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Consciousness, Literature and the Arts

Archive

Volume 9 Number 2, August 2008

___________________________________________________________________

The Association Process in Stanislavskis Threshold of the

Subconscious

By

Craig Turner

UNC Chapel Hill

One of the fundamental goals of modern acting technique is to create

ashiftin the performers normal self-awareness. This shift enhances

concentration on the performance by reducing anxiety responses

while strengthening control over movement and speech. Even more
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important, a shift in awareness provides the creative ground for

generating unique and compelling character behavior.

Within contemporary actor training theories (Stanislavski, Chekhov,

Strasberg, Hagen and Meisner), a key distinction between a mediocre

performance and a more compelling one is found in the relative

completeness and depth of the shift. It is a truism that there are

performers and there are actors. The difference between the two

lies in a willingness to relinquish the comfortable knowns of self-identity.

The performer plays out of a personal presentation of self, as an

interesting personality. The transformative actor, in comparison,

substitutes the characters sensory world for his own and is the model

for modern western acting to this day.

Many Hollywood stars are, in this sense, performers. The reason we go

to see Tom Cruise, Keanu Reeves, Cameron Diaz, and Catherine Zeta-

Jones is because they are attractive and pleasing personalities.[i]

Performers are not paid to change that much from their own voices,

body shape and emotional range. Compare these performers to the

actors such as William H. Macy, the early Dustin Hoffman, Robert

Duvall, Helen Mirren, and Linda Hunt, whom we recognize as artists
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belonging to the transformative tradition. We look forward to their

ability to show a greater variety of forms and qualities in their acting.

I hasten to add that both performers and actors may be attractive,

famous and commercially successful people, and we can enjoy both

styles immensely. The distinction I suggest here is that we can come to

expect changes from role to role in a greater degree when speaking of

the actors. Keanu Reeves may well be attempting to transform, but

analyzing his body movement, his voice, speech and character

behaviors demonstrates a comparatively limited palette from role to

role. On the other hand, watch William H. Macy in the made-for-TV

movie Door to Door, about a salesman with cerebral palsy, then

compare to his work as the harassed and hapless car salesman in

Fargo and you see a range that is truly astonishing.

InAn Actor Prepares, Constantin Stanislavski first described the

differences between the skilled actors transformed state and the

performers attempt to play at a role: We see, hear, understand and

think differently before and after we cross the "threshold of the

subconscious." Beforehand we have "true-seeming feelings,


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afterwards"sincerity of emotions." On this side of it we have the

simplicity of a limited fantasy; beyondthe simplicity of the larger

imagination. Our freedom on this side of the threshold is limited by

reason and conventions; beyond it, our freedom is bold, wilful, active

and always moving forwards. Over there the creative process differs

each time it is repeated. (Stanislavski, 1989, 282).

Stanislavskis terms are intriguing, hinting at a way of understanding the

transition between everyday consciousness to the actors creative

state as a journey, a kind of initiation passage. Unfortunately, although

he added numerous examples of training and rehearsal techniques

throughout his work that support and enrich this transition idea, he was

vague about the shift as it is experienced by the actor. As he said, I

can only teach you the indirect method to approach [the

subconscious] and give yourselves up to its power. (Stanislavski, 1989,

282)

But maybe we can directlyunderstand this shift without losing

Stanislavskis creative sense of play and magic. Using recent insights

into how brain and body operate, perhaps we can more explicitly

understand what happens in this activity of creating a character. With


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these newer ideas, we can expand on Stanislavskis intuitive approach

as well as answer more specific questions about the actors

transformational process as a procedure, such as: What is the threshold

of this passage from self to character? How does the actor not only

recognize it but experience it? What can the actor do to create the

most effective movement through this passage from here [within

himself] to over there [within the character]? Most importantly, is it

possible to explicitly describe this place of transition and then to

suggest howwithin the more modern mind/body paradigmit

enhances artistic creativity?

Two modern systems concerned with state change are relevant to this

discussion. One, Neurolinguistic Programming (NLP), which was created

in the early 1970s, is especially interested in exploring subjective

experience and beliefs. (Bandler and Grinder, 1975b; Grinder et al.,

1981); (Dilts, 1990); (Andreas and Andreas, 1987; Andreas and Andreas,

1989) A significant part of NLPs popularity in the teaching/learning and

personal development fields stems from its interest in sensory systems

and their relevance to state change.


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The second relevant system is Stephen Wolinskys descriptions of Deep

Trance Phenomena and how they underlie our everyday sense of self.

His work in hypnotherapy (described in his important Trances People

Live) offers useful markers applicable to the actors transition process

into character state. (Wolinsky, 1991, 10)

Incorporating these elements can provide a more detailed and

systematic description of Stanislavskis threshold of the subconscious.

Rather than a romantic notion of artistry and a vague giving ourselves

up to its power, we can create a clearer framework for discussing the

process of acting by understanding and describing the act of

impersonation at a deep sensory level, a level at which the actor

actually experiences it.

Empathy and Transformation

Becoming the character is one of the most common clichs of

acting. The basic question for nearly all systems of acting is how to

achieve that identification. A common underlying thread is the belief

that the actor must join the character in her world, over there, and to

experience the emotions and sensations belonging to that imaginary


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place. The distance (psychological/emotional/sensory) between the

actors everyday state and where the character exists defines the

passageand thus the journeythat must be traversed to achieve

authentic transformation.

Sir John Gielgud, arguably one of the very best English actors of

the last century, provides a rare example of an actor who is articulate

about this process:

Of course, all acting should be character acting, but in those days I did

not realize this . . . My own personality kept interfering, and I began to

consider how I was looking, whether my walk was bad, how I was

standing; my attention was continually distracted and I could not keep

inside the characterI was trying to represent. In Trofimov (in Chekhov's

The Cherry Orchard, with the Russian director Theodore Komisarjevsky)

for the first time I looked in the glass and thought, "I know how this man

would speak and move and behave," and to my great surprise I found I

was able to keep that picture in my mind throughout the action,

without my imagination deserting me for a moment, and to lose myself


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completely as my appearance and the circumstances of the play

seemed to demand. (Hornby, 1992, 86) [Emphases mine]

This is a most important point not only to the actor, but to the audience

that will witness the performance. Operating out of solely personal

sensory distinctions will give the actor answers to the question What

would Ido if I were Hamlet? This is not transformation, it is selfishness.

