Letters from Alvina Krause: Teaching Sensory Perception

Context
Whenever I visited Bloomsburg those first two years, Krause always arranged her own work with her Bloomsburg students to address the concerns of my next quarter's teaching.
During the school year, I phoned her often.
Each week I sent her my teaching journal and each week she returned it with comments and suggestions.
And she wrote letters with more ideas and suggestions.
Her partner Lucy McCammon told me that AK was determined to do whatever it took to help me survive those first few crucial years.

Notes
First Year Acting
Acting is a performing art -- with music and dance.
The actor, through performance, communicates the drama--as violinist communicates--as dancer -- -- --
Through creation of character, responding to situation and environment and society in which he is placed, he interprets and communicates the playwright's dramatized idea as the musician interprets Mozart etc.

The musician's medium of communication, of creation, is his violin, piano, flute etc - - - No true violinist would settle for less than the best violin: a Stradivarius if he could get it--afford it -- Then through consummate artistry, he seeks to bring forth the depth, the power, the infinite variety of this Stradivarius, this perfect instrument. --

The actor's instrument is himself, his total self -- Not only his voice and body, his speech, his movement: these are the communicating media. Communicating what? All that he can bring to the creation of a Hamlet, a -- -- --

All that he is, all that he has known, all that experienced -- the music heard or not heard, people he has known -- books, etc. etc.
Out of emptiness comes emptiness -- What do you bring to the art of acting?
First page in journal: What do you bring to Hamlet, Hedda, Willie Loman, etc.
The actor is as all human beings with one addition: the ability to perceive more deeply, comprehend more fully -- he has keener senses -- He hears, sees -- -- -- --

The first year of the study of acting is the building, training of the actor's instrument: himself --
1. A voice that can communicate Macbeth or Marchbanks etc. etc.
2. A body that reveals through spine, toes, shoulders, etc. etc. every human response to the astonishment of living (which is drama)
3. Stored up experience, riches of vision, the creative substance --
4. Imagination which builds from the known to the unknown

It is through the senses that we store up usable experience.

Train senses to respond--
Start with sight -- What do you see -- color shape size etc. -- If you were a minister what would you see -- a poet? a carpenter -- a fool
Test for visual response -- Hold up a picture -- a piece of velvet (Oswald's cherry-colored velvet) -- Let students describe what they saw. Ask Is there a poet among these people? A porter (Macbeth) who sees nothing. A designer?
Show them how characters establish their individuality through sense responses -- Not always obvious ([Here Krause names a design teacher -- DD])

First assignment:
1. Test yourself: write in journal your most vivid visual response of the day. Check on what did you fail to see.
2. Find and study a visual minded -- responsive person. Be prepared to demonstrate him in class.
3. Find a visually unresponsive person -- sees little -- unresponsive to color, texture, design, shape etc. Be prepared to present him in class.
4. Be Juliet's nurse walking down street -- she responds to little except smell of food, beer, shady, comfortable side of street -- or be Porter from Macbeth before he is drunk -- same as nurse dull senses --
And so on --

Hearing -- same technique

Kinesthetic -- muscle -- Do Elizabethans!

Smell and taste -- Falstaff -- Sir Toby -- Nurse
        Hedda? --
        Discuss eating scenes and what they reveal

Touch -- Lubov and Anya finger tip touch --
         Study a jeweler -- an oriental -- love of beads  [I almost didn't include this, but Krause was a person of her time-- DD]

Wind up -- trip to Art Museum
          Malvina Hoffman statues -- study them with all senses alert --
          Bring them to life in their habitat -- what has made them what you perceive in the statue?

It's a glorious, exciting experience that first quarter -- People come alive totally -- they store up what they will use later in creation of character and environment --

Get it?

Letters from Alvina Krause: Teaching Acting, Greek Tragedy

Context
Before I started teaching at Northwestern in 1973 I had had only two other formal teaching experiences: for two years as part of my graduate fellowship in English literature at Loyola University I had taught freshman composition (1968-1970) and for one semester (fall 1970) I had taught sophomore English at Providence-St. Mel High School in Chicago.
While working with Alvina Krause in Bloomsburg (1972-1973), I had kept an acting journal. When I started teaching, I continued to keep the journal--a teaching journal now--sending it to her at the end of each week's classes.
The following is the note she sent with the first teaching journal installment--we hadn't discussed my continuing to send her the journal.
(I shall try to create the impact of her underlining and capitalizing and intensifying of the fountain pen script as she wrote. And I have appended photocopies of the note in her handwriting.)

