liberated the elements of Presence, Radiation and Significance to reach us, the audience.
Here is an interview I gave this month to Katelyn Ressler of ISTR (Irish Society for Theatre Research). Thanks for the questions, Katelyn .They were very thought provoking, as we tried to imagine what the The Theatre of the Future (as Chekhov describes it) might be like.
biog . Max Hafler trained at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art in the seventies and worked successfully as an actor for ten years in theatre and television. He has worked as a playwright, was the winner of a Sony award and an award from the Commission for racial Equality for his play Albion Tower. He has taught and directed theatre extensively in higher education at the University of Galway and youth theatre all over Ireland, focussing on Chekhov technique, Voice and Ensemble. . He has guested internationally, at, among others, MIT and the University of Maine in the States, The Lir and the University of Glamorgan. His training in Michael Chekhov Technique came through the Michael Chekhov Association , and he is co-director of Chekhov Training and Performance Irelandwww.chekhovtrainingandperformanceireland.com
He is the author of two teaching books TEACHING VOICE (Nick Hern Books 2016) and “What Country Friends is This?” Shakespeare and Young Performers(2021 NHB)
What is your first memory of theatre that had a profound impact on you?
I remember playing Bottom in a cut down version of Midsummer Nights Dream when I was 8 in a papier mache asses head and seeing my mother watching me and smiling broadly.
What are the challenges facing young aspiring theatre practitioners today, in both research and practice?
They are considerable . One might ask the question what are the challenges facing young people, period? In some ways social media has democratised things a little and perhaps the new early opportunities are less fringe theatre and more short film. The main problem is that the arts are treated more as a business than an art, which is ultimately demoralising to the art and the artist. I think dealing with what has always been an extremely tough profession has not got easier and the issue of rejection and what that does to your psyche is very challenging. I worked as an actor with some success as a young man and found rejection incredibly hard to deal with; I have seen this issue about self-worth in students too. There are all sorts of strategies to combat the way things are; making your own work, not measuring your worth on whether you are ‘working’ or not, being generous, staying open, learning what you can from any employment opportunity, and finally not making your work the only thing that validates your life whilst at the same time staying dedicated to it. All of these things are easier said than done.
I came to University teaching as a practitioner so my work in further Education has always been with that primary focus, but I have grown to respect certain types of Theatre Research and have made some observations as I have moved along, which I might offer. I think people need to be cautious when considering a career in Research to not use it as a substitute to sublimate the desire to perform, because for most people I suspect this does not work. There is a lot of conflict still between learning practise and academic researching, though I hope that polarity is starting to shift now. And most importantly if you are a researcher, be honest with yourself about how much practical experience you have, particularly if you want to seriously explore research-as-practise. It is no good putting on a performance project if you do not have sufficient skills to carry it out. The thing is performance skills take some time to learn and are not something you can get into your body in one class for two hours per week. Universities have to start giving practise the time and respect it deserves.
How do you incorporate/navigate through the digital era of theatre (AI, CHAT-Gpd)? In your opinion does it hinder or boost theatre.
Well as a retired lecturer who exclusively creates my own classes, both online and in the room, I fortunately am not really dealing directly with this problem anymore. However, I would like to say something about online teaching of theatre because I still do this and despite some of the problems I find it amazingly exciting. I started, like most people during covid, with a strong commitment to the idea that artists needed to keep their imaginative muscle going. I teach mainly through the Chekhov technique, which as some of your readers may know focuses on the Imagination and the Body and I was convinced that I could find ways to do it in a meaningful way. I worked to make the classes participatory and inclusive and as much like in-the-room as we could. I also encouraged a lot of sharing of the work, more than I might do in the actual studio.
As a footnote (and back to the question !)I am concerned about the technological advancements in your question and this blurring of knowledge which purloins knowledge from humanity through technology. The goal of the creators of AI seems to be to make these latest technological innovations as ‘real’ as possible in order that you will be tricked into believing it is real or human or, in the case of an essay, an original consideration and response by a student. In a work of art I am not there to be fooled, but exist as a co-creator. I make a compact with the creators to go into their world and suspend my disbelief. I am co-creating with the artists to be thrilled, excited, moved or astonished. With AI I feel I am there to be fooled.
