by Alan Arkin
Sadly, I look at the groups during their first half-hour of work and I can’t stop myself from making judgments. “This person is going to whine all weekend, that one is selfish, this one is going to push too hard, that one is never going to do anything worthwhile, this one is auditioning.” But by the second day all my initial judgments are out the window.
I am endlessly surprised. I’ve been auditioning people for plays for forty years and the surprises still come. So I don’t audition. In my professional life I have to work with people with a great range of experience, from rank amateurs to professionals, people who have been in the business for fifty years, people who have never been in front of an audience, and there is no knowing where the good work is going to come from. I’ve seen amateurs occasionally wipe the floor with the professionals. I recently did a film with eight-year-old Abigail Breslin, who was more of a pro than most of the adults I’ve worked with. You never know. In addition, and more importantly, I want the workshops to be about life, not show business, and in life you never know who you’re going to end up having to spend time with. As a result of this attitude there have occasionally been some wildly eccentric participants in the workshops, but they’ve tended to act as a catalyst and a prod for the rest of the group. They become a way for the others to dig into the work and show some emotional solidarity around the difficult person. It also gives me a great opportunity to test my ability to work with special problems, and I have to do it spontaneously.
I had a guy once decide that he wanted to recite his poetry in his underwear. He stripped down to his briefs, sat a woman onstage in a chair for no purpose that was ever explained, and proceeded for half an hour to read poetry he’d written in the workshop, much of which was about my private parts. The hardest part of the ordeal was finding something positive to say to him afterward. Other people occasionally use their allotted time to audition material they’ve been working on. I try to discourage this because it has nothing to do with improv, and gets the workshop sidetracked and into performance, but if that’s the way they want to use their time it’s their business. Fortunately it doesn’t happen very often.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
We watch puppies and kittens at play. They shake sticks between their teeth and growl, they tumble around, falling all over themselves, they grab each other by the neck, they leap at imaginary things; it is when animals are at their most delightful.
It’s easy to fall in love with them at this stage of their development. They’re cute and cuddly and amusing, at least when they’re not ruining our shoes or the furniture. But what we miss is that for the puppies and kittens there’s nothing cute about what they’re doing. They might be having fun, but more importantly they’re learning all the tools and techniques they’ll need for life in the wild. The pouncing, the shaking of sticks, the wrestling with each other, the jockeying for position, it’s all rehearsal for their survival, and watching them with this in mind we can see that their play is crucial preparation for events that are matters of life and death.
It is similar for us as children. Watch kids as they play Batman or Superwoman or army hero or Olympic athlete or demolition expert or beauty queen or movie star or astronaut. They have no problem jumping into these roles, which are critical for their development. They go at it full tilt, with every ounce of their power and imagination. Nothing is held back and nothing is left out. There is no embarrassment. There is no fear of failure. It’s as if their lives depend on it, and to a great extent I think they do.
You don’t have to tell kids how to be Batman or Superwoman, how to find belief and emotional commitment; they simply know. It’s built into their DNA. Somewhere along the line, however, in a reasonably healthy person, it becomes unnecessary to continue with this kind of play. I don’t know exactly when it happens but I would guess it occurs sometime in late childhood, when an adult identity is starting to form. At this time you see embarrassment and self-consciousness creeping into kids’ behaviors when they’re asked to play a role. For most of us, as we leave childhood, the technique of learning through role-play is no longer a necessity, and becomes an embarrassment instead.
It’s my feeling that many people come to the workshops for this reason—they’re stuck someplace or they’ve forgotten how to play. And although for adults this may be socially appropriate, they feel they’ve lost something important to them. They feel stifled, dried up, and uncreative. I often hear them express this sense by saying that something inside of them is “blocked,” as if they have an emotional problem, or they have lost their talent, and there is fear connected to this feeling. But when I hear this I’ve discovered that very often they’ve actually gone through some kind of metamorphosis, and haven’t recognized it. I try to give them new techniques, exercises that require a sense of abandonment and play, to help them once more feel the creative flow that has been lost.
Life is constantly this, whether we like it or not. Change. Going through developmental stages and then growing out of them. For each stage we develop tools and techniques to help us cope, and in each stage we discover a new “me,” and then we have to find the tools and techniques that this new “me” needs to work with.
But techniques don’t last a lifetime. We become attracted to one when it mirrors our personality or our interests, and when it solves a problem in our life. But we evolve, we change—we get happier, more at peace, or we get more despairing and disillusioned—and as this happens we have to discard the techniques that previously held us together, We thought they would last forever; they don’t. We have to discard these life preservers and throw ourselves into the sea again and grab for new ones. Not fun, not easy, but if the purpose of our work is ultimately self-discovery and not just about making a living, it becomes a crucial exploration.