But operating out of the characters senses (over there where he

exists) can give the actor answers to a much more interesting

question: What would Hamlet do?

The actors movement to a characterizationthe essence of what we

think of as western, psychologically realistic actingis mirrored in the

way they actually talk about working on a character. Similar to

Stanislavskis on this side and over there, I have described the

language elsewhere:

We hear actors say they werent in it [or I wasnt there or that they

phoned that one in] at a particular performance. This is no

accidental or arbitrary linguistic framing. The great actors talent is to


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submerge (associate) so completely with the experience of the

imagined characters world thathe (the actor) appears no longer to

be in himself; he is in the character. Put another way, the dream

body takes over the actors body. (Turner, 1996, 19)

My interest here is the place where, psychologically and physically, the

actor crosses over into the world of the character and, in reverse,

how the return journey is negotiated. What are the signs of such a

crossing? How much does the actor consciously negotiate and how

much is a by-product outside of conscious awareness? And since

acting is an art, how can the process be repeated and shaped to

meet artistic goals?

The divide between the actor and the character must be crossed

psychologically, physically and imaginativelyin order to achieve a

true artistic imitation in Stanislavskis scheme. The most powerful way we

have to close such a distance is to empathize, which I will discuss in

detail below. If I can empathize to the point where I accept the

characters sensory world as my own, I can achieve a transformation

and identification into the world of the play. This empathetic response


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spurs the actor to move from self-consciousness to character-

consciousness and goes beyond mere sympathy, which is a more

general awareness of anothers situation. If the actor cannot find a

reason to empathize, then the ability to transform is severely limited.

But how does the actor know when she is there, when she has deeply

empathized into the role? When her sensory experience shifts to that

not normally her own. Out of that different sensory experience she

begins to act and that is what makes the role.The change in sensory

information creates the idea that identity has changed. To help us

understand how and why this process to creating a character is

accompanied by sensory shifts, we turn to Neurolinguistic

Programmings description of sensory modalities.

NLP Theory: Representational Systems/Submodalities

Until recently, we had little understanding of how actors neurologically

structure the imaginary events of a play, nor how those images are

manipulated. Commonly, we hear vague appeals to creativity or

imagination and often leave it at that. Even within the field of actor

training, the emphasis in studying a text and a role is more often on the


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ideas and content rather than the sensory process that stimulates the

transformation into character.

The work of Richard Bandler and John Grinder (Neurolinguistic

Programming, or NLP), first appearing in the early 70s, was a milestone

in understanding how humans internally encode, modify and change

their subjective experience and it is useful in helping us understand how

the actors created world of the play is constructed. NLP suggests that

human beings respond to their personal maps of the world, not the

way the world actually is. Bandler and Grinder derived this idea in

part from Alfred Korzybskis work (Korzybski, 1958) (encapsulated in the

famous dictum, the map is not the territory) as well as from the ideas

of Gregory Bateson, who suggested that information can be defined as

the difference that makes a difference and who emphasized

studying structure more than content. (Bateson, 1990)

Essentially, NLP suggests that we create our maps of realityany time

we think of anythingby using the sensory systems as a kind of code.

This code is made up of patterns of visual, auditory, kinesthetic, and

gustatory elements. Memories and generalizations we make about our

experience use that code in various combinations. The enormous


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range and variety of encoding possibilitiescreated moment by

momentgive us our subjective experience. Human experience is

fundamentally a process of filtering the enormous amount of sensory

information our mind and body receive every moment and then

generalizing from that, consciously or otherwise.

Typically, the strength of an experience or memory comes from how it

is encoded, not, strictly speaking, from its content. We do this selective

encoding as a matter of course, usually out of range of consciousness.

Although the actor uses this process for special imaginative and artistic

purposes, NLP suggests that this is fundamentally a natural human

process (what Elliot W. Eisner in the educational context has referred to

as forms of representation) (Eisner, 1976; Eisner et al., 2002). As Joseph

OConnor and John Seymour point out, We re-experience information

in the sensory form in which we first perceived it and, additionally,

one way we think is consciously or unconsciously remembering the

sights, sounds, feelings, tastes and smells we have experienced

(O'Connor and Seymour, 1990, 43). Therefore, we do not act directly

on realityonly through our perception of what we think is reality.


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Within each sensory system, we make distinctions that particularize our

encoding even further. I may think of cat by making a picture of a

cat within my visual system, but from what kinds of details will that

picture be composed? These details create distinctions that are called

the "submodalities" of a sensory system. (Bandler and Grinder, 1975a;

Bandler and Grinder, 1975b; Bandler et al., 1985). Submodalities are the

qualities that any one sensory system can sustain. Within the visual

system, this would be brightness, size, texture, color, dimensionality,

shape and so forth. The auditory system carries distinctions such as

volume, tone, pitch, timbre, nasality, shrillness and many others.

Kinesthetic mode contains qualities such as soft, firm, silky, heavy, light,

hot, cold and so forth.

So in our example of cat, we might visualize a charcoal drawing of a

cat done with just a few quick lines, or a three-dimensional full-color

photographic picture of a cat, or a film of a catand each of these

visual constructions can have a different effect or feel for us. In each

case, we have cat, but what is often missed is that the rendering

itselfthe submodality choices through which the rendering is

createdhas a profound effect on our response.