We need to be aware also that technological innovation means a falling off and debasing of traditional skills. As a Voice teacher I am aware of this. Whilst on the one hand , amplifying sound empowers people who do not have any vocal training to be heard in a space, it also encourages professional performers to be lazy and not use their voices as part of their instrument for a deeper performance.
You work with the Michael Chekhov Acting Technique, when and who introduced you to it?
I read On The Technique in the early 2000s and was fascinated, but it wasn’t until I visited an ATHE conference in Denver in 2007/8, and I attended a session run by Deborah Shipman working with the technique in practise that I realised how powerful it was. That really started me on my journey. From there I trained with the Michael Chekhov Association and also some training organised by Michael Chekhov Europe. Amazingly, Mary McPartlan (a dearly departed colleague at the University of Galway) unbeknownst to me, had also met with the MICHA group and brought Joanna Merlin, the President of MICHA (and now also sadly,passed) and the luminescent Fern Sloan from the US to teach a group of us at my very own place of work! That was 2009. I continue to learn and study the work. Every class I do I look on as a research project. I have recently been to Ridgefield where Chekhov actually taught, with a group of international teaching colleagues where we learned a lot from each other. It was wonderful.
How has working with the Michael Chekhov Acting Technique helped you evolve as an actor, educator and human.
This is a big question. I work mainly as a teacher and director. Working artistically through the Technique has changed my life considerably. It changed my priorities . Michael Chekhov approached his work with a spiritual seriousness on the one hand but with a sense of fun and lightness on the other . He was the first practitioner I had heard calling actors, Artists. Would that I had learned the technique at The London Academy of Music and Dramatic art where I trained!
Chekhov training is completely holistic. In other words, it is all about connecting up the Voice,Body,Feelings and Imagination so that you can operate as a whole performer. It encourages you to develop your artistic response to the world, to events, to the everyday and find wonder and astonishment within them. It is a way to remember how you maybe felt about theatre when you were a child. This has extraordinary spinoffs as a human being. It encourages you to be in the ‘Now’ and it helps make you conscious. If you want to learn more about my approach to this work go to www.maxhafler.wordpress.com .
As an educator, and particularly when I am directing, I understand that no production at whatever level is ever going to be truly successful without 1) Atmosphere 2) The Feeling of Ensemble and 3) A Feeling of the Whole (by that I mean the whole performance). Chekhov said that “Atmosphere is the soul of the performance” Most productions pay only lip service to this and often good actors perform without the feeling that they are creating a world in which the audience have to immerse ourselves….
As an educator, how do you utilize the structure of academia to inspire both research and practice without it hindering inspiration and creative flexibility?
So now I shall be controversial and say that practise IS research just as teaching a class is research. As a teacher you should always be alive to the room and the people in it and always be open to development. However I do not think that is what you mean here.
At a fundamental level I do not believe that practise and research really mesh together. They require different skills and strengths. I do believe in research as a goal in itself, but learning practise takes time so unless you have some performance training under your belt I think mixing practise and academics can be problematic. The only way to develop proficient and inspired practise is by that same word, practise. That means giving more teaching hours to it because so much art training is experiential and you need to put it into your body. This is not something that many academic institutions are willing to do. This does not mean there is no place for intellectual consideration; you might have a meaningful experience in a workshop but you need to review your experience, and process it, afterwards. In Chekhov technique it is called, ‘flyback’.
What drew you to a career in academia?
I never entered the academic world really, although I have written several plays, won a Sony Award, had a few articles published in theatre education journals and written two books on Teaching theatre, Teaching Voice 2016 Nick Hern Books, and “What Country …” mentioned above.
I was drawn to it like many practitioners wanting more respect for my art form and my place within it (anyone who has been a freelance actor/teacher/director will understand this).
Who are your mentors and why?
Joanna Merlin, the founder of the Michael Chekhov Association would definitely be one. She sadly passed away this year; all of the people in my Independent Chekhov Studios Co-op who come from all over the world, and a man called Paddy Swanson who taught me at LAMDA and whom I met decades later through extraordinary coincidence, when I was teaching in the States, who opened my eyes to the wonder and power of ensemble and physical theatre.