A lot of people, coming to the workshop, hear the term improvisation and immediately think of sketch comedy. My initial job is to get them away from this idea, thinking that they have to be smart-asses and clever and inventive for an entire weekend. I can see it as they first come in. They’re afraid they’re not going to be clever enough, or interesting enough. They’re afraid they’re going to have to be creative, which is a terrific paradox, because that’s the reason they’ve come. It becomes my job to help them get over this fear as quickly as possible.
So they come in, about twenty of them—writers, lawyers, teachers, psychologists, and people from the theater, many of whom haven’t done anything in years. Twenty seems to be the limit. If there were more I wouldn’t be able to give them individual attention. We work in a bare room, hopefully well lit; there’s no stage, no props, no fancy lighting. All we have are folding chairs.
After we all briefly introduce ourselves, I ask the group to stand up and push back their chairs, and we form a circle. I tell them we’re going to play ball. There is no ball. I start bouncing an imaginary tennis ball. I tell them if they follow the instructions, their work for the weekend will be much easier and more comfortable. My instruction for this first exercise is that I don’t want to see anything interesting or anything creative. They look at me to see if I’m joking, but I’m serious. Immediately I see twenty people breathe a sigh of relief. They’ve all come to tap into their creativity, the instructor has told them not to be “creative,” and they breathe a sigh of relief. It’s as if their creativity is something that has to be reached for at great cost, a thing outside of their normal abilities, that being creative will mean sticking their necks out, doing something embarrassing. Or that creativity is something for geniuses, for special people, and that being creative turns them into Prometheus, attempting to steal fire from the gods, a dangerous act.
The ball gets thrown around the room. It has to go fast. No time for being clever, for thinking how you want to do it. You have to pay attention to where it’s going. If someone takes more than two seconds to throw the ball after receiving it, you can see the “creative vibe” creeping in, the attempt to be interesting. When that happens the person’s mind gets tak
en off the game, off the activity, off the group, and is put back onto himself, and the air immediately goes out of the game for everyone. The energy dries up. In that split second it becomes a personality contest and a competition. To keep that from happening I have to make sure the ball stays in motion. After a minute or two of playing with the imaginary ball, people start laughing. They’re having a good time in spite of themselves. Without a pause in the action, we change from a tennis ball to something else, anything that occurs to me, anything that can be thrown—a Ping-Pong ball, a volleyball, a feather, a Frisbee, a squirrel.
If the game stays fast, and people stay out of their heads, within minutes the whole group has loosened up. We begin to know who each of us is, and we’re all being effortlessly creative and having a terrific time. Without any self-consciousness. At the end of about ten minutes we stop.
“What was the instruction?” I ask them.
“Not to be interesting,” they say. “Not to be creative.”
“What happened?” I ask.
“We got creative,” they say sheepishly. “We got interesting.”
“Why?” I ask.
Once in while someone knows the answer, which is: It is our nature to be creative. Not being creative is an aberration.
With that one exercise, most of the rules for the weekend have been laid out. I don’t state these rules at this point because I don’t want to get the group back into their heads. They’ve just left their heads for ten minutes and it’s important to keep it that way.
The next several exercises are geared toward getting the participants to become aware of themselves as a group, to establish the idea of sharing, of working together for a common purpose. This is rarely taught in acting classes, where I often find a subtle, unstated sense of competition between actors. In classes, as well as in much theater and film work, I often feel the vibes of people being extremely nice to each other in order to hide an underlying jockeying for position. I want to counteract that impulse here.
In the second exercise we become machines. We break into groups of six or seven, and I assign numbers. People go into the playing area in the order of their number, and I give an instruction that remains in place for the remainder of the workshop: Unless they have an idea, something that sparks them, they’re not to go into the playing area. I call it the playing area to keep it from being a “stage.” I don’t want to work on a stage. This workshop is not about performance; it’s about self-discovery.
Often people jump into the playing area too soon. This happens either because they just want to be up there having a good time or because they don’t want to hang-up the other participants by having them wait until they have an idea. But if you go into the playing area without an idea, you’re just on a fishing expedition, hoping for inspiration to strike. And if you’re up there waiting for inspiration, it rarely comes. It also puts a damper on other people’s energy. The lack of commitment and purpose can be felt, and it drags everything down.
Back to the second exercise. We’re going to turn ourselves into a machine. The first person performs a motion that suggests a piece of a machine. It can be real, imaginary, anything. When the second person has a way of fitting into the motion, a way of adding to the machine, he joins the first. And so on, until six or seven people in the group are one machine.
What invariably happens the first time through this exercise is that no one touches anyone else. It’s understandable; they’re strangers. They don’t know each other. After the group has become a machine I ask them to do the exercise again, this time making sure that each person is in some way touching another part of this human machine. The difference is dramatic. The event becomes infinitely more interesting and compelling, and afterward we spend some time discussing why. People grope toward articulating a reason but can rarely state what it is.