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Changing the submodality distinctions for therapeutic purposes can

reduce the negative effect of an experience. It allows the patient to

get a different emotional response. For example, if a patient continues

to remember a disturbing event in color, three dimensions and in an

exaggerated close-up (e.g., in a phobic/anxiety reaction), he can

practice creating a different response to that picture (and therefore

the memory of the event) by, for example, creating a picture that is in

cartoonish black and white with only two dimensions and in a tiny size

with a border around it. Whichsensory distinctions might create a more

positive effect can vary from person to person, but by playing with

submodality distinctions like this, training the patient to remember in a

different way, some of the overwhelming effect that the picture installs

can be reduced. In this way, personal history can be re-experienced

and re-learned (at least to reduce its emotional power, not the fact

that an event happened) to provide more useful outcomes besides

continuous pain and suffering.

Submodality distinctions are also critical for the actors work. The actor

translates what she reads from the plays textliterally pictures of letters


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on a pageinto visions, sounds and sensations that can serve as a

dramatic reality. Using submodality distinctions, she can imaginatively

create the information specifically mentioned or implied by dialogue

and scene descriptionwhat are called the given circumstances.

The circumstances determine or condition our [the characters]

conflicts, can supply our motivations, and specify the nature of our

actions (Hagen, 1973, 158). For example: Where do scenes take

place? What culture is it? Do environments change from scene to

scene? What is the time of day, month or year? What are the

character relationships stated or implied in the text? What is the history

of the situation and the characters? What events are described or

enacted? The givens supply a suggestive basic ground plan to the

dream world of a play, but they must be translated into sensory-specific

events to create the feel of real experience for the actor.

A text is not a play. The script can provide only the most basic givens.

Nevertheless, the actor must start his dream there, from the playwrights

dream-text.

The play, the parts in it, are the invention of the author's imagination, a

whole series of ifs and given circumstances thought up by him. There is


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create a more authentic sense of onstage life and to capture fully the

actors attention, these patterns will be necessarily complex. Once

installed, they quickly motivate and engage the actor into an active

presence. They are what shifts the play from linguistic abstractions on

paper to as-if-real sensory events, from play analysis to a live theatrical

event that engages the audience.

From the NLP point of view, Stanislavskis entire method is based on the

process of discovering which submodality distinctions within the actors

sensory systems provide the greatest useful stimulus to his imagination.

Such distinctions create a compelling character and completely

engage the actors will precisely because they are so personally

powerful and drive his neuro-physiology to move and think in

congruence with the world of the play.

Sometimes only one sensory representation is necessary for

engagement in the plays world. (Like Prousts petite madeleine, a

smell or taste memory by itself can be especially powerful.) More

commonly, however, the actor must take time, creating detail after

detail, slowly building and layering the textures of every scene. Finally,


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as when water primes a pump, one final distinction sets off a powerful

chain reaction, and the actor is there. In an instant, the actor is in a

different place and body entirely and experiencing the world of the

play. Stanislavski describes this process:

In the first period of conscious work on a role, an actor feels his way into

the life of his part, without altogether understanding what is going on in

it, in him, and around him. When he reaches the region of the

subconscious the eyes of his soul are opened and he is aware of

everything, even minute details, and it all acquires an entirely new

significance. He is conscious of new feelings, conceptions, visions,

attitudes, both in his role and in himself. (Stanislavski, 1989, 281-82)

The actors unconscious responses (eyes of his soul) to such conscious

questioning and probing are quite powerful, and not always

predictable. On reflection, the actor can usually point to the

difference that makes the difference, that is, the submodality

element that created a breakthrough in understanding the

character. This variation in response to sub-modalities adds life,

spontaneity and individuality to a performers work. This is also why two


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actors can have very different versions of the character Hamletand

we can take great pleasure in comparing the two.

On the other hand, this individuality of response to sensory distinctions

can make for maddeningly irregular outcomes. By definition, what we

think of as unconscious (or other-than-conscious, depending on your

model of mind) involves a different kind of logic to behavior, one that is

not necessarily linear and usually more metaphorical (Over there the

creative process differs each time it is repeated.). Actors end up

repeatedly creating different sensory worlds and then trying them out

to gauge their practical effects, but they cannot be sure ahead of

experience where a sensory choice may lead.

The creation of the sensory world of the character is the primary focus

of the actors work, not the creation of emotion. Modern actors are

trained to create the circumstances that will bring forth the emotional

levels of a scene, not to feel things. Actually, emotion is only a by-

product of what the character is responding to within the imagined

experience, not a goal. Therefore, it is no more possible to be angry

than it is to be a king. What the actor candois find the given


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circumstances of a scene from which anger may emerge (I see the

other character as an enemy; I hear his words which seem harsh and

abrupt). By selecting and rehearsing a series of submodality

distinctions, the actor experiences shifts in state that create changes in

observable behavior that will include emotional overflow.

There are days of hard work and experimentation through rehearsal

that seem to trigger little useful motivation in the actors performance.

Then there are those rarer days when a sensory sequence works very

well, even startlingly so. As Bateson has pointed out:

The artist's dilemma is of a peculiar sort. He must practice in order to

perform the craft components of his job. But to practice has always a

double effect. It makes him, on the one hand, more able to do

whatever it is he is attempting and, on the other hand, by the

phenomenon of habit formation, it makes him less aware of how he

does it. (Bateson, 1988, 138)

The actor must also work both with a directors vision of the play and

with the imagined sensory circumstances of the other actors. Balancing


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this complex web of dream states is time-consuming. It relies on

individual discipline in generating possibilities and in teamwork to

achieve a whole dream world.

We now have the first element of the association process, provided by

the NLP insight. By focusing on a select sensory distinctionor through a

small set of theman actor can change state such that he does not

feel or behave like himself. The sense of being someone else is what

engages the playing of a script, creating a curdling, if you will, of

body feeling/action/emotion, spontaneously extending beyond the

sensory choices themselves and into unexpected other parts of the

characters life orientation.

As much as an actors technique relies on frequent and conscious

adjustments, there is still a point where conscious control must cease.

Any athlete will tell you that attempting to think through options during

a game is useless, our conscious mind is too slow for such an effort. An

actor in performance feels the same paradox.

At some point, transition from here (the actors everyday state) to there

(the characters world), control must be relinquished to a great degree.


