Fiction and Focus

“The single most important part of acting is total belief in the world you are trying to create.”
— Ada Brown-Mather, Master Teacher, RSC

Whenever an actor stands on the stage in front of an audience, the world or fiction generated by their imagination must be clear. As the actor works to make this fiction more and more precise, they attract or “hook” the audience into imagining it with them. Once “hooked”, the audience is suspended in this fiction through the actor’s continuous effort to discover new qualities within it. The more sensitive and expressive the actor’s mental and physical instrument, the more vividly these discoveries are transmitted. Acting methods exist, then, to make the actor a conduit for constant, instantaneous inspiration. Without the fine-tuning and dynamic range gleaned from years of training their mental and physical sensibilities, an actor may feel inspiration on stage, but it will not take seed and blossom in the heart of the audience.

The Suzuki Method of Actor Training is a fundamental approach to forming the actor’s sensibilities in this way. Offering a comprehensive philosophy and practice both in terms of form and content, it is appropriate for any actor, regardless of culture, language, nationality or race. The principles developed through the training are so universal that, properly practiced, they provide a solid foundation for any performance style. Nevertheless, as the training has taken root in the educational institutions of the West, its physical elements have come to dominate the practice. The mental work in this context has typically been limited to the concepts of concentration and will power, with an in-depth exploration of how the physical work connects to imagination and narrative lacking. Put another way, form has been favored over content.

It does stand to reason that the curious Western actor—trained primarily in psychological analysis and working in a playwright-dominated environment—would be more drawn to the physically formal aspects of the Suzuki Method than to the content-driven ones. When such actors get exposed to the training, it is usually for a short period of time, during which they may be able incorporate some of the clearly structured physical technique, but are less successful in digesting the subtler imagination work. This tendency—in combination with reservations about the training’s severe instruction format and vocal work among acting teachers[i]—has caused the Suzuki Method to be seen as an intense but “simple” movement training based in Asian theatre and martial arts techniques[ii]. As a result, at least in the university/conservatory setting, Suzuki Method is rarely offered as part of a core curriculum[iii], but rather as an elective or for limited periods of time in special workshops and seminars. [iv] To rectify this limited perception, directors and teachers working with the Suzuki Method must develop new strategies to bridge the gap between the training’s formal technique and the task of storytelling. Otherwise, the Suzuki Method runs the risk of getting pigeonholed as an exotic oriental dance form; never being recognized as the fundamental, universal actor training that it is.

One way to address this form/content imbalance in the Suzuki Method’s Western translation is to re-examine the concepts of focus and fiction. In the training, basic exercises are performed with the actor’s gaze and core squarely focused either on another actor (a kind of mirroring), or at an imaginary focus directly in front of them. In both cases, the actor must engage his or her peripheral vision around the focus, maintaining a sense of the whole space and monitoring the presence of the audience and other actors on stage (apart from the focal actor in that case). Most importantly, the actor must imagine a narrative scene or fiction that this focus represents. Starting with determining the distance between the focus and themselves, the actor must continuously spawn the details of the fiction in their imagination. If a particular exercise requires the actor to move through space and change orientation, the fiction/ focus moves with them while their gaze remains constant in terms of angle, distance and intensity.

Grasping the concept of focus and fiction is vital to understanding how imagination functions in the Suzuki Method. What makes the training unique is not necessarily the physical difficulty of the exercises—similar forms can be found in dance and sports that are just as if not more exigent. What distinguishes the training, rather, is the challenge to act while working at an intense physical level. Suzuki himself warn us that:

“…any time an actor thinks he is merely exercising or training his muscles, he is cheating himself. These are acting disciplines. Every instant of every discipline, the actor must be expressing the emotion of some situation, according to his own bodily interpretation. The actor composes on the basis of his sense of contact with the ground.”[v]

Thus, the discoveries an actor makes through attacking the training’s demanding physical forms must fuel their imagination and develop their fiction. Yet, despite the importance of this stipulation, the amount of attention paid to it has progressively diminished in the Western translation. To understand what gave rise to this disparity, it’s necessary to scrutinize how the training has been transmitted from its creator over two generations of teachers.