Note
I take it you want this returned. The only comment I have: Excellent! Well done! Go on as you have started.

Of course your students are slow to comprehend: you are shaking the foundations of their acting training! And I won't say be patient!

BE IMPATIENT! 

Be impatient of stupidity, of ignorance, of indifference, of your own inadequacies! Drive ahead! Be compassionate of the pain, the struggle of learning, but never tolerate anything that impedes the process. Be compassionate for the human being who is driven by the desire to be an artist and who suffers in the course of his search; but be ruthless in holding him to the disciplines of his art.

Lead your class to understand tragedy in its truest form: Greek drama. Do not force your concept upon students, but lead them to discover on their own that the tragic hero, heroine, is one who has the capacity to realize fully the depths, the power, the death (all tragic heroes do not die physically--Oedipus) and to realize fully deeply with every fibre of his being the role he has played in bringing about that death. The Oedipus howl, cry, thunder, of pain when he totally realizes that he has brought about this tragedy--this horror, this inconceivable catastrophe, must fill the world with realization of man's stupidity, pride, etc. etc.

Lead them to understanding--of their own fate--
A teacher's responsibility is not to provide the right answers: it is to ask the right questions.

Letters from Alvina Krause: Teaching Greek Tragedy Fall 1973

Context
When I studied with Krause in Bloomsburg, we did not work on Greek drama. After I got the job at Northwestern, I visited her for a Greek tragedy infusion. The following week she sent me the notecards below. She sent the letter below some time into the first quarter of teaching (I think--she did not date her letters. On most, I pencilled the date I received them, but not this one).
During the breaks between every quarter and the summers of the first two years of teaching, I went to Bloomsburg to work with her on whatever it was I was supposed to teach the following quarter. Those visits and frequent phone calls during the quarter and the teaching journal I sent to her each week--and which she returned with lots of suggestions and comments and notes--kept me afloat the first two difficult years.

Letter
David,
Before I ever taught Greek drama I had an experience that revealed Greek drama to me. In London I rushed to the British Museum to see the original Greek sculpture on exhibit there. I found myself in this immense room--a long, long room. I hurried down the center of it to find the Venus. Suddenly at the end of the room I found myself up against something huge, gigantic, terrifying and there was the name "Venus". I froze. This ugly mass, this rough dark immense thing. The dream of a lifetime exploded. I turned and ran back down that long room. But at the door--thank God!--I looked back. And there she stood--the Venus I had known all my life: Beautiful! Magnificent! I almost wept.

Distance. Space -- revealed the Goddess I had known for so long. When I started teaching Greek Drama that experience was my basis: Space, Sculpture, Columns, the Parthenon-- Have you created this for your people? Our world is so crowded, so petty, so small. But in the Greek world where sculpture was a dominant art Venus could be magnificent in her colossal size. Vastness, distance is imperative. Do your people go to the shore of Lake Michigan and look across into that vast space? And do they believe that law and order prevail? Does a God really speak from the sky? And still Man had the capacity to stand erect and tall. Did you begin with the magnitude of Greek sculpture? The Greek dramatists have that same magnitude. the realism of magnitude, of distance, have you created it? There are no petty contortions in Greek sculpture. If there is agony it is colossal agony but it is real in its magnitude. And it is beautiful in its clarity. It is magnificent. Can your students create a sculpture of Medea in her tragic agony?
Stay with it! You are growing. Thank god you are not satisfied!

****

Notecards
GREEKS
Read Edith Hamilton's The Greek Way of Living. Make it your own thinking. Use it as background--out of what did Greek drama spring? The thinking of the Greeks--the social attitudes--
But remember: Bring the classics up to you today. Do not simply go back into the classics.
Antigone lives today
Electra
Oedipus
Edith Hamilton has a great essay on Greek tragedy. I no longer own it. Maybe John Van Meter can find it for you--or send you to the librarian who can find it.

