Part Three: The Performer/Audience Romance
talent and skill, resonance, the total act, No-Form technique
(updated 8/12/10)
TALENT AND SKILL
The creation of Art depends on a dynamic balance of skill and talent in the communication of the spiritual and the universal truths of humanity. Performers often demonstrate an imbalance of talent and skil; too much talent can overwhelm skill, just as too much skill can crimp talent. The more exceptional the performer, the higher the integration of talent and skill.If we are to develop and expand our presence as performers, talent and skill must develop together. Talent, as the term is used here, allows for fluid and total access to the internal landscape. Skill, as the term is used here, enables the articulation of subjective material into externally recognizable forms, images, and structures. Through talent we experience the presence, fluidity, and force of an artist; in skill, we experience their virtuosity, technique, and form.
Talent and skill each require their own distinct sustaining actions. Talent can be nurtured by allowing total freedom of self-expression towards greater fluidity and spontaneity. Skill can develop with consistent application of technique towards clarifying the form and style of whatever talent can access. When talent and skill harmonize together, true spontaneity expresses itself as the high form of Art.
The audience/performer dynamic expresses an inherent imbalance. As performers, we're onstage because we exhibit, or should exhibit, more talent and skill than the audience. To ignore this fact, in the name of some populist theatrical ideal of destroying audience/performer barriers, is to perpetrate a deception. In theatre, the performers call the shots, must call the shots. The audience pays to be entertained and perhaps, enlightened to some aspect of humanity they can learn from or identify with. When the actors do their job and it all comes together, theatre happens. There is a difference, however, between theatre that just gets the job done and theatre that changes your life.
THE WAYNE NEWTON SYNDROME
Performers of the theatre that changes lives must continually work their craft in very specific and precise ways. Though these ways differ for each performance medium, their common crux includes whatever skills and talents enable them to access, express and embody the internal landscape of our common humanity. Without this Self-access, we can easily slip into the rut of redundancy repeating what we know and what do best and, stagnate in a quagmire of inertia. Unless we consistently take on roles, skills, and subjects that stretch our capacities, our existing talents can easily corrupt and fritter away into a blitz of glitz.
Performers suffering from the WNS become more tourist than artist, more mimic than creator, more spectacle than substance. The Universal Patron Saint of Show Biz Glitz, Wayne "Mr. Las Vegas" Newton, reminds us of the fate awaiting anyone who only performs what they do best -- it's what he's famous for and he does it very, very well:
“I’m still doing the kind of shows I’ve always done
and I can tell you one thing: people may leave one of my shows disliking Wayne
Newton, but they’ve never walked out saying, ‘He didn’t work hard for us’ or
‘He didn’t give us our money’s worth.’ " -- Wayne Newton
THE SOCIAL VS. THE THEATRICAL
The social and the theatrical follow their own laws. As performers, we know how creative working relationships do not always lead to friendships and social liaisons; some do, some don't. Beyond the social agenda of making real connections with each other as friends and comrades is the theatrical problem of how the performer connects with an audience. The audience/performer courtship and romance is fraught with mystery, anticipation, and insecurity. The stage fright of a blind date does not start out as any long-term relationship but as a tremulous one-night stand called Opening Night.
Theatrical conventions of distance (the fourth wall), talent, and skill separate actors and audience, a separation sealed by post-performance audience applause. These power dynamics tip and sway with kinetic charge and fickle electricity; one night we're up and on, the next night we're down and out. As with any one-night stand, the audience/performer romance remains unpredictable and most performers would not want it any other way. Can any real connection actually be made between actor and audience inside such imbalanced dynamics ? Yes and no. Real connection between audience and performer may not be possible through any form of direct theatrical attack. If the performer is to discover any real connection with their audience, a more indirect approach may be necessary.
"Direct attack" implies any presentational confrontation from the performer that directly manipulates and/or assaults the audience. Whether it's via the seduction of the performers' own charisma or the performers' insecure "need to please and be liked or to impress others" or the more aggressive assaults of Artaud's Theatre of Cruelty, or Julian Beck's Living Theatre and their numerous theatrical hybrids, direct attack theatre often fails to achieve any real connecton between audience and performer. Though this direct attack approach can be effective as political theatre, historically it has also consistently failed to achieve its core aims of awakening the sleeping masses or saving the world. Though there will always be great passion for performing this type of theatre, to assume it can result in any genuine audience/performer connection is to court self-delusion.
THE NEED FOR LOVE
No matter how great a given performance, an audience can only love the performance and not the person performing it. Expecting a satisfying "real" connection with any audience is a little like believing that our need for love can be fulfilled by their applause. Everyone needs and deserves real love but that's not what the audience offers or can offer. With very few exceptions the audience is conditioned by centuries of tradition to act as a passive, receptive vessel for the influx of their own impressions, emotions, ideas, beliefs, and reactions to the stimulus presented onstage.
If the performance is successful, the audience responds with adoring applause, praise, admiration, and respect. But this is not love. Oh, we can hear them say, "I absolutely love your show" and "what an amazing performance" and "I LOVE you in your show" and so on, but these affects quickly fade, don't they? Those who fall for the love of an audience are shadowed by a gnawing emptiness between gigs, fueling a hungry ghost high in the compulsion to leapfrog from production to production without breaking to breathe, to live, to love, and to be nobody but ourselves. And if you are foolish enough to believe in your P.R., you will eventually become a hungry ghost yourself.
Attempting to meet the human need for real and personal love may be perhaps the worst reason to enter theatre as a performer. Find someone to love (and to love you) and then, decide why you want to perform. And if you can't find someone to love, love yourself like there's no tomorrow. Or if you are so graced, turn to God and find the unconditional love that no human can be expected to provide and then, share this Presence with the world as your personal mission. Become the love that you seek.