When Suzuki began directing as a student, the dominant theatre form in Japan was Shingeki: the post-WWII theatre dedicated to producing works from the Western canon in a naturalistic style. The leading Shingeki companies, such as Haiyu-za and Bungaku-za, all had a regular training regimen based in the Stanislavsky Method. This was also the case with the company of student-actors performing in Suzuki’s first play, Chekhov’s The Anniversary. As he states in a recent interview:

“When I started to direct as a student at Waseda University in the 60’s, most of my actors had been trained in the Stanislavsky Method. While I agree that these techniques can be valuable for developing the imagination, for me they are too focused on psychological analysis and not enough on physiological phenomena. In other words, I believe both the intellectual and physical interpretation of each moment on stage is necessary. To remedy this imbalance in my actors, I started to create exercises that would help them engage a kind of animal energy in the body’s core. I believed that, by regularly engaging this animal energy in the context of acting, over time the actors’ expressive abilities would expand.” [vi]

Thus, Suzuki’s method was developed with a strong awareness of the differences between what he was envisioning and the work of Stanislavsky and other naturalistic methods. A key factor to consider here is that Suzuki developed his method in the context of making plays. For example, in one production of The Trojan Women, Suzuki invited a well known Butoh and Shingeki performer to work with the company. While these guest artists trained with Suzuki’s actors, they were able to establish a connection not only through the physical training, but also by having the same narrative focus. Put another way, the fiction they engaged was the world of The Trojan Women, both individually through their characters, and collectively with the entire cast.

When Suzuki started to share his method with foreigners in the 1980’s—through his own trips to institutions in the United States and during the Toga summer sessions—the teaching was often conducted outside the context of working on a specific play. Since most of the actors in these groups were experiencing something extremely different from their own training, they mostly concerned themselves with how to execute the physical technique.[vii] There may even have been an assumption on the foreign actors’ part that imagination work did not play a vital role in Suzuki’s method, since he had been an outspoken critic of the psychologically based training used in Shingeki. In retrospect, it appears clear that the abstract workshop context over a short period was not conducive to an elaboration on the subtler, “invisible” side of the training. Of course, when some of these actors went on to work with Suzuki in production, the connection between the physical work and the actor’s imagination was significantly clarified through a constant dialogue with a communal narrative in rehearsal and performance.[viii]

In addition to the problems created by the abstract format, the content/form disparity has been exacerbated through a kind of dogmatic transformation in the West. For Suzuki himself, the training has always functioned as a malleable interface that continues to evolve even to this day. When this first generation of Suzuki’s foreign students became teachers, however, a dogmatic trend surfaced as they disseminated the training. Naturally, between any two cultures as different as Japan and the United States, a degree of mysticism creeps up around artistic exchanges. This mystification of the foreign “other” often causes the received knowledge to be treated in an overly precious way. When this happens, the flow of exchange becomes stiff, and a desire to protect and codify the sensations one originally felt when encountering the work of the “other” grows. Unfortunately in such moments, artistic growth stops, and individual perceptions of the precious “other” degenerate into a kind of dogma that no longer has life or movement. Yet, any method designed to train a company of actors must, by its nature, be able to morph as artistic needs and interests change. By overly codifying the Suzuki Method—mitigated through precious perceptions of the “other”—such teaching diminishes the training’s transformative power. This is perhaps the reason why some of the first generation Suzuki advocates were limited in their exploration of the imagination work. In such cases, these teachers have been either reluctant or unwilling to alter the training to fit the artistic needs of their students and the projects they collaborated on.[ix]

One example of this phenomenon can be seen in the way Menelaus’ opening speech text from Euripides’ The Trojan Women has functioned in the proliferation of the training. For many years, from the 80’s into the late 90’s, this Menelaus text was simply the only one used to teach the training, regardless of the play the actors or company being taught may have been rehearsing. [x] Of course, Suzuki today uses the “Tomorrow” speech from Shakespeare’s Macbeth as a kind of warm-up, but he spends significantly more time examining texts drawn from the play(s) being rehearsed. Oftentimes these explorations result in the formation of new variations within an exercise, or even in a new exercise altogether. This plastic use of the method allows it to adjust to the specific needs of the artistic work, which is infinitely more useful in rehearsal than simply trying to satisfy the prerequisites of a perceived dogma.