Who are theatre practitioners you think people should be familiar with when studying theatre or subjects related and why?
Michael Chekhov (of course): I advise people to look at On The Technique of acting in particular (HarperCollins 1991)
Peter Brook: The Empty Space, and on Evoking and Forgetting Shakespeare (Nick Hern Books 1998)
Carl Jung, because his breadth of understanding of the imagination makes his work remarkably illuminating for those who are studying Chekhov. A kind of primer which covers this area of his work is called Jung on Active Imagination (Routledge 1997) edited by Joan Chodorow
When I was training at LAMDA in the seventies we were often encouraged when speaking Shakespeare to ‘let the words speak for themselves’ , to almost disengage the body from the voice. This felt artificial and old fashioned. It also felt forced as the words emerged from the body , fuelled by the breath , so why shouldn’t the body connect with them? Surely the body did something! This approach made for some pretty disembodied acting, a disconnect with the story, between what you were saying and how you were feeling.
After watching some of the Hamlet the other night performed from the Bristol Old Vic on BBC4, I felt the same disengagement within each individual actor but for the opposite reason ; in their often superficial, superfluous gestures to dredge up some feeling and urgency. Instead of an artificial stillness, we had a frenetic over-gestured acting, with no sense and no thought changes that I could see, just rapid text, often at the same level, as if we were watching a tv thriller, but without the same attention to the sense or the plot. (After all, it’s Shakespeare and doesn’t everybody know the story?!!!!!!)
I could ask questions about why there seemed to be no world created in the Bristol Hamlet, no vessel in which the actors could anchor their characters with a real sense of security, but I want to stay with this idea of how we express through the body and how we use it to locate our character and transform our selves.
There was a curious polarity, between my own training in the seventies and this production from the 21st century. In both cases ( my own initial training) and the production I watched a part of last night, the body seemed disengaged from voice, feelings and imagination which in turn disengaged the feelings. This happened in my own training because the body was rather devalued and the power of the voice mythologised, whereas in the above production where the body was overused and unrooted. There is no getting away from the fact that training has got to ultimately be holistic. You can explore the mechanics of breath, voice, increase flexibility, range and dexterity but without the imagination, feelings and the use of the body you cannot fully transform.
As someone who teaches Voice with the Body and works consistently with psychophysical techniques like the Chekhov Technique, you might wonder why I am so critical of more physicality. But it is not physicality in the way I mean it. It is not the energy moving through the body, moving into the space, to their fellow artists and, above all, the audience. What many of those actors were doing was not gesture to uncover feelings and sensations but an undisciplined movement habit which is meaningless yet fools the actor into thinking they are conveying something. It is signalling.
And it is not particular to this production. By the way, this is not an attack on regional Shakespeare. I am in fact grateful that the BBC has such a commitment to live classic production. The signalling happens, it seems, everywhere and has been happening for a long time.
The signalling use of gesture is used most prominently in Shakespeare to get cheap laughs for jokes with sexual innuendo. A character touches their privates and laughs suggestively during the joke that no one really understands, causing the audience to titter in an embarrassed yet knowing way. You also notice signalling when characters are mentioned in the text and the actor points towards the person in question as if the audience would not understand who they were talking about. Or they say ‘the sky’ let’s say, and they point upwards in case we did not know where it was. And sometimes I believe that is why this signalling happens; the fact they do not trust the text at all, that Shakespeare is ‘hard’ and that the audience are fools. What is particularly galling is that emphasis, which helps us understand the meaning of a phrase, even if we do not follow it word for word, seems a lost art. That, and even more profoundly, meaningful pauses in which changes of thought, emotion and realisation are filled, taking us off in new directions and new moments in the story, are spectacularly absent.
Correct use of the body, using it respectfully and in a rooted way to uncover feeling, sensation, action and how the characters actually go about trying to do what they want is how to use it, not with some tense default movement which acts as a mask to real feeling.
With Chekhov’s psychological gesture we explore big gestures initially but that is expressly to find these sensations and feelings we might associate with the character; in the actual performance, there may be nothing of the physical gesture left, only the impulse for the gesture moving inside the actor, lighting the text and radiating it out towards the audience.
