Letters from Alvina Krause: Spring 1975

Context
The group of students in Bloomsburg was growing and they were by now mostly graduates of NU. Krause's letters included more and more discussion of her work with them.
I have used capital letters when she writes actual names.

Letter
David,
You make sure you recognize priorities! You just may have the capacities that make a great teacher. Let nothing come between you and that aim! And if you need warning, look at [She names an NU colleague -- DD]. A man of colossal talents who lost sight of priorities and what is he now! Keep your vision clear. It's a lonely road, but look at [ditto -- DD]: he chose the other --

Yes, I have told the group we stop work in two weeks. It is useless to go on and I refuse to pursue a useless course. I would rather work in my garden. I tell you this because you better do something about that sophomore course in acting! It should be the very guts of the work in acting! It should turn on the creative minds of actors. It should be the touchstone for all future work. An actor creates should be the theme. Out of what? Stored up images, sensory images, action images, people images. By what means? The creative imagination. Do you know these NU people --except for Y -- have none? No imagination at all! Even when I supply the flame, nothing kindles! They admit it: they are numb, they have never used the creative mind. P brought it all to a climax with Mercutio. We had worked on Mercutio earlier in the year. I told them: here is Shakespeare himself, his active creative mind teeming with images thrown into galloping verse. And what does P give us? A clown. A bumbling clown. Wit? Not a trace! Poetry? Imagination? Not a sign! I blew my top, P left and probably will not reappear. And thus we got to the acknowledgment: no creative minds. Three years of acting at NU and imagination is a foreign word. Now you get busy on that basic course. Scrap my program. Devise your own. But reach the creative mind! I shall work with U and Y if they like, but the rest -- goodbye.

The Chekhov cherry tree was beautiful [Those of us who first went to Bloomsburg during spring break 1972 planted a Cherry Orchard cherry tree in the backyard as a parting gift -- DD]-- and now the iris gloriously regal and I plucked a white rosebud today.
And what is NU doing for the Bicentennial?

A.K.

Letters from Alvina Krause: Fall 1974

Context
During fall 1974 and winter 1975 my journal was full of questions.

Journal
Me:
[On Creative Imagination, I end the entry with this question:]
What am I missing? Where is my blind spot?

Krause's Response:
Imagination works through the senses. They must be trained to respond.
See the lake -- actually see the color, the form, the movement: See a gull flying over the lake, muscles perceive the movement, the dip, the soaring, Hear the waves, the beat, the tempo, feel the spray.
Enlarge the responses, the lake becomes the North Sea, the water darkens, the roar is loud, the gulls cry out, the spray slaps your face, the clouds are dark, they rush -- Hamlet watches the 7th wave come in, break "To be or not to be"
[Along the left hand margin she wrote "Reality" to bracket this first part -- DD.]
Imagination becomes creative only if the realistic sensory response to a stimulus is vivid enough to enlarge of its own accord from lake to ocean to Hamlet on a parapet --
"To be" will only be words unless touched off by images rooted in reality

"My dear Judge, how mortally bored I have been" -- What must the actress see, hear, perceive -- what must the actress do -- turn a rehearsal table into a Victorian table with marble top, a miniature in a gold filigree frame, a lamp with a decorated globe shade --

Turn a rehearsal prop into Gaev's bookcase through sense response -- begin with your own reality.

Me:
[About a student in beginning acting]
And what do you do with a student who sits caved in, thinking like crazy, uncomfortable with his physical self, unable to let himself create because he is self-conscious even when I get the entire class involved in an exercise? He'll try and then he gives up, collapses. I'm at a real loss.

Krause:
What is his chief interest? What does he know well? To some degree, in what is he an authority? Whatever it is, get him to show the class how -- If he is a camera buff -- Let him illustrate -- Then go to -- If Hamlet had a camera -- what -- how -- Work from the known -- from confidence to --

****

Me:
[A description of work on the Antigone/Creon scene in Anouilh's Antigone and my attempts to get students to create the characters as forces more than as realistic human beings. When I met resistance from the students, I flailed.]
As ever, any light you can shed will be assimilated.

Krause:
Begin with real people, eliminate gradually all small actions, all small intonations. Try it in French, the language of precision. Listen to French drama.

About Antigone's Nurse
She is stripped of everything except the qualities that make her not see, not realize.

