11/13/2014 Session with Mike Alfreds - The Factory

Session with Mike Alfreds

Wednesday 16th July 2008

I’m a newcomer to The Factory, so I don’t know how the sense of anticipation in St, Luke’s Church just before last week’s session with Mike

Alfreds compared with the buzz generated by other sessions in the past. But by my standards, there was a palpable sense of excitement in

the room. By any account, the turnout was pretty large.

Mike opened with some words of encouragement – ‘You seem to be doing exactly the sort of thing I’ve always been aiming for,’ he told the

assembled company – before embarking on a long and fascinating exploration of the twin concepts of character and emotion. His key

themes would resurface again and again: ‘hiding behind mannerisms’ is generally uninteresting; you are always you onstage, doing

something for real; emotion and physicality are inseparable and interrelated.

Character

Central to the morning’s discussion was Mike’s own approach towards the subject of character. Any conception of character had to

originate in the text, he told us – in an intellectual sense at least. ‘But the really interesting stuff,’ he added, ‘comes from the gut.’

Mike’s starting point is generally to ask the actor to develop a series of lists:

Write down a list of facts about the character, and the ‘big chunky actions’ he or she performs (e.g. Hamlet stabs Polonius, goes to

England, etc.). There must be conjecture at this stage (e.g. ‘he’s in love’).

Write down what the character says about him-/herself.

Write down what others say about the character.

Write down what the character says about others.

One might also write down any images persistently connected with the character (e.g. birds and eyes with Imogen in Cymbelin e ).

(If you’re working with an edited text, Mike noted, you should do this process with the whole, uncut text. Omissions, he noted, are also

facts – nobody says very much about Olga in T hree Sist ers , for example.)

After you’ve written these lists – and not before! – you may conjecture. One character, you might observe, apologises a great deal;

another explains himself a lot. Even here, however, you should try to avoid making value judgements, and Mike also suggests avoiding

adjectives. These conjectures then help you to determine your character’s super-objective (e.g. ‘to be recognised as a human being’) and

through-line of action (e.g. ‘to avenge his father’s death’). Mike told us he uses this approach because an analysis of this sort allows one to

see connections not always evident from a linear reading.

Mike asks actors to prepare this work before rehearsals. He starts rehearsals not with a read-through, but with a group discussion and

exploration of these lists, with the whole company present. The company will spend twenty minutes or so exploring one character

together. This is very open – exploration may be physical, intellectual, whatever seems appropriate or useful – and sometimes actors will

get a bit lost. The process, however, allows for the unplanned. Actors playing others’ roles, Mike suggested, will often take off simply

because they are free of responsibility.

The person playing the role under exploration will step out to watch their fellow actors’ explorations, and a discussion will follow. Mike

told us that he will ‘slap down’ any discussion of characters’ feelings or generalisations: he demands specificity.

Such character work is central to Mike’s process; he will put aside time for a session almost every day of rehearsal. These will often take

the form of various physical explorations. He encourages actors to develop ‘a whole battery of tools’, though inevitably not all of them

will be useful; some of these include:

Improvisations. These are not necessarily about talking, however – they are about in habit in g characters, and living their routines

(Mike gave an example from a play he directed in which many of the characters were manual workers, and so much rehearsal time

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was dedicated to improvisations exploring the physical qualities of this manual work).

Michael Chekhov exercises on physical centres. These centres, Mike noted, can be exterior to the body – Irina in T hree Sist ers , for

example, may have a physical centre out in front of her, as if in the future.

Imagining your character as a caricature.

Laban exercises (more of which in a moment).

Mike’s emphasis was that our emotional lives are in our bodies , and he digressed into an entertaining illustration of 1940s women bursting

into tears when coaxed into unclenching their thighs…

Mike pointed out that in improvisation (and, he suggested, in T he Hamlet Project ), spontaneity comes from the body, ‘from the gut’. Trying

to repeat, therefore, is never ‘reality’. What is important is being in the moment, working with what is there in front of you. Likening acting

to improvisation on the piano, he stated his conviction that ‘You’ve got to be very disciplined in order to be free.’

Somebody asked a question about this priority: how does one respond to the moment as one’s character, rather than as oneself? Mike’s

answer was that the rehearsal process should allow this response to become organic. Inevitably, of course, there will always be a seed of

you in that response.

For Mike, physicality and emotion are interdependent (he gave the examples of shrugging creating a real, physical sense of apathy, or

shaking one’s head of negativity). His key idea is that actors must work on a character’s voice, movement and so on until it ‘becomes

second nature’. By changing physically – adopting, for example, an archaic movement vocabulary – actors start to t hin k in a different

way. Bowing, curtseying etc. – the manners of a period – should become natural. Actors must learn the world of the play.

Mike explained that he prefers to talk about the ‘world’ of a play rather than its setting or style, since the two are interrelated: learning

the ‘world’ incorporates an understanding of cultural difference (which one must research) as well as stylistic difference. In a Feydeau

farce, for example, characters may not stop to think – that is the way in which their ‘world’ functions. Verse is another example: in verse

plays, said Mike, one needs to find a physical style which matches the language – modern-day naturalistic movement, he feels, is

inappropriate.

Concept, Interpretation, and Fixed Results

Mike’s feeling is that ‘you go with the work of a writer, rather than fight it’. He spoke of his dislike for the recent Rupert Goold / Patrick

Stewart M acbet h and its constant undercutting of the text.

In a brief but emphatically scatological exchange, Mike and Alex discussed both the ‘shit’ that accrues around scenes of classic plays, and

the folly of ‘shitting on the play with a concept’. The important thing, said Mike, is to be ‘democratic’ and not attempt to dictate to

audiences what their response should be. (This led to a lively discussion of the perennially popular ‘phallic gesture’, and audiences’ now-

automatic response to it.) Do not decide on results, he said – objectives, yes, but never outcomes.