Only when everything, body, imagination, voice and feelings move together in the performance and are connected up can we be lifted as an artist and as a member of the audience.
During a fascinating discussion on teaching goals last week at the International Chekhov Technique Teachers Coop, someone came up with an amazing image of teaching in a whirlwind, as if you had to impart everything and get people to experience everything in their bodies before the time came for the course to end.
Michael Chekhov
How well I know that feeling of the shortage of time! On Zoom especially, with limited time and this feeling that you are held together as a group bounded by threads of light and images, though thousands of miles apart. It is the shadow that stalks all short courses; to give something of value in a short time whether you are working in the room or in the virtual studio.
What the whirlwind can do is it can create the ‘Wow Factor’ where participants get surprised by their response to stimuli and the text. They are jolted into a more holistic experience. This can be a great reason to go into ‘the whirlwind’ to keep people moving and experiencing so they do not have time to think. Their intellect sleeps and something else takes over. It is exhilarating and it opens doors. It makes them realise that the possibility of creation can bubble up in a new way, if they would just allow it to happen.
As someone else said, part of a teacher’s skill is reading the room and changing rhythm. Too much staying in the same rhythm and pace can make it harder for the student to engage.
But it is true as well that the whirlwind sometimes comes from a desire to cram in everything you can….this is partly because the various elements of the technique are so interconnected that one wants to share in the idea that all these elements of the technique are joined up. Michael Chekhov saw all these individual elements of practise igniting the others.
Some of us suggested that it was better to limit the number of tools taught, in order that the student can come away with something they can use now. Using an element immediately without sufficient practise however will not work for everybody. They can easily get disheartened if it doesn’t work for them.
Michael Chekhov frequently challenged his students to keep working on the technique as someone in the group reminded us in our discussion. But then, she also reminded us that he was training professional acting students, whereas we often have a mixture of people on our courses. But I think sometimes highly trained professional actors can be very resistant to a training which has more to do with imagination, freedom and the body. You simply do not know how participants will respond.
Chekhov technique is fascinating in this way; on the one hand the initial stimulus of the work can be mind-blowing and rich but to actually use it, like everything else, takes work and time to deepen our practise.
As Peter Brook said, in THE EMPTY SPACE,
“An actor, like any artist, is like a garden and it is no help to pull out the weeds just once, for all time. The weeds always grow, and that is quite natural, and they must be cleaned away, and that is natural too.”
But it is a balance for us teachers; to encourage application on the one hand; and on the other to do the work and do the practise which enriches the imagination and sensitises the body to all the influences to which it is subjected.
Then Actors really can be Magicians.
It can be that the participant is not quite ready yet to hear and fully experience a part of the work. It often makes us feel defeated. But there is nothing wrong with this; we have all had learning experiences of our own where we were unable to absorb or wanted to dismiss something we were being taught because we found it challenging in some way, shape or form; then years later (often many years later!) the light goes on and we go ‘aha! now I know what they were getting at!” It’s sad that we as teachers, do not always experience those riches of realisation in our students, but sometimes we do. Chekhov Technique , because it is primarily experiential and is about at a basic level connecting up imagination, body, voice sensations and feelings, enables us to see more of our fair share of these breakthroughs.
Thankyou, group of friends and colleagues for such an enriching conversation!
We all know what atmosphere is. We sense it when we go into a room, or stand on a beach, or wait in a hospital waiting room, or sit in our own bedroom. We notice it at weddings, funerals, and graduations; and whilst every person will have a different response to any atmosphere there is something which is common to everyone present. Through the use of atmosphere, the characters in a play are united on a Deep level. Atmosphere is, as they say, ‘a thing’.
Stepping into the Atmosphere
When I work with a new group to me, I frequently start with atmosphere and last Sunday, when working with local actors for the Drama League of Ireland, I did just that. Starting with atmosphere can be difficult for some people because it does require a focus of imagination we are not always used to; but once you trust it, it can be overwhelmingly powerful. Michael Chekhov went so far as to say that the atmosphere is the soul of the performance, yet it is astonishing how often this very key roadway to the realm of feeling is absent when we go to watch even the most professionally produced of plays. I have written about this extensively on this blog. The thing about it is that when an atmosphere is generated by actors, the audience knows there is something powerful emanating from the stage without necessarily being able to put a name to it. They just feel it.