Remember: Greek audiences came with their picnic baskets, their families--for the whole day--What must the acting have been to hold their attention? To grip them.
Medea and Women's lib--
Antigone and the Hungarian Youths who chose death rather than Russian rule--
Greek drama fell into what we know as a classic form but under the form was rebellion, passion, tragic anger.
Contemporary--the March on Washington--Nixon--Creon--etc.
Why begin the year with Greek Drama rather than with Albee, Chekhov--the bigness of it, releases the actor--Play to the horizon first, then come into the living room--Establish the size, the bigness, the all-encompassing theatre first--
Reach out first then, within
Greek drama has no walls

CHORUS
They are not chanting a formal, pompous statement which bores them; they are wildly insisting that the audience, the gods, somebody look at these terrible things that are happening. They are passionately concerned with the drama. Only by singing their screams can they make themselves heard and understood. Only by dancing their fears, their exorcisms, can they raise their reactions above those of a mob to a universal plane.

Each play has its own particular idea--each has its own style

Find the basic outlook on life--

The astonishment of living

SCULPTURE
Art of sculpture was part of daily occupation of Greeks--Never a museum art--
Embodied beliefs--stood as a symbol of their lives, beliefs.
Infinite simplicity a sense of fitness, rightness--
They put art above all living pursuits--not as propaganda--artist was a free agent, Then best is exalted, clean, never coarse, cheap, mercenary, sensationalized, unintelligible, distorted
Study Greek statues until they burst into organic life--
Lines, wrinkles, creases, blemishes are removed in the interest of the essential.

Note the:
Oppositions
Resistance to forces
Balance with infinite variety
Dance in Greek drama was an expression of ideas by means of human body actions: Character, passion, were expressed in posture and rhythms, movement

GREEK RELIGION
Not creeds--they were unknown. Poetry, music, nature, ancestors, history.
Gods were impersonations of powers of nature and of their own passions. Earth, sky, sea, fire, wind. Love. Wisdom.
Gods were Man's ancestors. Like men they fought, lived, bore grudges, spent much time on earth helping and hindering man.
Intimacy in relations between man and Gods--If a ship was lost man called Poseidon to account--In victory he turned to Athena
Religious life was part of politics not a Sunday affair.

Hubris, the sin of pride brought inevitable punishment
Sin did not involve conscience. There was no moral brooding
no traumas

Balanced man did not neglect some of the gods. Gods were jealous. An untended shrine was a portent of disaster.

CLYTEMNESTRA
Her eyes smoldered under heavily-lidded brows
She wore heavy jewelry--preferably gold
Her gowns were low-cut--and she had a bosom

She had the magnificence of mountains where storms had been
A Columbia professor said the above about Clytemnestra. Sorry I can't find the exact quote. For me it sums up the lady. Note the opposites: magnificence smoldering--Sex vs tragic depths

No cold Greek statue but a Queen who has suffered wrong.
Opening scene between Clytemnestra and Agamemnon: magnificent! He knows: to step on the red carpet is hubris--and Cly- tempts him to do it--The response of horror from all on lookers is a dramatic climax that shakes the world.

MESSENGERS
It might be wise to start your class performances with a messenger assignment for this epitomizes Greek drama. They can be done by man or woman. In this lib age: probably a woman.
There are people who say the dramatists used a messenger to tell the offstage bloody event because the Greeks could not take the actuality on stage. Bunk! The Greeks were as inured to violence as we are--or more so. The slaying was not performed on stage--probably--because without lights or curtain what would you do with the dead bodies? So the messenger was created: one who was capable of bringing the offstage tragedy on stage. And so the messenger speeches are great pieces of drama. A servant, a witness, a soldier--someone with the capacity to speak graphic speech runs, rushes in--horrified, terrified but the tale MUST be told. Underscore that MUST-- The tale is not idle gossip, is not horror for the sake of horror--it must be told to a particular recipient. The bearer of the tidings does not want to tell the gory details: he must tell them - it is imperative that Medea hear. She must be told. (Clamp your hands over the actors mouths, restrain them in every way until they get the imperative urgency and necessity) The roles must have been assigned to great actors for only great ones can achieve these magnificent climaxes. They take the drama right up to the final tragic moment--