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That loss of control often accounts for the feeling of performance

anxiety felt by most people, and truth be told, even by many skilled

and experienced professional performers. Eventually, however, that loss

is reframed as a positive exchange for the possibilities of the

characters world, full of enormous potential creativity, inspiration and

insight.

What we need is a model for that reframe, and for that we turn to the

ideas of Stephen Wolinsky.

Wolinskys Trance Criteria

Stephen Wolinsky, a highly regarded hypnotherapist and scholar of

meditative practices, has created an approach to hypnotherapy

based on the idea of trances and their power to hold us in their grip. He

suggests that trance states are created as a response to specific life

circumstances as defense and a way to cope with difficult or

destructive situations. Helping the patient see how he creates his own

personal trances is the first step in reducing, then eliminating, their

power.


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Common, everyday trances occur to all of us. You hear a song from

your teen years on the radio and suddenly, for a moment or two, you

are back in time. But the radio changes the song and you come out of

that trance. A simple trance might occur when you are watching a

basketball game on TV so intently that you dont hear a word your wife

says. Another quite common trance is the one many people submerge

into when they drive a car. Very few people consciously drive a car;

most do it unconsciously while thinking about other things.

Part of the power of trances is due to the fact that they come and go

unconsciously. The frequency of these lighter, transitory ones simply

demonstrates how pervasive they are. In the case of everyday trances,

as soon as we become aware, we can choose to stay within and have

a nice experience, or we can pop out when we like.

There is another, more deeply dysfunctional trance that, according to

Wolinsky, can form in childhood and generalizes throughout a persons

experience by adulthood. For example, in order to protect herself

against abuse, a child may learn to freeze her body and breath to stop

the unpleasant experience. Unfortunately, she may learn to freeze so

effectively that she continues to shut off body feeling unconsciously


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even when she consciously seeks intimacy as an adult. The trance

remainsembedded in mind and bodylong after the original

experience is gone.

Even an identity statement can generate a profound trance. As

Wolinsky says, In a nutshell, to be in a trance identity means that we

have fused or become one with a set of experiences that defines how

we view ourselves. Whether that identity is I am a loser or I am a

competent editor, in both cases ones experience of self is narrowed

and circumscribed. (Wolinsky, 1991, 17) The problem is not that the

patient has created a category of behavior (editing, losing), it is

that she begins to generalize the behavior into an identity and it

becomes a limiting trance.

Each of us learns by experienceunconsciouslywhich kinds of trance

we can create and sustain in order to cope. Most adults have had a

lifetime of experience in creating the kind of trance states that are

most effective in handling their particular circumstances(Wolinsky,

1991, 20) In the therapeutic environment, removing the power of an


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identity trance gives the patient more choices in responding to life

events.

...I presuppose that anyone who is in the grip of a complaint, problem,

or a symptom has hypnotized himself or herself into a particular state of

consciousness in response to some kind of experience which could not

be processed at that moment[I do not emphasize content, what I do

emphasize is]...the trance process by which the person ultimately

creates the symptom.(Wolinsky, 1991, 21)

Outside the therapeutic environment trance states provide a powerful

creative vehicle for an actors imagination. Identifying with a character

so empathetically that the quality of sensory experience changes is a

kind of trance. We have numerous examples from non-western cultures

of traditional ceremonies, dances and other forms of theatre that

incorporate trance techniques and allow the shaman or performer to

become an animal, character or elemental force.

How can we we know when a trance is present? Wolinsky says there

are three core characteristics of any trance:


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1. A narrowing, shrinking or fixating of attention

Restricted attention is an abstract way of saying that a particular

sensation dominates or frames our point of view. For example, a human

face has a nose, eyes, mouth, chin, forehead, and so forth. Gazing at

another persons face, we can be aware of each of these parts in

sequence or in gestalt. But what happens when we focus on just one

element? We suddenly reduce our impression of another human. If

someones eyes take our sole focusand we remain fixed only on

those eyesthey begin to seem bigger or more intense. At that

moment we are entrancedand may be unable to respond to other

visual signals needing our attention.

In the case of the auditory channel we can become so hooked into

the sound of a voice that we completely miss the presence of another

senses input. Recent scientific studies in the dangers of cell-phone use

point out this very fact.(See, for example, Scholl et al., 2003)

Normally, we shift quickly and smoothly from one sensory channel to

another as we experience our life. But when a particularly powerful

trance state occurs, sensory flexibility begins to operate in a much


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narrower band of consciousness. We are cut off from our inner, deeply

functioning unconscious resources.

As Wolinsky says,

A symptom [here he means the presence of a trance state including

the narrowing of sensory focus] can be thought of as the non-utilization

of unconscious resources. When we are in a symptom state, we are not

making use of inner resources that are normally available to us. This

happens because the central characteristic of any trance state used

to create the symptom is that it shrinks our focus of attention. (Wolinsky,

1991, 31)

This ability to narrow focus is first of all a basic skill for an actor. Part of

the pleasure of a theatre performance can be attributed to the feeling

that we are watching the characters without them overtly

acknowledging us; we are looking through a keyhole, as it were. Like

an athlete in a game, the performers focus must be limited to the

circumstances of the playing, not on the crowd. Allowing the

awareness to flow to the audience will instantly create behaviors not


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grounded in the dramatic circumstances. Additionally, and in a more

advanced sense, transformation into a character demands a focus so

narrow that the actors own personality will not intrude.

2. The sense that the experience is happening to the person

A trance gives us a feeling that the experience is happening to us,

although we have actually created it ourselves. More importantly, we

feel that it is not possible to alter it or adjust it or stop it. The loss of

control is subtle, yet powerful. In this kind of limiting trance, we are more

likely to use non-performative linguistic constructions, for example: I

cant, You always, I shouldnt. Typically, under the influence

of a trance, we generalize, distort and delete sensory information in

order to maintain the trance.[ii]There is a kind of inevitability in a trance

state.