Atmosphere takes us closely to our childlike response of “let’s pretend” . On one level we are immersed in a serious game with our friends of ‘cops and robbers’ (or whatever children play and fantasise nowadays!) However, we can easily interrupt our imaginings to give instructions or set rules for the fantasy before returning to it and seamlessly the atmosphere floods back as we return to the imaginative game.
What is astonishing about atmosphere is that because you are imagining something external to you and then letting that thing work and use you, the inspiration for the way you move speak and behave appears to be coming from outside you. This has a deep potency and when I first experienced it, was unlike anything I had ever experienced before in acting. It is like magic. As the great teacher Lenard Petit says , “you let the atmosphere play you”. This stirs amazingly challenging feelings and sensations which you often are not expecting. So often I hear first time explorers of this element of the work say, “I said the lines differently to how I was expecting , and yet it felt right and truthful”. While Chekhov alerts us to the fact that the first thing we find is not often the right one and there are other elements to find before we settle comfortably with our character, nonetheless, those first discoveries can be life changing in terms of the way you see acting/ performing in general.
It is the very palpable feeling of watching someone make these realisations, of being ‘astonished’, realising you truly have the power to imagine and make the invisible manifest, not only for yourself but for an audience, and that is where the true joy of this transformation lies.
And not only in acting. The number of times I have seen someone change gear in front of me, like they are getting some kind of jolt on a deep level, and they communicate with the audience or with each other in a new way. There is a kind of shift inside them, a transformation. Of course these transformations are sometimes momentary and we try sometimes to ’get back there’ the next day and we have difficulty.
That is what practise is for. Because something is magical does not make it always easy to maintain, but as an initial revelation, it is something which can encourage us deeper into the work. Perhaps that is the most important thing: to have the revelation in the first place, and that, as Chekhov said, ‘Actors Are Magicians.’
I am running Playing with Atmosphere online which begins Nov 7th at 5.15 irish time and runs for two hours
Declan Drohan and I are running two online courses , one starting on the 15th Sept at 4.00pm Irish time on the Fundamentals of the Chekhov Technique Ease,Form,Beauty and The Whole, and from October 4th at 5pm Irish Time for 6 weekly sessions ,The Quest for Character which will help us deal with finding imaginative entry point for building the character. email chekhovtpi@gmail.com . there’s a short video on the fundamentals course, below
Chekhov’s Barn in Ridgefield,CT where his students trained and rehearsed and where in 2023 a group of international Chekhov teachers gathered to experiment and explore the work.
In 1939, due to the outbreak of the Second World War, Michael Chekhov, the famous acting teacher and director, had to close his acting school in Dartington Hall Devon and recreate it in Ridgefield Connecticut USA. The school lasted only three years, until 1942, when America too got involved in the war, and Michael Chekhov moved to Hollywood where he worked as an actor and teacher until his death in 1955.
A group of experienced International Chekhov teachers were given the opportunity in August 2023 to work in the large barn in Ridgefield, Connecticut where Chekhov ran his studio. I was fortunate enough to be one of those people. We belong to the International Chekhov Studios Cooperative and throughout the pandemic a group of us met together every week on Zoom to support, ask questions, discuss training and much more for over three years.
One of Chekhov’s concerns was The Theatre of the Future: what might it be like, and how could we help those who come after us? Through an exercise called The Palace of the Theatre of the Future we were invited to envisage what that Theatre of the Future might be. Chekhov, an artist in exile, buffeted from country to country, was trying to explore theatre when the world was on fire with (amongst other things) World War Two. He was constantly thwarted from complete long term fulfilment by external circumstances and by the fact that what he was striving for was a deeper, truer sense of live performance which had a strong spiritual component; it was regarded by some with suspicion, (and in my opinion, still is today).