Mike spoke of the danger of clinging to pieces of business which used to work, but which have outlived their original function. Drama, he

said, is about meetings and moments bet ween characters – and this is actively inhibited when one is locked into a set of interpretive

decisions. He likened this to the concept of Deadly Theatre famously outlined in T he Empt y Space by Peter Brook – theatre with ‘not a

breath of real life in it’. Repetition is ‘virtual reality’, he said, and never the thing itself.

Another question: how does one reconcile this free approach with practical concerns, like ensuring the actors are not all standing in a

straight line? Mike replied that he does ‘self-blocking’ exercises with casts, so that again, it becomes ‘second nature’ to actors not to mask

one another, to from interesting stage pictures, and so on.

Mike noted that he is fed up with plays being submerged by technology – theatre, he said, is after all the ‘most human’ of the art forms.

Liveness, uncertainty about what will happen next, is key to the theatrical experience.

Emotion and Objectives

After a short tea break, we returned to discuss the subject of emotion. For Mike, the problem arises from what first seems to be an

impossible contradiction: ‘you must express emotion, but you can’t play it.’ How, then, to get in touch with this emotional inner life so that

one can express it for real?

‘I want, therefore I do,’ said Mike; everything you do, you do in order to achieve an objective. In a similar way, most characters are in a

state of dissatisfaction, unfulfilment, and go through the play trying to find fulfilment. This quest for fulfilment – in other words, this

ongoing attempt to achieve a super-objective – will carry a very real set of emotional responses. Feelings come unbidden: when, for

example, your objective is blocked, you may experience various negative emotions (rejection, frustration, etc.), while achieving your

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objective may prompt feelings of acceptance or of pride.

Another question: what about those instances where the text demands a very specific emotional response (when, for example, someone

asks ‘why are you crying?’)? Mike’s answer was that the actor’s preparation has to take this into account, building up the required

emotional energy and really believing in the character’s objective. Play the actions moment-by-moment, he said, and emotion will come

from the gut. [As a side note, I wonder whether the actors who asked this question – Jethro and Federay I believe – were satisfied with this

response?]

A further question was posed regarding super- and counter-objectives: can you switch them around, playing what was previously the

character’s counter-objective as their super-objective, and vice versa? Mike felt that you could try, and that it would be a fascinating

exercise, but that there’s generally one objective which overrides.

And one more: should your objectives remain constant from performance to performance? Mike said he thinks so, but that it can change to

a degree (in intensity, for example).

Points of concentration

This is an exercise which Mike explained was ‘revelatory’ for him when he discovered it. It will be used at the very last stage of rehearsal,

after all objectives are totally known. In a given scene, the actors will layer in one point of concentration at a time (this is explained in

more detail in Mike’s book Differen t Every Night , pp. 183-95). He gave us two examples. In the first scene of Hamlet , for instance, one

might

1) Play the scene concentrating on the fact that you are in a cold, high-up place.

2) Play the scene again, this time focusing on the presence of the ghost.

3) Play the scene again, this time focusing on (for example) your interpersonal relationship with Horatio.

4) …and so on.

In the first scene of T he Cherry Orchard , on the other hand, one might concentrate in turn on

1) how you feel about the orchard;

2) how you feel about Ranevskaya coming home;

3) how you feel about he estate being up for sale;

4) …and so on.

You play the scene over and over, focusing in turn on all the things that might have an impact on character – all the given circumstances,

one by one. The point of the exercise is that you’re thinking about the given point of concentration even when it is n ot explicitly discussed

in the text. Mike said he feels this adds a real richness to the acting. As always, he noted, there must be no repeating, even in rehearsal.

Never repeat the exercise with the same point of concentration: it will become dead.

Question: are there any exceptions to the rule about no repeating? Is there anything you can do twice? Mike said he doesn’t think so – he

cited an example from a Chekhov play he directed about an argument over property which seemed to demand exclusively fast playing,

but actually, to everyone’s surprise, was just as funny and truthful played very slowly.

Mike noted that he prefers objectives and points of concentration to have their roots in the text of the play: there should be no

‘inventing’. Don’t play a character with a hangover unless the text suggests they have one!

Laban Efforts

This is another exercise which Mike finds useful (and again, one which is explored in his book in much more detail – see pp. 229-38).

Rudolf Laban identified the following categories of movement:

light (no obstacles, airborne, balloon-like) or strong (overcoming resistance)

direct (purposeful, focused on a target) or flexible (absorbing, allowing oneself to be influenced)

sustained (flowing) or broken (renewing one’s energy very quickly all the time)

The eight possible combinations of these movement qualities correspond to eight different archetypes.

Mike emphasised once again that one’s physical state aut omat ically changes one’s mental state; thus, the archetypes describe

personalities as well as movement styles. ‘After a while,’ he noted, ‘you start to see life in that way, because the physicality has put you

in that state.’ The qualities also apply to voice as well as movement (since again, the voice is essentially part of the body).

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One can, of course, come up with complex permutations of these states. Voice and body may be in conflict with one another; different

parts of the body may even be in conflict with one another. Such conflicts, Mike feels, can be very telling psychologically. He stressed that

one should never close off a character into an archetype – these efforts are ingredients of character, not character itself.

Finally, Mike got us all up on our feet to explore the changes that one’s physicality can bring to bear on one’s emotional state; curling up

into an embryonic position, slowly furling and unfurling, can make one feel insecure and defensive when one gets up to interact with

others, while walking around with one’s arms spread wide instils a feeling of happy confidence.

Mike concluded by suggesting that we have the range of potential human expression within our bodies.

[NB - we're hoping to discuss some of the topics raised by Mike in this sessionhere - feel free to contribute!]

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