This inevitability becomes a plus in acting. A natural flow to a scene, as

if it is happening for the first time and free of conscious manipulation, is

extremely difficult to attain consistently, but when it does happen, the

actors know it. Choices in playing a sceneoften so hard won in

rehearsalsseem to sequence effortlessly when in this state. Part of the

satisfaction, even joy, of acting is the feeling of this playful state which


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what is called automatic behavior. This has occurred, for example,

when you hear an actor say that they dont know where that gesture

or reaction came from. What they mean is that they did not

consciously choose it. Automatic behavior can feel quite magical in

the context of acting.

Many actors describe their time awareness as so fundamentally altered

that on-stage moments seemed to pass unusually quickly or slowly

(time distortionyet another type of hypnotic phenomenon).

Wolinsky sees this as a consequence of our mind and body really being

one thing:

It appears as though time and resistance are directly correlated: the

greater the resistance, the more time is experienced as moving slowly.

Without resistance, time flies by. This is another paradox of how we

create our experience of time: we experience time as passing very

quickly when we are enjoying ourselves. Why is this? Somatically, we

are not resisting the experienceindeed, may even be welcoming

the experienceand thus our muscles are loose and relaxed, our

breathing, rhythmic and soothing.(Wolinsky, 1991, 176)


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Hypnotic phenomena are the will o the wisp of acting: trying to force

them almost always fails. It is usually better to pursue other actions that

can be achieved onstage while letting the phenomena happen when

they will. The phenomena are a by-product of the trance, not the goal.

This felt sense of the trance within the body is critical for the actor who

must rely on self-monitoring techniques to maintain state. Athletes also

rely on body sensations to monitor and tweak performance.(Millman,

1979; Huang and Lynch, 1992) The ability to notice subtle body

sensations and then adjust to them in a useful way while performing in

front of an audience is a difficult and yet most basic of skills.

Within the therapeutic world, trance statescharacterized by a

narrowed sensory reality that seems to take on a timing and speed of

its own while manifesting occasional hypnotic phenomenacreate

serious problems for the patient. The trance is a trap that prevents full

functioning of the person. Within the world of acting, however, trance

states are part of the most creative and powerful operations an actor

can generate. Through trance, a character can be imagined and then

lived.


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The Actors Association Ritual

Now, with the help of NLPs sensory modality distinctions and Wolinskys

trance criteria, we can map out what I have coined in other work the

actors association ritual. (Turner, 1996; Turner, 1999) By stepping into

the characters point of view, inthat body, the actors personal body

feel and point of view is fundamentally, and quite literally, transformed.

I use the term association here in the NLP sense: a change in the

point of view from dissociated (the picture or sound is outside of you;

you are observing it) to associated (you are now experiencing the

event from within the scene, as a participant). As an example, imagine

you are watching a roller coaster ride from about a half-mile away:

hear the screams of the passengers, watch the tiny cars zoom up and

down on the curves. Now imagine you are actually in the first car of the

roller coaster as it hurtles forward and suddenly down, feeling the

vibration, hearing the rattles of the rails and the screams of those

around you, and seeing everything around you in a kind of blur. The

difference in your experience between these two imaginings is the

difference between dissociating and associating the same event.


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Similarly, we can sympathize with someone by appreciating their

living circumstance, but when we empathize with someone

(associate) we believe we can feelwhat they are feeling, that we can

share what it is actually like to bethem. (Politicians remind us that they

can feel our pain.) The critical distinction to be made here is that, for

an actor (and not our performer), the ability to associate into a

characters body, senses and world providea kind and quality of

information unattainable from a dissociated state.

The association ritual begins with the actor seeing the character from

the outside and ends with the actor living through the characters

awareness. Through the power of repetition and enhancementas a

ritualthis process takes over the actors behavior in rehearsal and

performance.It is a kind of possession that replaces dissociated, logical

thinking about the text (used effectively by directors or critics) with

associated intensity and depth of physical feelingwhat feels right

within the scenes circumstances.

Complete association occurs when the actor sees, hears, and feels the

body and the imagined environment of the character as his/her own.


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Actually, then, we can say this sensory experience is not the actors but

the characters, from the characters world. It is one thing to think

about a character who is paranoid, this is a dissociated abstraction.

It is quite another thing to have a powerful sense (or numerous senses)

of what it would be liketo experienceparanoia (containing

submodality distinctions such as I can see eyes watching me

everywhere, I can feel someone watching me, or I can hear the

voices of people who are talking about me). Character feeling, then,

as a product of the association ritual, anchors itself in the bones,

muscles and nervous impulses of the actor.

The Association Ritual Process

To begin the association ritual, the actor invokes the characters visual

and auditory presence. This is a result of repeated readings of the

plays text. The plays descriptions of characters, the actions they take

and the words they choose are all translated into pictures and sounds

and feelings, the submodality distinctions described in NLP. Stanislavski

cautions that the initial images from the first reading of a play can be

long-lasting (they are seeds that can grow) and perhaps influence

the final performance in unexpected ways.(Stanislavski, 1989, 3) Thus


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the actor must clearly and carefully note them so they can be

monitored.

A play text is usually heavy with dialogue, but there are also other

elements to consider. Descriptions of environments where scenes take

place and any physical actions detailed can also spark imaginative

responses. A script that notes the character enters the room and walks

to the bar will of necessity out of the actors sensory imaginationbe

filled in with details about that entrance. One actor may see, in his

minds eye, a way of walking that bespeaks an attitude of hesitation in

entering that bar. Another actor may notice a body part or mannerism

that is unique. (There are the obvious visuals like Richard IIIs humped

back or the limp of Laura in The Glass Menagerie, but any character

can have slight to outlandish physical characteristics that help to

define a role.) Or the actor may notice details in the environment of

the bar, the colors, shapes, other characters and so forth that may be

used to create a sensory context for embodiment.