I have seen this exercise hundreds of times and I think, first of all, there is no machine in history where the parts don’t touch. But this is obvious. The subtle aspect of it, the one that’s crucial for our purposes, is that the minute the moving parts of the machine touch each other something dynamic takes place. Our attention to what they’re doing becomes more acute, and it’s more interesting for the participants as well. Why? I think it’s because when the parts are touching, something can happen. There is a world of possibility now open that was not present before, when there was no touching. I think this translates to any form of “touch.” As machines, in this exercise, physical contact is the only kind of touching possible; machines don’t make emotional connection. But there are myriad ways for people to “touch” each other, and I find that just introducing this thought to the group brings that awareness to the mix. We don’t have to work on it. No touchy-feely exercises. Just talking about this opens the group to the necessity of really relating to each other, genuinely touching each other, making sure that they see, feel, and affect each other as the workshop goes on.
Once, as I sat watching twenty adults turn themselves into bits and pieces of machines, making strange noises and moving with grotesque, awkward mechanical gestures—all of them lawyers, teachers, psychologists, and actors—I pictured the group at a party, an evening get-together, with all the attendant random events and desultory conversations that go on during these evenings. And I imagined one person jumping up and saying, “Hey, everyone, let’s play a game! Let’s all turn ourselves into machines! We’ll break up into groups and become machines.” The likely result of that announcement would be that everyone at the party would exchange alarmed looks, smile politely, and go back to their cocktails.
What’s the difference? I wondered.
I came to the conclusion that the difference is that in the workshop, although nothing is stated, each person senses that there’s a reason for the exercise—there is meaning behind it, an intention—and that meaning and intention will be revealed. But what if there was no meaning behind the exercise? What if I had designed it just to kill time, or I came up with it on the spur of the moment because I was ill-prepared? What if I was just bored?
Still, in the minds of participants, simply trusting the fact that there must be a meaning behind the exercise allows them to jump into it fully, and invest it with their own meaning. And it turns out that that jumping in, that decision and personal investment of their meaning is what actually gives the event meaning. Who cares whether it’s my meaning or theirs? In fact, who gets to decide what the meaning of something actually is?
I am pretty sure that meaning changes from individual to individual. Take an activity like sweeping a floor or cleaning a kitchen. When you think of those activities you probably think of them as acts of drudgery. No chance of doing something creative with jobs like that. Now picture Charlie Chaplin cleaning a kitchen or sweeping a floor. The possibilities become endless. “Well of course that’s different,” you answer. “He’s a genius.” Yes, he is a genius, but what are the contributing factors to his engagement in these activities that turn them into genius?
His decision to turn them into creative activities.
His insistence that there was something creative to be mined, even in the most common activity.
The amount of time he’d spend discovering their creative potential.
He could find it anywhere, and so can we. Perhaps not with all the brilliance and grace that were his particular gifts, but we can do it too.
For me, it all comes down to intention.
For the third exercise we again break up into three groups, and again people enter into the playing area one at a time. In this exercise the participants are asked to be part of a moving tableau. They can speak now, but only to communicate with the others in the playing area, not to us in the audience. It’s as if they’re now extras in a movie, setting the scene, creating an atmosphere, but not calling a lot of attention to themselves. I suggest a place that conjures up a specific mood, a specific tone—for example, an urban park on a warm spring day. One by one each actor has to fill in the scene. We want to see
a variety of activities, and we want to see the space in the playing area used creatively, and we want to maintain the feeling of the place and the day. It requires not only that the players be aware of their own activity and their own life in the playing area but also that they fit it into a whole and make sure they are adding to the event. As with all the exercises, if someone is doing something that gums up the works we go back, fix it, and continue. How does someone gum up the works? By having an activity that is random and can’t be pinned down—they’re wandering all over the stage doing a half-dozen different things, which keeps the next person from finding a clear space or activity in the playing area. They can gum it up by being redundant and doing the same thing the last person did, or by ignoring the tone of the piece and looking for laughs.
The actors are occasionally thrown by this emphasis on group awareness. My experience over the years has led me to believe that most actors don’t read the scripts that are assigned to them. Often, in auditions, they’re not even given anything to look at but their own parts, which encourages this myopia. In a well-written piece every part has a function, every character is necessary to the whole. Sometimes the function of the character is obvious, sometimes it has to be searched for, sometimes it just adds to the tone and mood. An actor’s exploration becomes much easier if he examines the material from the viewpoint of discovering his function in the piece.
For the fourth exercise we break up mostly into groups of three. This is the only exercise of the weekend in which I ask people to jump right in without a plan. This exercise requires no thinking beforehand. No characters, no set up. It only requires immediacy—the actors solving the problem directly in front of them.