Remember:
1. The messenger has been an eye witness of horror.
2. The messenger must bear the tidings to the character involved--
3. He (she) comes at break neck speed-
4. He is pulled two ways--back toward the horror, forward toward the recipient
5. He neither babbles nor does he orate: he articulates a horror of exactness with demanded explicity what he is almost incapable of telling.
6. The listener is active: Medea is glorying in the message; she demands every gory detail (But always remember she is no common bloody murderer--She is tragic in that overpowering deep, passionate love is in combat with equally overpowering hate that must revenge the incredible insult to love. Medea and Jason were two great lovers who gloriously sought the Golden Fleece together. At Corinth she is a savage alien -- Jason deserts her for a princess. Because of the greatness of her love she must strike-- Hate overcomes love) So: Medea glories in the message, exults in it, demands more, more, at the same time part of her is die ing in tragic anguish-- Love and hate are close kin, you know--
7. The messenger's entrance is forecast and built on stage. I think Medea is standing high upstage looking off right in anticipation. I think when she sees him in the distance she cries out, runs down in an exultation, hands clasped high "God and God's Justice" and swings up to focus on his entrance. I think perhaps in sheer exhaustion and fear he drops to one knee. Perhaps she advances on him with arms raised-- he has to begin his tale--

If the assignment is successful, if students get absorbed--perhaps you will go on with more Medea--
Then Antigone

LAW (hubris)
Man may not question the law of gods, the law of man--
Law is Law.
(Elizabethans sought the law within self)
Tragedy is always imminent when a law is broken.  Any line that refers to the breaking of a law should be followed by ominous thunder--

Letters from Alvina Krause: Teaching Beginning Acting

Context:
Alvina Krause wrote nearly one hundred letters to me before her death in December 1981. In the first years of my teaching at Northwestern, the letters often deal with concerns about teaching. This blog seems a good place to post those that might have value to readers. This one (date: 1974?) is a response to my telling her that the department was changing the title of the beginning acting class.
Note: She names specific people whom I have labelled "A", "B", "C".

Letter:
Changing the title of the sophomore year of acting does not change the content nor the direction nor the purpose of the course: the actor's total self as the medium through which character is created. What is character: the sum total of all that you are, all you have experienced, etc. since birth plus all your ancestors brought to your creation. You are you responding with all of your attributes to the world in which you live. Macbeth, Lady Mac, is the sum total of their attributes responding to their world Scotland. To create those characters in that world: walk across the Scottish heath, feel Scottish turf, stretch out your arms to those Scottish lakes: Loch Lomond, etc, tower to the sky in response to those mountains until you are fired by ambition to rule this land--building character is responding to the world you are living in; from sense response to this world comes desire, hate, fear or negative rejection. Create the world in which character (Hedda) lives, sees, hears, empathizes, etc.

You people who came to Penna to study acting at an advanced level were in trouble because you had missed or skipped sensory training. Let them label courses as they please, but you must teach what you know to be true. Agree to teach the basics as outlined. If questioned on your method explain: a teacher, if any good, is a creative agent; as all other artists must find their means of working with basic principles, so must the teacher find his way of teaching basics. Do not get imprisoned in regulations! Say "Yes" but be free to do what you know must be done.

Characterization is a most involved subject for it means the study of, the comprehension of human life. Never forget "The profession of the actor requires more genius, more knowledge, more understanding than any other profession whatsoever; for the profession of the actor requires the comprehension of all human life". Learn to listen to your associates, be quiet in response, but never be deflected from what you know to be true. Applaud genius wherever you find it--in student or in associate. Learn! Discover! The world and its people: perceive it fully. And trust your dramatists! They will lead you. Never get bound in by a little department of egotistical personalities. Seek out big minds like A, B, C. Remember: the value of disciplines is the freedom they bring you. Discipline for the sake of discipline is tyranny--avoid it! But discipline to achieve artistic freedom, ah, that's another matter!

Good luck!
AK

Mrs. Winemiller and Her Last Close-Up

Context

This is a minimally edited version of a comment posted by a reader (a former student) to my last posting “Prop Actor” July 22.

