How Do You Create Virtuoso Human Beings?
Get on the Floor and Boogie: A Director Explains his Approach
By Ron Bieganski (published in American Theatre January 2004)
Developing virtuoso actors doesn't start with acting exercises -- it starts with virtuoso creative humans. That's what I've learned in my years at Free Street Programs, a Chicago organization whose mission is to open the potential of youth through theatre and writing, so that youth can be creative, active participants in their own destiny. That is our blurb. Like, "A mind is a terrible thing to waste." In my time, I have watched way too much bad youth theatre -- not theatre by untalented performers, but theatre by young people who have developed skills that feed into their own insecurities and lead to many "actor-ly" problems: overacting, unfocused intentions, showing off, self-consciousness, etc. These performances are truly happenings that only a mother could love. Part of the problem, I have come to realize, is that most acting training takes for granted that the actor already understands where creativity, emotion and spontaneity come from. But the more I've worked with youth, the more I've realized that they don't understand these things. So developing a training process -- and, more generally, a working process -- that is about being an artist and opening creative potential has become my mission. In 1985, when I started working with at-risk youth -- by "at-risk" I mean any young people who are not reaching their potential because of economic, societal, educational or family reason -- at Free Street, I asked myself the following questions: How do you develop focus to stay in the moment? How do you develop an open, fluid emotional connection within your work? How do you develop a nonjudgmental attitude that allows your body to be a virtuoso reactor? And isn't all of the above something I want to develop in youth whether they are actors or not? Isn't this something I want to continue developing in myself?
In response to these questions, we have developed a specific training system that forms the basis for the work of MadJoy Theatrics, the Free Street program that works to create new forms, structures and language to tell non-autobiographical stories. Our theatre training starts with the development of a nonjudgmental emotional openness and leads to whole human development. To a certain extent, this system has been influenced by my own experience performing as a juggler, acrobat and dancer; working with the Ark theatre in Madison, Wisc.; practicing contact improvisation; and even getting a degree in biology -- which has shaped my ideas about human development. But the most crucial factor in developing the system has been my breath and movement work with young people. I've found that the more focused breath and movement work we do, the more the students open up to being intimate, immediate and spontaneous. The students have this inside them all the time -- what they need is a way to bypass the everyday process that closes them up, makes them self-conscious and think too much. So our acting training starts with this idea: Focus on your breath and whatever physical activity you are doing. As you focus on the breath and the activity, stillness emerges in your mind. No thought, negative or positive. As you focus on breath and activity, your heart opens and your body fills with emotion like a vase filling with water. Your breath is alive. Your body resonates like a violin with emotional breath. And yet there is stillness in your mind. Stillness is not nothing. It is an opening.
Based on this foundation, the MadJoy system concentrates on 6 essential principals:
1. Freeing the non-judgmental creative mind with physical work
2. Ensemble mind, shared creativity
3. Non-linear creation of material
4. Safe, wildly creative space
5. Adult artists (not social workers) as facilitators and mentors in creative work. Art first.
6. Creation of multidisciplinary 'new' work (non-autobiographical) in structure, language, form and direction. Let me briefly explain these principals, and then I'll give an example of two specific training exercises that apply to them. After that, two of the teens who have experienced the exercises will talk about them.
Free the creative mind. MadJoy Theater's workshops begin with a very physical "no acting" approach to freeing the body. The workshops strive to develop "quality moments" -- which are moments when the youth are energized non-judgmentally. This process allows the student to explore performance as a natural product of being in the moment and allows the deep creative well to flow freely in all aspects of the workshop.
Ensemble mind -- the giving-up of single ownership of the performance --involves critical, non-destructive thinking: We all work together, or we do not work. Ensemble mind gives us permission to steal ideas from each other and then give those ideas back; it provides a total experience for the participants, as I believe it does for the audience. An ensemble mind is also a volatile mind --a mind that, when it fails, fails gloriously.
Non-linearity. Our culture and standard teaching practices have trapped our minds in a linear/time-dependant world. When MadJoy is working, we try to escape that linear mode. The creation of a new script does not start with an issue; it starts with months of creating characters, movement, poetry and dialogue, with "wild exploration" as our only intention.
