REFLECTIONS

Howard Stanley's response to our Bulletin Board topic of "Learning Lines" was so eloquent that it has been given a page of its own in this new section which reflects the views of other contributors to The Rehearsal Room. The headings are mine the words are Howard's
Howard's production of "Hamlet" opens in June at the Dandenong Ranges Community Cultural Centre, Upwey and travels later to the Carlton Court House.

The Memory Contest

How many of you or your friends have been to workshops where you have a wonderful time, contact other people meaningfully, learn some exciting new performative approach but when you are told, "now go learn your lines" it all changes. Or one is fortunate and is engaged in rehearsal of a play. People wander around reading and mumbling with bits of paper, trying to avoid each other as they negotiate text, character, furniture and other humans engaged in similar. Some kind of table discussion may happen. Speculation is rife. Everybody is an expert, expounding on what their character may or may not do or be. Discussion is heated. Directors have opinions which they share. People are feeling really good, they "know their character". They are told to go home that night and learn their lines for tomorrow. Next day something is different. The rehearsal may have degenerated into a memory contest. The atmosphere of community has gone to be replaced by something else - fear.

Anxiety over line learning and performance, is, I believe, the herpes of theatre.

Dealing with a Problem
To date there has only been one drama school to my knowledge in Australia that explicitly addresses the issue of line learning as part of the process of acting into the performance. That is Lindy Davies at the VCA in Melbourne. From speaking informally with her, she told me that her current methodology is largely informed by a longish period in her professional life where she experienced enormous difficulties in memorising. She stopped performing. Her reflective enquiry in nuetralising this fear, largely informs her current practice and the curriculum at the VCA. She has been, arguably, the first in mainstream performance teaching to acknowledge not just the obvious connection between word and action, but how simultaneously implicit memory is in this equation. Possibly her background as an English teacher may have something to do with this, I don't know.

Actors are Language Acquirers We share a similar recognition of the aquisitive process of language. Some years ago I went to university and studied among other things applied linguistics. What I discovered was that everything in life is some form of language acquisition. For a time I taught English as a Second Language to non-English speakers and overseas students. That is when I realised that actors are also language learners. Their job is to truthfully say someone else's words as if those words were their own, regardless of culture, times or location and we, the audience, are supposed to believe it. And they are to do this transformation in a very short time. This process is recognised in ESL circles as one that is acultural/physiological/psychological (attitude)/and intellectual continuum.

Howard (left) in rehearsal with JASPER BAGG and DARYL WILKINSON .

I now knew what happened but the how was still elusive. Until about 2 a.m. one night over three years ago on the Internet during a trawl for 'acting-techniques'. (what else does one do at two a.m.?) That was when I discovered Jeremy Whelan's web page:
http://www.jeremy-whelan-acting.com/index.html

Using the tape recorder as a rehearsal tool.

An Exciting Unconscious Learning Process It is the most elegant form of paradoxical learning I have encountered, and simple too. On the basis of that discovery I have founded a theatre company. I will say little about the process, in the hope that readers will have a look at a fairly comprehensive website. What is most challenging about this way of working is that it is performer driven. If performers are able to surrender their urge to control (as an intellectual process via words) in order to just experience and play in the mannerthat an absorbed four or five year old does, learning comes easily, because the experience of the scene is an emotional and experiencial anchor out of which words come.

One is learning by not consciously learning or remembering or memorising. When we rehearse we, in a relatively short time, simultaneously create a strong but fluidly organic understanding of the story, character, relationships, blocking, actions and importantly, words.

Personal Experience
In the thirty year long course of my own memory loss, I feel moved to say that I have been very successful in scaring myself and my colleagues absolutely witless at times. Eventually I became, increasingly, a solo performer - even to the extent of basing my cabaret character, Howard Slowly, on the frequent inexplicable pauses that occurred between the laughs. I feel now that I have, with help, disassociated many feelings and attitudes that prevented me from occupying a performative present. In the course of this I have seen Kineseologists, NLP practitioners and Hypnotherapists, the latter being the most personally effective. What I have discovered is how creative we are at getting in the way of our selves; how far away from our true voices. How a relatively small action of forgetting lines is sometimes a door into larger issues connected with one's relationship with the huge area of performance in life as well as art.

What I strive to do as teacher and director and also as performer is incorporate this holistic kind of acknowledgement of fear into my practice. It is my hope that this becomes some kind of sub-textual fabric clothing not only us, but also our audiences, allowing us in the words of Deborah Hay "to hold and be held", a context where we (audiences and us) are in a metaphoric sense, continuously holding and being held by each other. This can only happen where there is no fear. We continue. And we enjoy the mistakes we make.

Howard Stanley

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