It is important for us to understand how different this is from an ordinary

reading of a play. Reading is a natural process of translating text on a

page into concrete sensory elements. But at that point the similarity to


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what actors do ends. For most readers, the point of view is dissociated

and varied. The average reader can engage with any character, or

none, and enjoy the play from a more meta perspective, from outside

the scenario as an observer. This applies even to the skilled insight of a

critic or scholar and is a response to the overall patterns of the text, as

seen from many angles. The search, in short, is for understanding.

The actor, however, is looking for the details that lure and intrigue in

such force that he feels compelled to enter and participate. He wants

to find an associated point of view existing withinthe world of the play

embodied in a character. Using submodality distinctions of

Neurolinguistic Programming with the text generates exciting and

personalized details that can help do this. The character becomes

more compelling as it becomes more specific to the actors own

senses. Whatever insights are found, they must contribute to an

embodied living out of the dramatic circumstances, not just an

intellectual understanding of them. The actor, in short, searches for an

experience.[iv]


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Whichdetails begin to dominate the actors conception distinguishes

the skilled actors individual spin on the scripts text. A performer, by

contrast, would take the entrance direction above as a simple motor

signal: come onstage. The questions of Where have I (the

character) been? or What am I entering this room expecting to

see/hear? or What aspects of this room attract my attention and

affect me? may not even occur to this performer. Thus the vast

number of details that might be present in the way in which the

character enters will be missed.[v]

It is instructive to observe sitcom actors in this regard, as they artificially

move and pose for their comic line setups and deliveries. What we

frequently see in these shows is dominated by the needs of camera

angles played out from an external perspective, with actors turning out

their torsos to camera rather than naturally facing each other, for

example, and having to pause to deliver a line until they know their

camera is on. The texts also tend to aim for a result in laugh lines

rather than character-generated engagement in the given

circumstances. (This is not to say that these performances are not

sometimes humorous, or that there can never be creative acting in


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these shows, only that the way of producing a weekly television series

makes it difficult to create deeper, more varied and interesting choices

in the material.)

Actors work in different ways, often because their preferential sensory

modes differ. One actor has a vivid visual imagination, creating

pictures quickly and easily from what he reads in the play. Another

hears the voices of all the characters in great tonal detail as they

speak. (Stanislavski, 1989, 169) Eventually, more than one sensory

system is stimulated as the preferred system reacts and builds

momentum.

Any sensory information that might be considered negative can be re-

framed in order to understand the positive context. Think for example

of bad characters, or the challenge of playing a monstrous

personality like a Hitler or Richard III. In order to play the role, the actor

must construct the positive intention of the behavior and this starts with

the sensory images chosen. Another example might be a character

yelling at and attacking another. For the actor, the challenge

becomes how to create a moment where what the character sees

and hears stimulates yelling and attacking as an inevitability. There is

no bad here, not in the moral sense. There is only the deep


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understanding of motivation as it is played out in response to sensory

distinctions.

The style of a piece can also affect the sensory choices an actor

makes. A farce character and situation achieves a different kind of

plausibility and attraction if, for example, all the imagined colors of the

scenes are richly saturated, or if the character is conceived as an

animal or in an outlandish costume. (Notice how your memories of

pleasurable, happy events are usually bright and pleasantly colored,

and how your unhappy memories are often dark, dim and perhaps in

black and whitethis is partly how we encode our history and

categorize it.)

In any case, the totality of sensory imagerycharacters, environments,

stage directions, directors comments, additional researched

materialestablishes a goal for the association ritual, building the

imaginary world as the target. These elements in various combinations

stimulate the actors interest and emotional commitment. The actor

reaches a pointsooner or later in rehearsalswhere a critical mass of

sensory detail is achieved. It becomes easier and easier to picture the

character with the installed qualities. Eventually the characters dream


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body and world, full and rich in detail, stand in his minds eye, if you will.

As I have said, the actors desire to merge at this moment of

association is a form of empathy. Empathy is the follow-on of sympathy

and requires action. All of the preliminary study, research and

refinement of sensory submodality details develops to this point where

the actor desires to merge with the character, to embody the sensory

elements necessary to function in the role.[vi] The moment of

association is at hand. The next step is the transformation from

understanding about to being in, going from observing a dream to

actually living in it. To use the clich, the actor now willingly walks a mile

in the shoes of the character.

Entering the Character

Initial moments of movement into the character are usually performed

in private and are used to test various aspects of the character found

in research and imaginative circumstance building. Minus the

distractions of other actors and the rehearsal hall, it is simpler to perform

the first associations in this way. The process model I suggest for this is a

kind of over and into sensory experience, initiated and enhanced by


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Wolinskys trance criteria. That is, first the actor imagines the characters

situation (or more precisely the characters body within the situation).

Notice here one of the Trance criteria of a narrowed sensory focus on

an imaginary image/sound pattern.

When the image looks and sounds right, the actor imagines moving

over and into the character body/place, noticing what sensations

arise. Some actors only imagine moving over while physically staying

where they are. Other actors literally get up out of their chair and slowly

put themselves into the character body and space they have created

before them (in their living room or study).

Inhabiting a character body at first is done slowly and easily, rather like

putting on a glove, with each body part in turn adding positively or not

to a total sense of character. For example, one place to start with my

visualization of Falstaff would be to inhabit the belly I see before me,

that is to start with that body part awareness. I might slip into that

belly, imagining it as my own, and simply stay with that belly for a few

moments/minutes. Imagining the belly as my own, I can sense how its

weight, size and shape begin to affect the rest of my body container,


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perhaps noticing how my lower back hurts with the added forward

weight or how my knees tend to lock under the strain. If the body part

does not feel right (the criterion for this phase), then it can be

replaced with a variation (bigger, smaller, different shape, etc.). Yes, a

Falstaffian belly is an obvious choice. But I might as easily start from an

idea of how Falstaff cocks his head to one side or breathes

asthmatically to find my way into an association.

What is interesting here is how many new sensations/psychological

variations come from within the association exercise itself and not from

the previous dissociated study of the character and the play. These

sensations often arise in the moment, surprising and unannounced, as

ideosensory behavior. At this juncture, the trance characteristic of an

experience happening to the actor can be quite powerful and

sometimes sudden, and at other times slow and deliberate. An actor

cannot really know which details will be the most important until they

are experienced, so there is an experimental feel to this phase.