Safe, wildly creative environment. MadJoy strives to create a workshop/performance environment in which internally voiced editing is eliminated. We strive for a performance based on reactions, not on mechanical thought.
Adults as mentors and facilitators -- MadJoy's work is not to put youth in a room to do whatever they want. Adult facilitators steer the young people from cliché and facilitate the creation of original contemporary work that comes from the deep creative well of all involved.
Creation of new, non-autobiographical work. Youth psychologists say one of the main problems when youth are confronting a difficult past is to help them move forward even a little bit. To emphasize a single tragic autobiographical moment that gets performed over and over, I believe, doesn't help the youth. There is a beneficial element to psychodrama work; we just feel that turning it into a performance is not beneficial. Psychodrama should be done the way group therapy is done, without an audience. Young people know when they are being patronized, when there is huge applause for a not-so-good autobiographical performance. They know -- just ask them. Our society must really re-think what "empowerment" is. Self-esteem is nothing but smoke up your butt if you are not also teaching real skills.
So how do we get to these "real skills" from the principals I've outlined above? Well, we start with a variety of simple -- but not easy -- exercises, like "Wiggle and Jiggle." This is an exercise that we do a lot in the beginning and bring back on a regular basis throughout the rest of the year. One person lies on their back, closes his or her eyes and falls into the floor. This person's whole purpose is to let go of his or her muscles and gently use breath to energize (release). The working partner will be wiggling and jiggling, manipulating and compressing the other person's limbs. As you work on your partner you can also think about making them longer with each limb you work on.
You could think of "Wiggle and Jiggle" as how little it takes to become energized and focused in the moment. Most theatre classes begin with something big to get the blood flowing. I want the youth to learn how little it takes and build up from there. I'll let one of the young people who've done this exercise describe how it feels:
Youth commentary from Jasmine Harris, 15 years old, after the first week of work.
The "Wiggle and Jiggle" exercise is what really told me that this place is nuts. At first, I'm looking at people shaking the devils out of people's limbs, and thinking "Like hell if I'm gonna do this!" But you really get into it after a while. I know that for the guy-and-gal pairs there can be a bit of tension, but they make it clear in the beginning about the whole "respect your partner" thing. We used to do a much more subdued version of wiggle-jiggle in the theatre company at school, and back then I was so tense you couldn't even wedge a stick up my butt. I just never knew how to let go. But you get to see that the people you're working with aren't out to get you, and you have to learn to trust them. I close my eyes and breathe. Breathe. Breathe. Once again I feel those million unnoticed joints and muscles loosening, releasing, and I think to myself, "I am the floor. Be the floor" for some strange reason. It's odd, because after you're all brushed off, you start to feel kind of like you're levitating -- and there's this tingling effect that at first feels like rope-burn. The first time I did it I felt like I could shoot lasers through my fingertips -- it was awesome.
Another MadJoy exercise that's a little different is stream-of-consciousness. Stream of consciousness -- which can be done either as voice work or as writing -- is the verbalization of everything that you are thinking and feeling without wording your thoughts. Doing this exercise regularly enables you to express yourself without obstruction, and you learn to free yourself quickly when you get stuck. This is an antidote to functioning above, below, next to your real self. This exercise works with the front-of-the-wave of thought before you actually have time to edit yourself. So beautiful, strange, perverted, dirty, surprising things are going to come up Just let them come up and evaporate as the stream of new words goes on. Streams can be: single words, rhymes, partial sentences, whole stories. After you practice this for a while this exercise is not about flow, because flow is easy -- the game becomes about how quickly you can get over getting stuck. When the game becomes about how quickly you can get back after you lose it, the student will attack their writing and other improv scenes with more ease.