In the exercise, we were asked to imagine a Palace, a structure which becomes a receptacle for the imagination; this Palace was of the Theatre of the Future. We would enter that Palace and see what it revealed to us. Through our imaginings, answers can emerge. It sounds esoteric but it isn’t, provided you trust your imagination. The imagination can provide solutions and inspiration as long as you are prepared to honour it. Some might think this a strange way to open such an exploration but the imagination plays an active role in all our discoveries. As Einstein said,
“Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.”
In many ways I have quite a dystopian vision of the Theatre of the Future. You have a privileged class of people who can afford to make and experience theatre. Additionally, the technological media has made the consumption of art a more solitary affair, less communal and less of a sharing.
I want to share my experience of this exercise. I tried not to analyse during the exercise itself till later, when the whole group talked; a process known in Chekhov terms as “flyback” or “spyback”. In the following description though I will be analysing as I go along.
In Ridgefield when I stood up to begin, I had no knowledge of what that ‘palace’ structure would look like. I suddenly saw two flimsy flapping doors painted black (rather like you were entering a factory) which I pushed through to realise I was in a funfair in one of those kind of palaces of pleasure you would find in a fairground.
Palaces in a fairground have a curious quality for me . From the outside they seem flimsy as if they would blow down. Inside they are full of potency and imagination. In my palace I heard echoey voices as I walked down a corridor; they were not frightening but part of the fabric of the place. I began to see tableaux, alcoves into the past.
The first was a Greek theatre in blazing sunshine, statues on plinths and a huge audience. There were no actors onstage but the auditorium was packed and everyone was waiting expectantly. It was not noisy ; but focussed and full of anticipation. On the right side of the space was a kind of altar where incense was burned and perhaps sacrifices or rituals were performed. The stone was white; the sky a cloudless blue. I moved on.
The next alcove was a rowdier affair in a medieval street, a cart for a stage and a bible story. A poor audience enjoyed themselves, shouting back at the actors playing Noah’s Flood and yet also in awe of the wider religious themes . Instead of the white stone and the blue sky of Greece, there was dirt, laughter and awe in equal measure, noise, red and yellows…
The next alcove contained a Shakespearean theatre, a ‘wooden O’ and one of Shakespeare’s plays was being acted; the audience was rapt and listening as they followed the story…. not religious but with a different degree of involvement and participation; a fully communal experience.
The next alcove was darker, with an Expressionistic set…..I imagined it in the 1920s period; the stage was small , the play was visceral and political . Perhaps it was a Brecht play….. the audience was enthusiastic but small, hanging upon every moment in order to find a way to tolerate the present injustices of their lives.
When “flying back” on this exercise, some things occurred to me. I realised how the Theatre of the Future lay in the past; that the theatre of the past had a power that the present does not. Chekhov felt this himself and explains this in his writings. I thought about how the play originated in religious expression and that, in Shakespeare’s time, we came close to a more secular yet still spiritual (with a small s) experience for all concerned. You didn’t need to experience it in that depth but it was there for you if you wanted it. I couldn’t possibly have known exactly what these theatrical experiences were really like ; yet my imaginative journey in the palace led me to insights into our question of The Theatre of The Future.
Interestingly, during our time at Ridgefield we did some work with the opening chorus to Henry 5th. In Shakespeare’s Theatre there was no set to speak of and no lighting, as the plays were performed in daytime; so the audience had to use their imagination. Imagination, which is at the core of the Chekhov work and Shakespeare, is totally dependant on the language and images.
“Think when we talk of horses that you see them
Printing their proud hooves in the receiving earth,
For ‘tis your thoughts which now must deck our kings”.
The audience had to participate, to share , to go on a collaborative journey together with the playwright and the actors in order to fully invest in the play. Their imaginations co-created the experience.
So if somehow the Elizabethan theatre had the participatory connection right, then how do we make that connection again? The sense of communal connection seems absolutely vital in our own difficult times. It is both challenging and healing.
Back to The Palace – On To The Future.