Today, the dilemma of how to teach the Suzuki Method while maintaining a fluid connection to narrative and imagination work persists. During the Suzuki Training Symposium in August of 2009, Suzuki himself implored the group to always teach the training in the context of working on a production. Otherwise, he said, “the training degenerates into a kind of sports conditioning”. Even in a short workshop, training in the context of specific play, with short speeches from the text chosen for the vocal work, is possible.

For example, during a three-week workshop conducted in the Spring 2006, I used Shakespeare’s The Tempest for context. The group memorized four contrasting speeches, and specific situations from the play were attached to certain exercises. In some instances, the actors were asked to choose a single moment from the play on which to focus, imagining a kind of still image to represent their fiction. While executing the exercises, the actors would meditate on this single moment, painting in the details as they worked. As the fictional images became progressively clearer to the actors, the specificity of their internal quality became apparent to the audience as well. In this way, just as a Polaroid photograph develops through exposure to the air, the actors’ fictions developed through exposure to the animal energy encountered in the exercise.

In certain exercises, the actors were made to improvise a text related to the still image they had generated. The improvisation was structured in such a way that, once the actor reached the end of a complete phrase or idea, they could repeat it. Through repetition, a kind of vocal play developed in relation to the physical work, through which different facets of their fiction began to emerge. Such experimentation with the training enriches the actors’ physiological and imaginative relationship to the play, forcing them to be accountable for both form and content.

While there is of course no one formula to exploring the illusive content-side of the Suzuki Method, it is the responsibility of all who teach the training to engage it. Because of the extremity of the physical forms and the inhibiting dogmatic approach that has crept up around them, the imagination work continues to be laid on as an afterthought, if at all. Not only must those who teach the method do so in the context of a specific narrative, but they must also continue to explore new ways of making the performers work just as hard on this “invisible” side of the training as they do on the visible.

-- Kameron Steele
Toga-mura, February 2010

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^[i] David Diamond, “Balancing Acts: Anne Bogart and Kristin Linklater Debate the Current Trends in American Actor-Training”, American Theatre, January 2001.

^[ii] The terms “simple” and “martial” are quoted from Paul Allain’s audio commentary in the DVD accompanying The Theatre Practice of Tadashi Suzuki, Methuen, 2009.

^[iii] The Juilliard School is one notable exception. Columbia University also made the training part of its core graduate school curriculum for a time, but Kristin Linklater changed that policy

^[iv] Such was the case in the author’s engagement with Institut del Teatre in Barcelona, Long Island University in Brooklyn, Brooklyn College, Universidad del Cuyo in Mendoza, Argentina and the Universidad de Guadalajara, Mexico.

^[v] James Brandon, “Training at the Waseda Little Theatre: The Suzuki Method”, The Drama Review, 22:4, p.36.

^[vi] Interview with Lietuvos Rytas, January 26, 2010 for production of Dionysus at Sirenos theatre festival in OKT/Vilnius City Theatre, Lithuania. Author’s translation.

[vii] From author’s interview with American actor Tom Hewitt on Suzuki’s first trip to University of Milwaukee in 1980, Berkshire Theatre Festival, 1997.

[viii] Ibid.

[ix] From author’s 1992-1995 observations of training sessions led by Eric Hill at StageWest in Springfield, MA—one of the first professional theatres in the U.S. where the training was regularly taught.

[x] During rehearsals of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night directed by Eric Hill at StageWest, in Springfield MA, the residency company trained daily in the Suzuki Method daily using only the Menelaus text.