Get to the basic motivating force for each one and let that force dominate
Haemon -- a deep love for Antigone -- he would choose death for it. Youth, eliminate all romanticizing about youth and love. Play only the motivating force.
Ismene -- Youth loving life (normal) more than death.
Soldiers -- just that, no more  -- no individualities, they await orders, receive them, obey -- play poker while waiting --

Me:
I begin to question for myself. What is the difference between realism vs. Greek tragedy? Greek tragedy vs. Anouilh?

Krause:
[Next to my "realism"] Death of a Salesman. Keep Arthur Miller in mind for realism.
[Next to my "Greek tragedy"] tragic realization "Lo, he is fallen"
[Next to my "Anouilh"] Aimed at the head.
[Next to my "Greek tragedy"] Aimed at understanding through -- ?

Me:
[Observations about Greek tragedy, ending with this:]
But isn't that essentially what the French drama does too? There is a difference -- I can sense it, but I cannot articulate it and therefore I'm not certain how to teach it. Will you help clarify?

Krause:
It's in the aim -- the French insist on that intellectual grasp.

From my summer journal
Try being Anouilh -- with a keen mind, with a deep concern for his country, for humanity, looking from a high tower at his Paris, his France, knowing, realizing that with his talents he had the responsibility to strike a blow against Nazism. Play the Antigone he is creating as he looks at Paris.

****

Context
I send her copies of the notes I post on the bulletin board.

Letter
David,
The notes are to the point. Can you expand each point, illustrate, question? Always test your own imagination until you can trust yourself fully to develop any statement. Feel that you know Hedda and all her associates better than you know your own friends. And trust your own mind to explore, discover.
Talk about characters in drama as real people. As you talk about Eilert Lovborg become Eilert for a few moments.
[...A discussion of students and friends...DD]
I'm glad you have moved to Evanston. Should save time--

A.K.

Letters from Alvina Krause: Creative Imagination Winter 1974

Context
Beginning Acting. Winter quarter Sophomore year 1974. The Creative Imagination.

Letter
Do you remember your attempts at Othello? Horrible! Awkward! Self-conscious, unbelievable -- words without meaning, emotions without motivation -- Why? Because you were not using your creative faculties to become Othello. Your creative faculties were dead. You were a typical acting student -- memorize words, speak them with emotion and that's it --
The objective of the quarter on imagination is to start the creative faculty working again -- to stimulate the creative mind -- to demonstrate what creation is and the glow of it. My exercise worked for me. Scrap it if it didn't work for you. But find it! Did you get people thinking of how their creative minds functioned in childhood & then they got to H.S. & they started to follow the heard [sic]. Did you get your class excited about recapturing this lost faculty? Creating a character is far more difficult than creating a fantasy -- A child can build a universe on the beach sands -- Scatter some objects, fabrics, etc., on the floor. Build a Moor out of them -- While building say he is dark, a different skin, his blood is hot, his heart is warm, passionate, he trusts too much, he loves too much, he is a soldier, a leader, etc. -- Pick the fabrics for each quality -- Devise your own system -- But stir the creative mind!

****

Letter
David,
I can't remember where Complex Oedipus came from! [An article Krause gave me and that I had misplaced--DD] If it is a newspaper clipping probably it came from Lucy's niece in England. If you send it back to me maybe Lucy could identify it. More probably we would need to send it back to Jerry.

Imagination -- Try acting the titles of plays: Gamma Rays...Man in the Moon Marigolds -- alcoholic mother (The college here might have had a good production if they had started with the title) --

a tailor.... a lion.... a Roman Emperor

Or take a title of a play and add other elements in the play --

Rhinoceros ... Paris ... !

Such a process might show students the relation between creative imagination and acting -- Oh yes: Marchbanks (not April or May or August but March) -- an Episcopal minister .... a fireplace or ?
You can't be Marchbanks unless your mind has played with the word!

****

[I'm including this photo because it's the only way I can think of to get facebook to offer it as a thumbnail accompanying these letters as shared status posts on facebook -- DD.]

Letters from Alvina Krause: Creative Imagination and Shakespeare -- Winter 1974

Context
By winter quarter 1974 I was posting notes on my bulletin board. I sent Krause a copy of each set of notes and she returned it with her responses. I include only those parts of my notes that are necessary to give context to her responses.

Bulletin Board Notes on The Creative Imagination
I wrote a long essay about metaphor and the actor with nods to Hedda Gabler and the army pistol and Desdemona as a rose, including this passage written in my best AK manner:
"...What is a rose? Form? all right -- but everything else has form -- what is the exact, unique form of a rose? Can you capture that form in your body, sense it, create it, transfer it to yourself? Beauty? All right -- but what precisely is the beauty of a rose that is not the beauty of any other thing...."

