Rehearsal Insights: Preparation and Performance and their Relationship

Rehearsals for The Last Jew In Europe have been going well, smoother then with most shows. For reasons I can't quite put my finger on, the lines have been easier to learn than in other shows. I suspect, however, that this may have to do with my strong, almost fanatical text-based approach, and simply always, in rehearsal, saying my lines like I mean what I'm saying.

The role is further challenging for me because I need to have a convincing Polish accent -- I find Dr. David Alan Stern's Acting With an Accent series a terrific resource (amazon.com probably has the best prices):

Something else I found surprising -- I just stopped working on "building a character," i.e., I've just been working within a strong text-based approach, and the notes I've been getting from the director have been your intentions are good, they're on the right track, they're right there. However, I've never really thought about, or at least put much effort into thinking about, my "character," my "actions" or "intentions" simply because Tuvia, the playwright, has done all the work for me, i.e., all that stuff is IN the lines!

Everything I've been learning in Deborah Carlson's Word of Mouth Studios I've been faithfully and rigorously applying in rehearsal and preparation, and it seems to have taken me quite far, much farther than I ever expected, at least for this production. This approach, in my estimation and experience, is definitely the foundation of acting -- you're dead, theatrically speaking, if you don't have it -- an actor may be using this approach natually/organically, but if they're not, they'll need to learn it (like me).

This isn't to say I didn't do some "outside" text/script work. Far from it.

To get some sense of the play's background, I watched Ken Burn's The War and I worked my way through Art Spiegelman's well-deserved Pulitzer-Price winning Maus.

(It's all impossible to really understand, imagine, or grasp, and I guess that's good in a way, i.e., one can only hope that as we move further into the future, fewer and fewer people will have direct knowledge/experience/understanding of those times or anything like those times in today's world -- and the rest of us can count ourselves exceedingly fortunate. Nor we can ever forget the debt and terrible hardship paid by both those who survived and those who fought and those who died to bring an end to that unprecedented 20th Century human catastrophe: WWII).

However, I'm wondering if I can expand my preparation routine. Acting is (for me) basically two parts: preparation and then rehearsal/performance. Both are distinctly difference processes. Preparation is more of a routine, a set of activities, in large part, head-based/analytical -- but only at first. Performance is pure "in the moment/body-based" technique. However, I want my preparation to affect/influnce my technique.

I remember when I was "preparing" for a short showcase at Weist-Barron. I was all preparation and no technique. While the outcome wasn't bad, I sensed I was working working incorrectly, too hard, in a way, and I was a bit disappointed in my results -- however, I did have some insights that lead me to start working in a more physical way, or at least see the necessity of doing see (e.g., Into The Light) and to start looking for a set of techniques that would support a physical way of acting.

Now that I've got a good start in learning how to act using just my body, I'm going to try a more integrative approach, i.e., the performance technique and text-based preparation approach I'm learning in Deborah Carlson's Word of Mouth Studios and the type of preparation I did for the Weist-Barron showcase . . .

As an aside, this text-based approach has been enormously helpful in highlighting a weakness I've always had -- I'm slightly learning disabled when it comes to reading and math, though like most dyslexics, I developed strategies in school to help me succeed (though it was a lot of work and stress at times).

However, these strategies haven't helped me on stage or in rehearsal -- speaking text and reading text are two very different activities. It's too much to go into detail here, but often I'm breathing out of sync with the text as I speak, and this -- I suspect -- is because in part I'm having trouble parsing the text into meaningful clunks, and so I sometimes don't have a enough breath to support a specific thought, or I'm not sure how much breath to take before I speak -- again, because I haven't been able to parse ahead fully correctly -- and so I hold my breathe a bit before I speak. I think there's other bad habits going on too, but I suspect this is at least part of my problem. However, this text-based approach I'm learning is helping me learn to find the rhythms in the text, and this seems to be helping me with my mild dyslexia.

Another problem is pronunciation.It's possible to rank order words, i.e., nouns, verbs, and other parts of speech, by the frequency of their use (how many time they appear) in written form. This somewhat correlates with their frequency of use in spoken form. Thus, the words we see and say are often over-learned. Words that have low frequency use are names, not surprisingly. This is why you'll often have more trouble remembering and/or pronouncing names, especially unusual (to you) words or words with tricky pronunciations. They're harder because you just haven't encountered or used them as much as other words.

At least for more, correct pronunciation of unusual words is difficult, more than I knew, because I have such a hard time "hearing" phonetic differences in words. I've now learned, going forward, I'm going to have to pay extra attention and work extra hard at the correct pronunciation of unusual words. In short, I need to over-learn them, more than I would have guessed.

At times, it's a hell of a problem, but I'm not the first actor to have -- and more importantly -- to overcome these difficulties.