THE TOTAL ACT AND CAPACITY FOR RESONANCE
It is crucial to grasp the underlying motives of our will to perform. Why do we perform ? If we are to make real connection with the audience, our will to perform must be first liberated from all externally-driven considerations and motivations, such as seeking acceptance, pleasing others, trying to impress the director, getting attention, love or approval, or seeking any external acceptance for our talents, skills, and abilities. Only when the will to perform is emancipated from external social approval mechanisms can it become unified behind a commitment to the total act.
A total act is free of the manipulation and expectation of return and/or a manipulation of a desired effect, intention, or outcome. The performer simply, purely, fully participates in offering his/herself without any intent of gain.
The total act can be nurtured by developing the faculty of resonance as a guiding principle, i.e., one moves in a particular direction from a strong internal resonance with that source or direction. Resonance as a navigational strategy requires no understanding, forethought, or plans to guide us. When we fully commit to serving strong visceral and spiritual resonances within us, these same resonances can indirectly stir similar resonances in the audience. As our own experience rings true to ourselves, so can it ring true for the audience. A good question to ask ourselves at this point might be: "how to cultivate a deeper capacity for resonance?"
This 'resonance approach' creates space for an audience to experience their own impulses, sensations, thoughts, and emotions without the pressure of being confronted or manipulated by the performer to do so. Real connection between performer and audience can develop indirectly by resonances beginning in the performer and expanding to the audience, not unlike the sound waves vibrating across space from a bell to theear drums of everyone present. This interaction of resonance relies on the performer's total commitment to their own visceral and spiritual sources which, in turn, can act as a resonating catalyst for the audience.
In this way, the audience experiences an amplification of their own presence and not just the impacts of a performer's force of will or charisma. After the performance, the audience walks away exalted and amplified, not dented, assaulted, seduced or merely charmed. To cultivate this capacity for resonance, the performer must first resuscitate and restore the capacity for direct experience and perception towards an open state of being. This open state of being can emerge only after undoing whatever has been over-done and deadened by redundancy.
THE UNDOING TECHNIQUE OF NO-FORM
Any actor or performer too full of him/herself -- too many super hero self-images, too many tricks and skills, big ideas, preconceptions, ideals, beliefs, too much confidence and too many certitudes, etc. -- is like a violin stuffed with cotton; without internal space, the instrument can produce no sound. Resonance requires internal space. The capacity for resonance can be developed by cultivating more spatial awareness towards the immediate environment and also cultivating internal receptivity to the spaces within. External spatial awareness can be increased by simply relating with the space in the environment as a value. This can occur when the actual space between things and people takes on more importance than the things and people in the environment, an action that results in a greater receptivity to the space around things and around people.
Techniques for deepening internal receptivity typically involve via negativa approaches of dropping extra mental baggage of preconceptions and assumptions in lieu of a more direct perception of what is. Certain meditation practices and other awareness disciplines that stimulate a kind of "undoing" of mental and emotional fixations can also deepen internal receptivity. In the paratheatre medium I have been developing since 1977, we engage a standing posture of vertical rest called No-Form. The inner action, or essence, of this technique cannot be taught; it is tricky to even write or talk about it. The actual experience, however, might be addressed as a kind of intimacy with Void, or a kind of comfort in being nothing or being nobody.
This No-Form technique can be approached in any standing posture of balance resulting in a position of vertical rest -- of standing with minimal effort -- and supporting a state of emptying or internal receptivity. This inner emptying-out process is not done for its own sake -- no samadhi enlightenment is sought here. The objective of No-Form is to cultivate enough internal receptivity to sources of energy in the body itself towards their spontaneous expression in sound, movement, gesture, action, characterization. The breath is focussed on the exhale, allowing the inhale to occur by reflex. Mentally, we relax the desire to control and the desire to control the outcome or any appearance of our expression. The intention here is to incite the autonomy for not being anything, for not identifying with any image or idea, but to simply be "nothing"..to be. As such, the No-Form process does not involve any doing in as much as "undoing".
No-Form and the On-Off Switch to Creation
In our paratheatre processes, No-Form is used as a device to charge a ritual towards engaging the body's vital forces and then, to discharge these forces it after each ritual or performance. We begin at zero and end at zero. No-Form can also act as a conscious transition between any charged ritual or performance states and, our return to everyday civilian life. No-Form practice grants us the freedom to use our talent as a tool -- when we're done using it, we put the tool down. It's like having access to the "on/off " switch of our creative engines. We've all seen performers who need to be "on" all the time, the ones who have not found their "off" switch yet.
Once we can find the on-off switch to creation within us, we no longer have to fear the loss of access to these sources and our talent for expressing them. When we know how to turn the switch on and off, we can do so anytime. Anywhere. Anyhow. No-Form experience and practice also exposes the imposter that insists on taking credit for creation. When we discover it is not the "I", not the ego, that creates, the playing fields of creation open up beyond our wildest imaginations, playing fields we can roam around in and depart from anytime, anywhere.
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MANIFESTO LINKS
Part One: Orientation
culture, paratheatre, emotional plague
Part Two: Integrity Loss and Recovery
the force of commitment, what feeds the being, the good fight
Part Four: Self-Observation and Ego
figuring out ego, from being to playing, flexibility
Part Five: Double Vision
the first and second attentions
Part Six: Self-initiation
the bridge between worlds, what drains the power of dreaming
Part Seven: A Cultural Overview
the war in heaven, a society gone mad, and a whole lot of heart