As I stumbled on through the dark corridors of my Palace I opened a door and found myself in a lush green jungle. It was not oppressive but rich. There were wild animals in it, exotic birds and a ferny floor…. It was damp and fecund. A small boy emerged from the undergrowth. He did not look frightened but I felt frightened for him. I wanted to protect and lead him. I took his hand and started to pull him where I wanted to go. I wanted to keep hold of his hand but his hand was sweaty and it became hard to hold him. I thought I was protecting him and I started to feel afraid; suddenly the jungle became more ominous. I felt the Theatre of the Future was in this child, and I suddenly remembered that Chekhov’s actors at Ridgefield had a whole programme of work dedicated to the young.
The child’s hand slid from mine and he disappeared.
I became nervous and anxious, searching for him. I found him in a clearing. He was a little older now, in more ragged clothes but with strong fire in his eyes and he took my hand . He led me now through the jungle and he went faster and faster, pulling me …I found myself in another dark corridor. I opened a door and there was a blinding bright white room full of tv and computer screens…I was fascinated and then I felt screens sticking to my clothes, on my shoulders and chest and face. I felt as if I was being crushed.
Flying back, I am wondering about the fecund potential of the jungle and the small child; vulnerable yet paradoxically powerful. Let’s see this child as the ‘future theatre’. The child has its own energy, and whilst I want to protect him, there is a feeling that in my fear for his safety the child wants to pull away. When I find him again he has changed ; he is a young teenager who guides me through the jungle, running and making me feel exhilarated. In my imaginings he pulls me towards this room of technology where I become entangled with screens, after an initial period of wonder.
Technology is both something to be wary of, but also a tool of great opportunity. Without technology our group would not have been able to meet together through the pandemic. Our friendships deepened; our learning was shared; we collaborated on classes. Having said that, and I know everyone would acknowledge this, there is nothing like exchanging and working in the same room. I want to write more about this in another post.
My hope is we will return to find the true value of collective imagination by gathering to experience together .
As one of our colleagues, the esteemed Jobst Langhams says, we are always, ‘making researches’ when we are teaching. How true this is, I thought, as I embarked on leading an online course on Polarities and we explored its uses for creating a character and a production. with participants thousands of miles apart.
Michael Chekhov talks about making the biggest journey, the biggest transformation we can make in the journey of our character and the journey of the play. We as an audience crave transformation. And as artists we crave it too. We might say that this is the deepest aim of theatre, to show how things can change. Nowhere is this clearer than when we explore Polarities. They are opposites, conflicts within the character, and within the play. A polarity can be the axis on which a whole character’s struggle or the whole play rests.
If we consider it, we are full of these polarities or we certainly encounter them in our everyday lives. Perhaps we have struggled with one specific polarity all our lives; perhaps Power and Powerlessness. Between these two extremes, there is a thread and the opposites operate on our psyche like magnets, pulling us this way and that (as two of my students remarked the other day). So even this one polarity is not a linear journey.This one polarity presents us with worlds of behaviour to consider. Then, when you add all the other elements guiding your character through the play, you are starting to create something rich and strange. Like Archetypes and Atmospheres, when The Door to Polarities opens, we can be surprised by what bursts from the Imagination. How we respond to these surprises, hone things down and make our decisions about the character, like most of the Chekhov Technique, is up to us as artists to consider.
The most obvious polarity we can find in our bodies is when they are open and when they are closed. It was there we began, opening and closing our bodies. Our lives are powered by this constant opening and closing of our energy; of generosity and meanness; of confidence and shyness; of aggression and fear; of joy and despair. If we are in any doubt this is a truth, think about what happens when you are scared suddenly . There is a contraction, like an anemone closing.
Generally, though not always, one of these polarised feelings/qualities encourages us to open and one to close. Of course it is not quite as simple as that and we should avoid value judgements. Closing can be a desire to withdraw and be with yourself for a bit. It can focus a positive desire to protect.
I am so looking forward to next week, when we will be embarking on the aspect of the character’s journey and how polarities can be used to find the road the character might be on. This of course can be vital for those who are appearing in film and tv with little time for rehearsal.
I have just come off an exciting Zoom call with colleague and guest Liz Shipman. We discussed and planned our course The Shakespeare Connection which begins online on April 15th. The discussion was very exciting , focussing as it did on the character of language and the relationship between the audience and characters in Shakespeare. In my preparations I decided to have a look at my second book, “What Country,Friends is this?” which explores directing Shakespeare with young people using (primarily) the Michael Chekhov technique.