In the margin AK wrote this:
Good.
Continue on the "action" words. On behavior resulting from action --
A rose turns to the sun, sways with the breeze -- droops in the drought and heat --
bends

At the end of the notes, she wrote this:
You are terrific in concepts -- But develop ability to touch off creative action by the use of creative action.
Your fantasy [an assignment in which an actor plays one of a given human being, animal, or object, creating a pantomimed story involving all three -- DD] again needs explicit action.
Use "if" more
Everyone has a pistol within him -- go on develop, illustrate -- its power to destroy
He also has a mouse within him -- who peeks out, etc. --
Everyone has a peacock within who preens his feathers, steps high, etc. --
If pistol, mouse, peacock collide [Hedda Gabler, Tesman, Judge Brack -- DD]
???

****

Context
In her responses to my notes to the Shakespeare class, Krause continued to point me toward illustration by direct action.

My notes on creating the reality of A Midsummer-Night's Dream
In the notes I eventually get to this statement:
"...play the play, play the drama to create the beauty, the magic, the joy of a mid-summer night's dream -- to create the truth in 'Love is blind'."

In the margin she wrote this:
Illustrate: 
A night to do as you please, to race into the woods.
You are in a wood, at midnight -- trees, shadows -- crickets -- a cow moos, a bush shivers -- you see a pair of eyes -- owl? 
No -- it has horns!

A bit farther on:
You are so right, but you stop short of the images, action metaphors, which motivate -- imagine -- "It is midsummer night -- anything can happen --- you are in a wood -- there's an open space -- a stage --moonlight -- you start out 'to be or not to be' a donkey brays, dances in the moonlight" etc. etc.

Later in my Midsummer notes:
Men -- toss your capes joyfully over your shoulder, stride vigorously through this world, perch that cap with the feather in it on your head and bolt off into the forest.

Krause:
You want --- what? a girl? money? Fame?

Me:
And Bottom?

Krause:
You want to act -- so does Bottom. To act you need a loud voice. So does Bottom. Do it -- No -- a deep voice, etc. etc.
Bottom is anyone who wants to act -- He dreams -- Titania -- Elizabeth Taylor ----

****

Context
My journal

Krause's Comment
Ideas are only starting points -- The good teacher takes them into action.
Hedda is a pistol, Hedda is afraid of society, Hedda tempts Lovborg
etc.
Human beings are made up of opposites -- part reaches to the stars, part follows the herd: be a lark, be a sheep --
Macbeth is a 1) Great soldier, even a poet 2) Macbeth wants a throne.
Honor vs. base ambition
Eagle vs.  ?

Teaching Acting

Question:

I've been thinking a lot about your class as I'm working up my curriculum for Acting 1; these are undergrads just beginning their acting education; I'm pretty free to teach what I want, although they encourage non-text based work for this first semester. I remember 2 exercises we did the first year in your class that impacted me and that I was able to use and connect to scene work later on, I'm wondering if it would be possible for you to remind me how you lead those exercises and what you focused on? I remember the animal exercise pretty well, but if you have any insight on that I'm all ears (I think my animal became an encyclopedia salesman, funny). But, the 2 I'm really interested in exploring are: the song exercise and the character from a book exercise. I remember preparing for them and I remember some of the performances, but I don't remember them from a teacher's perspective.

If it's too much work, I totally understand and can figure it out on my own, but, my time in your class remains a seminal influence over my work, and now that I am in a position to inspire another generation of hungry 19 year-olds I thought I'd reach out to the teacher that hooked me 15 years ago (sigh-how am I that old)?

Any words of wisdom is much appreciated.

Response:

How nice to be needed!

There are lots of ideas about what teaching acting means. And someday I may write about that.

I believe that the actor is a creative being, and acting is a creative art. So I think it's more than the belief that all you have to be is "authentic", which means you must know yourself thoroughly so you can respond truthfully to given circumstances.
And, oh my, knowing yourself inside and out is difficult at any age (and takes keeping at it pretty much your whole life). With college age people, actually, I think learning to act helps with learning to know who you are as well as the other way round.

Your creative responsibility as an actor is to dramatize the people, the relationships, the situations, the story of the play, so that you can communicate what about being human the play deals with.