Youth commentary from Tina Powell, 17 years old:
Let me just say first of all that I am biased towards stream of consciousness, and if I make it sound as if I think that it is the best thing in the world that is because it is. I ab-so-lute-ly love it. At first, it is kind of uncomfortable -- how are you supposed to keep talking about nothing for two minutes straight? It seems impossible. But you just try to schtuck your way through it. If you're stuck, just keep saying "I'm stuck, I'm stuck, stuck stuck stuck" till you get out of that. Rhyme, talk about your mother, do whatever, just keep talking. It opens your head up but away from cliches and really thinking too much altogether, which is always helpful to an actor, since you should be able to react instantaneously.
When you're guiding youth through this kind of exercise, it's important to do the work with your students. In our world it seems that you can be a philosopher of ideas and at the same time not live by your own philosophy. (Make your own list of the numerous religious, political and teaching figures that fit this category). I really believe a principle quality of a true teacher is that you be a living illustration of what you are teaching. That teaching can't just be knowing the "system." The system should be living inside the teacher. So what am I saying? You have to get down on the dance floor and boogie. You must learn the skills and practice them with your students -- even when you are tired or old. Your philosophy is not yours unless you are doing it. There is a great Calvin and Hobbes cartoon where Calvin asks, "Which is more important, what you believe or your actions?" Hobbes said, "Your actions are your beliefs." Calvin responded, "I resent that!" Finally, let me say that this philosophy, and the ideas in the MadJoy system, are relevant to all actors, not just young people. I had worked with young people for about 15 years before I taught adults in Steppenwolf Theatre Company's professional training program. I thought the way I explained my work would change because my students were older, but it didn't change at all. The work related as easily to a 35-year-old as to a 16-year-old. The oldest actor I have worked with was a 62-year-old woman, and she was a joy to watch play the game.
I cannot stress how much MadJoy Theatrics helps the participants to grow not just as artists, but as people. Ken Vandermark, musician and MacArthur "genius" grant winner, has emphasized in his workshops with MadJoy that the ability to create something never seen or heard before is a "language skill." And like any language, if you learn the process early enough in life, it becomes automatic or instinctual. The ability to take what is your life at this moment and shape it into what you want it to be is essential to the development of the whole individual. Taking your own experiences, feelings, thoughts and shaping them into "new original stories" reinforces the skills that you need in order to become the person you wish to be.
By Ron Bieganski (published in American Theatre January 2004)
Developing virtuoso actors doesn't start with acting exercises -- it starts with virtuoso creative humans. That's what I've learned in my years at Free Street Programs, a Chicago organization whose mission is to open the potential of youth through theatre and writing, so that youth can be creative, active participants in their own destiny. That is our blurb. Like, "A mind is a terrible thing to waste." In my time, I have watched way too much bad youth theatre -- not theatre by untalented performers, but theatre by young people who have developed skills that feed into their own insecurities and lead to many "actor-ly" problems: overacting, unfocused intentions, showing off, self-consciousness, etc. These performances are truly happenings that only a mother could love. Part of the problem, I have come to realize, is that most acting training takes for granted that the actor already understands where creativity, emotion and spontaneity come from. But the more I've worked with youth, the more I've realized that they don't understand these things. So developing a training process -- and, more generally, a working process -- that is about being an artist and opening creative potential has become my mission. In 1985, when I started working with at-risk youth -- by "at-risk" I mean any young people who are not reaching their potential because of economic, societal, educational or family reason -- at Free Street, I asked myself the following questions: How do you develop focus to stay in the moment? How do you develop an open, fluid emotional connection within your work? How do you develop a nonjudgmental attitude that allows your body to be a virtuoso reactor? And isn't all of the above something I want to develop in youth whether they are actors or not? Isn't this something I want to continue developing in myself?