Chekhov technique and Shakespeare’s plays seem to me to have a few things in common. They are both transformative in the way true artistic processes are. Like Chekhov, Shakespeare believed in atmosphere, in his case created by the amazing imagery of his text. Both believed in Theatre and the Power of the Actor. Although Chekhov was keen to edit and transpose speeches from Shakespeare when doing a production to make the work flow in a way more akin to what he believed were modern sensibilities, there is no doubting his respect for the work of Shakespeare.
A few years ago, I went to see a rather annoying production of Julius Caesar at the Globe Theatre in London and I remember only one excellent moment. After Caesar is killed the conspirators come around the body, all of them covered in blood. Suddenly, they are completely alone as all the Roman crowd have fled. Because I was sitting at the side of the Wooden O, I was seeing the backs of the actors and beyond them a sea of audience.
Brutus and Cassius are speaking:
Cassius: How many ages hence
Shall this our lofty scene be acted over,
In states unborn and accents yet unknown!
Brutus: How many times shall Caesar bleed in sport,
That now on Pompey’s basis lies along,
Now worthier than the dust?
This for me created such a timeless moment and I realised the immense power of the theatrical metaphor, used so much in Shakespeare’s plays. It made me feel we were in the world of the play, the world of the modern theatre at that precise moment, as well as having a strong connection to a performance in the 16th Century. It gave an incredible sense of Time and History. I was very moved. We, the audience became more than observers; we were participants. In a darkened modern theatre when you do not feel at one with audience other than as an observer this collaborative feeling is much harder to bring forth. In Shakespeare’s Globe, in the seventeenth century, as was apparent to me here at this moment, it seemed much easier.
These dichotomies where an audience is actively involved in the play at the same time as being the observer is something which was absolutely imperative in the Elizabethan theatre and this dramatic shift in the audience’s role still has an emotional effect. Sadly and too often, characters addressing the audience for advice and counsel make a generalised ‘zoning out’ (often over compensated for by loud shouting!) When you commit as a performer to an involvement that the audience is there and their views actually matter, the atmosphere becomes charged.
The other key to this multi layered experience is the language and the imagery and the effect this has on the imagination without which the story and psychology of the characters is empty.
In my book, “What Country Friends is This?” (Nick Hern Books 2021) which gives help and guidance on working with young actors on Shakespeare, I emphasise working with the language through the body. I also talk a lot about this relationship with the audience. Is the audience actually a character in their own right? Usually not, or not exactly, because it’s important that their participation allows them to retain their identity as an audience. The key is the duality of this identity. If you make it too specific, let’s say the audience are the people of Rome, the chances are the audience are going to let you down. Like unsuspecting stooges plucked from the audience by a comedian they are never going to facilitate your performance. It is wrong to expect it. I saw one disastrous experiment of this whilst I was still living in England of Coriolanus directed by Sir Peter Hall with Ian McKellen as Coriolanus. The poor audience, some of them co-opted to be onstage as the incredibly important force of citizens, were expected to shout and yell on cue; it made for an embarrassing spectacle. The rage of the people on which this play actually rests was inevitably absent, leaving egg on the faces of all concerned!
The soliloquy especially is a bridge to the audience:
“You are both your character in his world and addressing the audience. You are doing both simultaneously, talking to yourself and talking to them”
(“What Country, Friends, is this?” 2021.p177.)
So what is this ‘character’ that we might give to the audience when we are speaking to them? Ask yourself, “What has the audience to offer me?” What is their role? In Macbeth for instance, I get the feeling that the audience are his judges, or accusers, maybe his conscience.
On April 15th I am beginning a set of online weekly workshops called The Shakespeare Connection which run till May 6th with guest tutor Liz Shipman who runs The Integrated Meisner and Chekhov Training in California. We will be looking at some opening and closing text from Richard III, a character who initially at least seems to have a real need of the audience. We will be using practical physical work, Chekhov exercises and doing examination of the text.
It costs 120€ for the four sessions. email chekhovtpi@gmail.com if you wish to book a place or have any questions to ask.
Max Hafler - Radiating /Receiving 