Additionally, a sensation that seemed useful in a previous association

rehearsal (i.e., it took the actor out of herself and helped place her in


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the characters body/world) now seems lifeless and so is either

enhanced or abandoned.

As body parts are added/taken away/enhanced/focused on, there is

a kind of cascading effect, a growing sense of completeness in how

the character body comes to life and is maintained. Imagine the

difference between looking over at the Falstaff example with his

belly and now looking down at my belly and watching it jiggle and

move in and out with his/my breath!

This profound changed in viewpoint and sensory stimulation begins to

acquire a life of its own and creates a living, active state in which

change can occur. Now the third trance criterionappearance of

hypnotic phenomenamay happen. For example, the actor (within

the character body) may suddenly remember an event from the

characters past that is not suggested in the text, but which makes

sense while the association ritual is active. Unexpected and

unplanned gestures or mannerisms occur (automatic behavior). A

sudden image of the characters mother or father may come to mind

(false memories), creating a powerful inner state or frame of reference


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the room or a particular way of standing or holding a special object)

can be useful as a way to mark out whether the actor is in

character or out of character. An anchor strengthens the stability of

the created character. It also can create a kind of psychological

framework that pulls the actors concentration away from distractions

such as too much audience awareness, performance anxiety, and

mind wandering from the performance tasks. We see many kinds of

anchors in athletes who use various ritualized physical actions to help

them focus on the game. Anchoring is powerful precisely because it is

based on repeatable or sustained physical action linked to a desired

psychological state.[vii]

Anchoring is especially important as the association process gains

fluidity and speed. The first associations are very slow, sometimes taking

minutes to complete. This slowness is important as a way to more

precisely allow the body to catch up with the imagery and to notice

even minute changes in position and feeling. But as the process is used

and the anchored state becomes familiar and almost automatic, the

time required for process speeds up considerably, now taking only


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seconds to achieve. This efficiency is very important when the actor

enters full rehearsals.

As the association process gains power and velocity, the actor tests out

the feeling of embodiment for its creative possibilities within the scope

of the plays action. Lines can be memorized more effectively and

easily if the actor understands what prompts them. The actor now goes

into scenes from the play more specifically, explores choices at length,

walks about, speaks, imagines other characters.

In addition to the associated state the actor can make use of a

dissociated position. After working for some moments within the

character position, fine-tuning various elements and their

combinations, it is possible to emerge and look at the newly adjusted

character figure. Information about the character can now be tested

both within the state of the character and tempered with the

occasional dissociated viewpoint.

Using the Associated Character in Rehearsals

Brief physical behaviors are linked to others, then integrated into longer

chains of activities and then scenes from the play. Soon the actor is in


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rehearsals with other actors who are, hopefully, exploring and creating

with their own association rituals as well. Scenes from the play are now

practiced with others. Can the actor retain the feeling of association,

that he is not himself, even with other actors in close proximity?

Perhaps, at first, just two or three lines of dialogue seem to work.

Problems found in rehearsals can be worked on still in private, but more

and more the process must find its way into the group work. This stage

tests the strength and depth of the association in the face of external

factors that might disturb the dream of the character.

The presence of other actors becomes a help and not a hindrance.

Each of the other actors is also becoming a character. The individual

trances start to mutually reinforce each other and thus the collective

association deepens. Actors respond, not to each other, but to each

others associated state. In very subtle ways, the mutual trance corrects

staging and behavior, and the sensitive director will recognize this.

An actor can come out of associated state when she hears a

director ask for a pause or stops the rehearsal to give notes. That is, the

actor can stop the scene, dissociate from the character, receive the

note and interact with the director and other actors as actors, then go


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back into character to carry out the suggested adjustments. However,

it is also possible to listen to a director while remaining in character. This

kind of processing strategy eliminates the actor as a kind of interpreter

to the character, instead favoring the characters ability to respond

more immediately and authentically to new directorial input.

Finally, actors successfully negotiate whole scenes in associated

character state. They have found their justification, deep feeling, and

direction from within their imagined circumstances. In these moments,

additional useful hallucinations can occur: the rehearsal hall transforms

into the environment of a scene, sounds as voices or naturalistic

elements can be heard (positive hallucination) or another actor is seen

not as she is but as the imagined other character might be (negative

hallucination). Time sense may distort such that quick moments in the

text are experienced as quick. Ideosensory behavior (I think it is cold

in this scene and my body then actually feels the cold) becomes

automatic, other-than-conscious.

The associated body possession can surprise the performer with its

rightness and speed of reaction to the texts events and dialogue.


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Character thoughts seem to happen spontaneously and trigger

responses appropriate to scenes, with less actor-conscious thought.

Automatic behavior generates interesting new patterns of movement,

speech and reaction, all appropriate to the characters orientation.

The actor feels she is in a different place, reacting from within a

persona not her own. The living process of association gives the actor

the feeling of as if for the first time, even though the fundamental

elements of the text (dialogue, relationships, situational context) stay

constant. Rehearsals are surprising forays into open-ended explorations

of the characters world, not mechanical work-throughs of logically

justified intellectual material.