In response to these questions, we have developed a specific training system that forms the basis for the work of MadJoy Theatrics, the Free Street program that works to create new forms, structures and language to tell non-autobiographical stories. Our theatre training starts with the development of a nonjudgmental emotional openness and leads to whole human development. To a certain extent, this system has been influenced by my own experience performing as a juggler, acrobat and dancer; working with the Ark theatre in Madison, Wisc.; practicing contact improvisation; and even getting a degree in biology -- which has shaped my ideas about human development. But the most crucial factor in developing the system has been my breath and movement work with young people. I've found that the more focused breath and movement work we do, the more the students open up to being intimate, immediate and spontaneous. The students have this inside them all the time -- what they need is a way to bypass the everyday process that closes them up, makes them self-conscious and think too much. So our acting training starts with this idea: Focus on your breath and whatever physical activity you are doing. As you focus on the breath and the activity, stillness emerges in your mind. No thought, negative or positive. As you focus on breath and activity, your heart opens and your body fills with emotion like a vase filling with water. Your breath is alive. Your body resonates like a violin with emotional breath. And yet there is stillness in your mind. Stillness is not nothing. It is an opening.
Based on this foundation, the MadJoy system concentrates on 6 essential principals:
1. Freeing the non-judgmental creative mind with physical work
2. Ensemble mind, shared creativity
3. Non-linear creation of material
4. Safe, wildly creative space
5. Adult artists (not social workers) as facilitators and mentors in creative work. Art first.
6. Creation of multidisciplinary 'new' work (non-autobiographical) in structure, language, form and direction. Let me briefly explain these principals, and then I'll give an example of two specific training exercises that apply to them. After that, two of the teens who have experienced the exercises will talk about them.
Free the creative mind. MadJoy Theater's workshops begin with a very physical "no acting" approach to freeing the body. The workshops strive to develop "quality moments" -- which are moments when the youth are energized non-judgmentally. This process allows the student to explore performance as a natural product of being in the moment and allows the deep creative well to flow freely in all aspects of the workshop.
Ensemble mind -- the giving-up of single ownership of the performance --involves critical, non-destructive thinking: We all work together, or we do not work. Ensemble mind gives us permission to steal ideas from each other and then give those ideas back; it provides a total experience for the participants, as I believe it does for the audience. An ensemble mind is also a volatile mind --a mind that, when it fails, fails gloriously.
Non-linearity. Our culture and standard teaching practices have trapped our minds in a linear/time-dependant world. When MadJoy is working, we try to escape that linear mode. The creation of a new script does not start with an issue; it starts with months of creating characters, movement, poetry and dialogue, with "wild exploration" as our only intention.
Safe, wildly creative environment. MadJoy strives to create a workshop/performance environment in which internally voiced editing is eliminated. We strive for a performance based on reactions, not on mechanical thought.
Adults as mentors and facilitators -- MadJoy's work is not to put youth in a room to do whatever they want. Adult facilitators steer the young people from cliché and facilitate the creation of original contemporary work that comes from the deep creative well of all involved.
Creation of new, non-autobiographical work. Youth psychologists say one of the main problems when youth are confronting a difficult past is to help them move forward even a little bit. To emphasize a single tragic autobiographical moment that gets performed over and over, I believe, doesn't help the youth. There is a beneficial element to psychodrama work; we just feel that turning it into a performance is not beneficial. Psychodrama should be done the way group therapy is done, without an audience. Young people know when they are being patronized, when there is huge applause for a not-so-good autobiographical performance. They know -- just ask them. Our society must really re-think what "empowerment" is. Self-esteem is nothing but smoke up your butt if you are not also teaching real skills.
So how do we get to these "real skills" from the principals I've outlined above? Well, we start with a variety of simple -- but not easy -- exercises, like "Wiggle and Jiggle." This is an exercise that we do a lot in the beginning and bring back on a regular basis throughout the rest of the year. One person lies on their back, closes his or her eyes and falls into the floor. This person's whole purpose is to let go of his or her muscles and gently use breath to energize (release). The working partner will be wiggling and jiggling, manipulating and compressing the other person's limbs. As you work on your partner you can also think about making them longer with each limb you work on.
You could think of "Wiggle and Jiggle" as how little it takes to become energized and focused in the moment. Most theatre classes begin with something big to get the blood flowing. I want the youth to learn how little it takes and build up from there. I'll let one of the young people who've done this exercise describe how it feels:
Youth commentary from Jasmine Harris, 15 years old, after the first week of work.
