Joseph Roach, Sterling Professor of Theater and English at Yale University, and Martha Lavey, artistic director of Steppenwolf Theatre Company dialogue on actor’s body and roles at the Chicago Humanities Festival.
Over the hour, a lot of it seems to apply to the process of poem-making and reading as well.
– acting is setting up a sequence of impacts on an audience (10 minutes)
– gertrude stein; something about the way she constructs sentences makes me spill over (12:30)
– as people observe the same neurons fire than the ones that would if they were doing (27:00,)
– being “under the weather of the role”, a doctor said to actress, your body doesn’t know that it’s lying (30:00)
and it’s healthy for “the theatre to die at night” to turn that role off and rest
– even when we think we are being natural, we can’t help be be mannered by the time we’re in (36:00)
Some job roles are to understand the impact of what you say, to build expectation, know when saturation or boredom point is and pull back and try a new tack. It’s something of a garden of words to make a stream of sound or story that turns and causes new reveals.
Something that doesn’t “make sense” still is felt in the body. The conscious upper brain is bypassed by some constructions in words.
Be careful little mind and body what you consume. Your body doesn’t understand what you obsess over isn’t really happening. Could a tough manuscript make you end up literally and literarily sick as you wrestle with the angel in the cave, breaking your own bones, giving yourself ptsd for the sake of a creation of the mind that then ripples ill effects to other minds that take a turn arm wrestling with the angel you made? Part of that is culture and each cultural artifact gives an exercise against a surrogate devil so one can handle ones own. Transferable skills and all that. Gains are hard to measure but impacts as you go along are easier. Sure, go into dark places. That is part of the writer’s job but come out at night for beauty because that is what renews the human animal.
Being under the weather of a project, the obsessive stage of editing, single-minded rewritings, the depressive trough of having no focus when it is done for a while, all have physical effects, mental effects and are a job hazard not just of actors.
Training the mind to be completely in one project and then clicking off so that one is shifting up activities is healthy. A little social, a little sun, a little obsession and cycle back again.
The matter of style and stylistics is to be a product of your age and peers and even when you think you’re not stilted, it’s temporary. But that’s the universe’s balloon. Looking at a 1940s anthology, some wrote in a manner that seems now like 1800s and some could be written by contemporaries today. Did they seem so stylistically marked then or the centre of style has just shifted so that one fell sideway out of the bubble while the other is still inside?