This is a process that often takes the entire four to five weeks of a

standard theatre rehearsal period to produce. As Stanislavskis work

shows, it is consciously repeated activities that eventually result in

unconscious behaviors. The association passage from self to character

has been negotiated. What was once a personal, internalized dream

of a character in a play now has weight and shape and will use the

actors body, mind and sensory resources. The kinesthetic

understanding of the dream character (feels right) has replaced the


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Andreas, Steve and Connirae Andreas, 1987, Change Your Mind and

Keep the Change, Moab, Utah: Real People Press

Bandler, Richard and John Grinder, 1975a, Patterns of the hypnotic

techniques of Milton H. Erickson, M.D, Cupertino, Calif: Meta

Publications

_______________, 1975b, The structure of magic : a book about

language and therapy, Palo Alto, Calif: Science and Behavior Books

Bandler, Richard, Steve Andreas, and Connirae Andreas, 1985, Using

your brain--for a change, Moab, UT: Real People Press

Bateson, Gregory, 1988,Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity, New York:

Bantam New Age

______________, 1990, Steps to an Ecology of Mind, New York: Ballantine

Books


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Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly, 1990, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal

Experience, New York: Harper Perennial

Dilts, Robert, 1990, Changing Belief Systems with NLP, Cupertino, CA:

Meta Publications

Eisner, Elliot W., 1976, The Arts, human development, and education,

Berkeley, Calif: McCutchan Pub. Corp

Eisner, Elliot W, 2002, Cognition and curriculum reconsidered. The

educational imagination : on the design and evaluation of school

programs, New York Upper Saddle River, N.J: Teachers College Press

Prentice Hall

Grinder, John, Richard Bandler, and Connirae Andreas, 1981, Trance-

formations : neuro-linguistic programming and the structure of hypnosis,

Moab, Utah: Real People Press

Hagen, Uta, 1973, Respect for Acting, New York: Macmillan Publishing

Company


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Hornby, Richard, 1992, The End of Acting: A Radical View, New York:

Applause Theatre Books

Huang, Chungliang Al and Jerry Lynch, 1992, Thinking Body, Dancing

Mind: TaoSports for Extraordinary Performance in Athletics, Business,

and Life, New York: Bantam Books

Iacoboni, Marco, et al., 2005, 'Grasping the Intentions of Others with

One's Own Mirror Neuron System', PLoS Biology, 3 (3)

Korzybski, Alfred, 1958, Science and sanity; an introduction to non-

Aristotelian systems and general semantics, Lakeville, Conn.:

International Non-Aristotelian Library Pub. Co.

Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson, 1980,Metaphors we live by,

Chicago: University of Chicago Press

Meltznoff, A. N., 2005, 'Imitation and Other Minds: The "Like Me"

hypothesis.', in Hurley, S. and N. Chater (eds.), Perspectives on Imitation:


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Wolinsky, Stephen, 1991, Trances People Live, Connecticut: Bramble

Notes

[i] Pick any period in Hollywood filmmaking and you can find the same

kind of hierarchy.

[ii]See also NLPs meta-model described in (Bandler and Grinder,

1975b) that explores these linguistic distinctions.

[iii]In addition to Stanislavski, we can see hypnotic phenomena used in

the techniques of other recognized teachers of acting such as Uta

Hagen, Michael Chekhov and Charles Marowitz.

[iv]The language of a text as a metaphor can start us thinking, but it is

embodied (associated) experience that we act upon. (Lakoff and

Johnson, 1980)

[v]See Hagens useful description of this process in her Respect for

Acting.

[vi]There may be connections here to recent speculation about so-

called mirror neurons that fire not only when we perform a certain

action but also when we observe others perform an action. The
http://blackboard.lincoln.ac.uk/bbcswebdav/users/dmeyerdinkgrafe/archive/craigturner.html#_ednref2http://blackboard.lincoln.ac.uk/bbcswebdav/users/dmeyerdinkgrafe/archive/craigturner.html#_ednref2http://blackboard.lincoln.ac.uk/bbcswebdav/users/dmeyerdinkgrafe/archive/craigturner.html#_ednref3http://blackboard.lincoln.ac.uk/bbcswebdav/users/dmeyerdinkgrafe/archive/craigturner.html#_ednref3http://blackboard.lincoln.ac.uk/bbcswebdav/users/dmeyerdinkgrafe/archive/craigturner.html#_ednref4http://blackboard.lincoln.ac.uk/bbcswebdav/users/dmeyerdinkgrafe/archive/craigturner.html#_ednref4http://blackboard.lincoln.ac.uk/bbcswebdav/users/dmeyerdinkgrafe/archive/craigturner.html#_ednref5http://blackboard.lincoln.ac.uk/bbcswebdav/users/dmeyerdinkgrafe/archive/craigturner.html#_ednref5http://blackboard.lincoln.ac.uk/bbcswebdav/users/dmeyerdinkgrafe/archive/craigturner.html#_ednref6http://blackboard.lincoln.ac.uk/bbcswebdav/users/dmeyerdinkgrafe/archive/craigturner.html#_ednref6http://blackboard.lincoln.ac.uk/bbcswebdav/users/dmeyerdinkgrafe/archive/craigturner.html#_ednref6http://blackboard.lincoln.ac.uk/bbcswebdav/users/dmeyerdinkgrafe/archive/craigturner.html#_ednref5http://blackboard.lincoln.ac.uk/bbcswebdav/users/dmeyerdinkgrafe/archive/craigturner.html#_ednref4http://blackboard.lincoln.ac.uk/bbcswebdav/users/dmeyerdinkgrafe/archive/craigturner.html#_ednref3http://blackboard.lincoln.ac.uk/bbcswebdav/users/dmeyerdinkgrafe/archive/craigturner.html#_ednref2


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empathetic response of the actor to the vision of a character or

dramatic scene may be a particularly sophisticated use of this

neurological response. See (Iacoboni et al., 2005) and

http://www.interdisciplines.org/mirror for a broad overview and

(Meltznoff, 2005) for developmental and social human implications.

[vii]Chekhovs use of Psychological Gesture is instructive. It combines

a significant gesture/body shape with a core need or value that helps

define a character at the same time that it anchors the characters

presence.
http://www.interdisciplines.org/mirrorhttp://blackboard.lincoln.ac.uk/bbcswebdav/users/dmeyerdinkgrafe/archive/craigturner.html#_ednref7http://blackboard.lincoln.ac.uk/bbcswebdav/users/dmeyerdinkgrafe/archive/craigturner.html#_ednref7http://blackboard.lincoln.ac.uk/bbcswebdav/users/dmeyerdinkgrafe/archive/craigturner.html#_ednref7http://www.interdisciplines.org/mirror

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