The "Wiggle and Jiggle" exercise is what really told me that this place is nuts. At first, I'm looking at people shaking the devils out of people's limbs, and thinking "Like hell if I'm gonna do this!" But you really get into it after a while. I know that for the guy-and-gal pairs there can be a bit of tension, but they make it clear in the beginning about the whole "respect your partner" thing. We used to do a much more subdued version of wiggle-jiggle in the theatre company at school, and back then I was so tense you couldn't even wedge a stick up my butt. I just never knew how to let go. But you get to see that the people you're working with aren't out to get you, and you have to learn to trust them. I close my eyes and breathe. Breathe. Breathe. Once again I feel those million unnoticed joints and muscles loosening, releasing, and I think to myself, "I am the floor. Be the floor" for some strange reason. It's odd, because after you're all brushed off, you start to feel kind of like you're levitating -- and there's this tingling effect that at first feels like rope-burn. The first time I did it I felt like I could shoot lasers through my fingertips -- it was awesome.
Another MadJoy exercise that's a little different is stream-of-consciousness. Stream of consciousness -- which can be done either as voice work or as writing -- is the verbalization of everything that you are thinking and feeling without wording your thoughts. Doing this exercise regularly enables you to express yourself without obstruction, and you learn to free yourself quickly when you get stuck. This is an antidote to functioning above, below, next to your real self. This exercise works with the front-of-the-wave of thought before you actually have time to edit yourself. So beautiful, strange, perverted, dirty, surprising things are going to come up Just let them come up and evaporate as the stream of new words goes on. Streams can be: single words, rhymes, partial sentences, whole stories. After you practice this for a while this exercise is not about flow, because flow is easy -- the game becomes about how quickly you can get over getting stuck. When the game becomes about how quickly you can get back after you lose it, the student will attack their writing and other improv scenes with more ease.
Youth commentary from Tina Powell, 17 years old:
Let me just say first of all that I am biased towards stream of consciousness, and if I make it sound as if I think that it is the best thing in the world that is because it is. I ab-so-lute-ly love it. At first, it is kind of uncomfortable -- how are you supposed to keep talking about nothing for two minutes straight? It seems impossible. But you just try to schtuck your way through it. If you're stuck, just keep saying "I'm stuck, I'm stuck, stuck stuck stuck" till you get out of that. Rhyme, talk about your mother, do whatever, just keep talking. It opens your head up but away from cliches and really thinking too much altogether, which is always helpful to an actor, since you should be able to react instantaneously.
When you're guiding youth through this kind of exercise, it's important to do the work with your students. In our world it seems that you can be a philosopher of ideas and at the same time not live by your own philosophy. (Make your own list of the numerous religious, political and teaching figures that fit this category). I really believe a principle quality of a true teacher is that you be a living illustration of what you are teaching. That teaching can't just be knowing the "system." The system should be living inside the teacher. So what am I saying? You have to get down on the dance floor and boogie. You must learn the skills and practice them with your students -- even when you are tired or old. Your philosophy is not yours unless you are doing it. There is a great Calvin and Hobbes cartoon where Calvin asks, "Which is more important, what you believe or your actions?" Hobbes said, "Your actions are your beliefs." Calvin responded, "I resent that!" Finally, let me say that this philosophy, and the ideas in the MadJoy system, are relevant to all actors, not just young people. I had worked with young people for about 15 years before I taught adults in Steppenwolf Theatre Company's professional training program. I thought the way I explained my work would change because my students were older, but it didn't change at all. The work related as easily to a 35-year-old as to a 16-year-old. The oldest actor I have worked with was a 62-year-old woman, and she was a joy to watch play the game.
I cannot stress how much MadJoy Theatrics helps the participants to grow not just as artists, but as people. Ken Vandermark, musician and MacArthur "genius" grant winner, has emphasized in his workshops with MadJoy that the ability to create something never seen or heard before is a "language skill." And like any language, if you learn the process early enough in life, it becomes automatic or instinctual. The ability to take what is your life at this moment and shape it into what you want it to be is essential to the development of the whole individual. Taking your own experiences, feelings, thoughts and shaping them into "new original stories" reinforces the skills that you need in order to become the person you wish to be.