And as an actor you create with your whole self, with all the experiences you have ever had (and so, yes, the lifelong study of who you are is the foundational element).
Since you create with the self, with stored up experience and images and behavior, the elementary thing you have to learn is to perceive behavior deeply, authentically, meaningfully: To come to understand your own behavior and to experience and store up the behavior of other people with as deep an understanding.

So, teacher, you devise ways to get your students to learn to perceive, truly to perceive. That means the senses, through which we perceive the world.

The first quarter's work at NU was devoted to the senses: sight and eyes, the organs of sight; hearing, touch, smell and taste; and the kinesthetic muscle sense, etc.

You take up a copy of my book on acting and you open it: what of your responses reveal "teacher"? What do you do that says "student of David Downs"?

Then try: Sarah Palin picks up the book. What do her responses reveal? Be specific. (By the way, Palin is a great life study for Natasha from Three Sisters. Read the recent Vanity Fair article. Try: Natasha sees Masha's copy of Gogol's Diary of a Madman on a side table. She picks it up. Her responses reveal something about her.)

Then: Arkadina picks up my book. She responds.

Turn my book into the play she will star in next. Let her respond. Let her reveal.

She picks up the journal that has Treplev's latest story published in it.

etc.

Do similar exercises with sight, with hearing, etc.

(This is still "non-text" work, but I think you should always lead every illustrative exercise, everything you do, toward some character from a play, some action in a play, some relationship, etc. Make sure they know Sea Gull and Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, Hedda Gabler, and something contemporary like Adam Rapp and Rebecca Gilman.)

The animal exercise and the novel exercise came the second quarter with emphasis on Imagination. First, you learn to perceive behavior, which is what you create with. Then the fueling power of creativity is the Imagination.

Just as people have motivated spines, so do animals. Metaphor helps us to get to understand the unknown by way of something that we already know. Is there something about your big ole house cat that helps you to understand/embody something about Juliet's nurse? Demonstrate.

What motivates a sea gull? Become a sea gull and discover.  Ride the wind currents. Soar above the lake until you truly sense the freedom and the security of the lake. Now let your motivated sea gull behavior become human and let Nina glide around the lake with such freedom and security.

The novelist can help you to understand people you can't study and perceive directly. Tolstoy's description of the way Nineteenth Century Russians dressed and behaved, what their houses looked like, what kinds of furniture they sat in, what their gala balls were like, etc., can help your actor's imagination to say: If I were a Nineteenth Century Russian... before your imagination says: If I were Anna Karenina.

You're leading to: If I were an Elizabethan before you get to: If I were Macbeth.
Where do you go to help your imagination create the experiences that can turn you into a Nineteenth Century Norwegian before you become Judge Brack?
etc.

And:
Novelists provide detailed descriptions of character and behavior; they suggest metaphors for understanding character.
Have you found a character in a novel that can help you to understand/imagine/create Tilden from Buried Child?
What contemporary writer is likely to have created such a character?

Also:
The novelist can tell you in much more detail than a playwright what a person is thinking and doing that reveals the unspoken even as they speak. Illustrate this with passages from Tolstoy, with Edith Wharton, Thomas Hardy.

Then:

Describe/write in words a particularly dramatic interaction you had with a friend, a parent, a lover. Then other acting students create the experience based on your description.

Become a novelist and write a description of Hedda's first entrance. Then become an actor and do it.

Become a novelist and describe what Kate and Deeley are thinking and doing as they speak in the first scene of Old Times.

This kind of work can help you get your actors to learn how to become novelists in behavior instead of in words.

The idea behind the song exercise was to get you to free something about yourself and to communicate it to the audience. Pick a song--usually from a musical--that expresses something deeply true about you. Don't worry if you can or cannot sing. It isn't about "singing"; it's about "selling" the song. In fact, often the students who were the musical comedy stars had a hard time with this exercise because it wasn't about cheap or fake selling and they often had learned to do just that and so found it difficult to access something simple and true and then simply and truly to communicate it to/with the audience.
This is a great way to help students learn to make a direct connection "across the footlights" that is essential to all acting, even drama of the most indirect relationship with an audience.

This also connects to Imagination work:  Songs from musicals (mostly from Oklahoma to Sondheim) that express character, motivation, attitude toward life, etc.  As with animal metaphors, see how the song as metaphor--the music, the rhythms, etc., as well as the words--manifests the character.  Pick songs such as I'm Just a Girl Who Cain't Say No, My Bill, As Long as He Needs Me, You've Got to Pick a Pocket or Two, etc.  Explore implications for motivated behavior in the melody, in the musical accompaniment, etc.

Happy working!