Question

I am working on Mrs. Winemiller from "Summer and Smoke". In the most literal sense, many scenes in the play involve props that evoke something much more than their most basic taste, smell, sight, sound - an ice cream, a beautiful hat. Her youth was made up of soft, draping fabrics and ice cream socials, brushed kid gloves and feathered and flowered hats. On some level, attainment of some echo of these things is all she has to look forward to - on another level I see them as symbolic of the small battles she wages every day to maintain a place and maybe control of her family. I am working with material things that made/make me happy - luscious bright scarves, lipstick (no, my lips are not naturally orange), a beautiful hibiscus bloom, etc. And I'm really trying to find the kinesthetic connection to my spine and hers. Because they bring her joy on several levels and take her back to a time in her life that was not bewildering and upsetting and lonely. Getting/winning these things brings back the spine that served her so well in her youth. I am a visual and tactile person. In this case I find it especially helpful, but no matter the case I hope always to be a prop actress too.

Now, I would appreciate your help. I don't see Mrs. Winemiller as "a crazy person". It's too pat for her to be nothing other than a mean old selfish crazy lady. Obviously she is not normal. But she is not "insane" in the stereotypical sense. She is intelligent and selectively lucid when needed. She was a beautiful, young belle once who was loved, pampered and spoiled to the extent that she became a pampered, spoiled adult with no life skills thrust into a life of responsibility. While she retreats into a childish state, it doesn't mean she doesn't love and want to be loved. In my opinion she spends much of the play trying to gain attention/love and to keep her family tied to her. Because what would happen to her if she were left completely alone? So she uses the weapons she has to thwart Alma's struggles to find her own love and demand her husband's attention. I don't believe she understands the real damage she is doing to her daughter. Her mind operates at a smaller level.

I am somewhat stuck on her final scene in the play, Part II, Scene 3. By this point you could say that she has triumphed. Alma's relationship with John Buchanan is not to be and further, Alma no longer occupies Rev. Winemiller's enforced pedestal - the one Mrs. Winemiller used to occupy. She and her father no longer share the "comradeship" they once did. She has re-established/cemented her place in the family circle and drawn that circle tighter around her. As the scene closes, I believe Mrs. Winemiller gets a glimpse of the real depth of her daughter's pain. If there is ever a time that brings back echoes Mrs. Winemiller's life with her beautiful baby girl (and all the sensory images that evokes), this would seem to be it. Those last two lines seem to hold out an opportunity - but I'm having trouble figuring out exactly what the opportunity is. . . I'm exploring several things - but it's not right. What do you think?

Response

Your thinking about Mrs. Winemiller, it seems to me, is clear and sound.

There is a young woman in you who can imaginatively become Mrs. Winemiller.

In your own life, when she/you suffered a devastating experience, she didn’t escape into “a breakdown” as Mrs. Winemiller did. Why? She/you had something Mrs. Winemiller doesn’t have--as you say, “life skills.” 

To create/become Mrs. Winemiller, then, eliminate your own capacity for life skills and animate the young girl in you who could have become a young Mrs. Winemiller.

So, yes, choose some “props” that will help bring back to life that happy, carefree, even pampered, young girl: Select a bright scarf to lift up the spine and let it soar a little and to free the hands and fingertips from practical concerns. Apply the perfect lipstick to put the finishing touch on a young girl who might then just do a 360 degree spin in front of the mirror. Or if that’s getting a little too grown-up, maybe look in the mirror and open your bright eyes very wide and give a great big lip-sticked smile.

Then simply apply these responses to the significant stimuli in Mrs. Winemiller’s life: Choose a chocolate/strawberry ice cream at an ice cream social where you are the featured attraction. Put on a plumed hat that allows you to release and display feminine energies in bouncing, airy plumes.

No need, I think, to get post-adolescent; rather, early energetic pubescent (“Alma’s got a boyfriend! Alma’s got a boyfriend!”)

As you say, she wants love and attention. (Alma comes into the room and Mr. Winemiller immediately turns to her. No matter that it may be to scold her. Do something to get him to turn back to you. "I want ice cream!") She wants to keep her family tied to her. (Do something that will make them keep you close: Take that hat when no one’s looking.)

As Williams suggests, she evaded the responsibilities of later life by slipping into a state of perverse childishness.

As you say, she is not insane, not just a mean old selfish crazy lady. Rather, a woman without life skills. If there is malice, it is the malice of the suddenly-neglected child who fights to win back daddy’s attention from the new sibling who has become the center of attention. (“Look at me! Look at me!”)

And all, naturally, in the manner of a girl of a certain social class at a certain cultural time in the South.

As for the last scene in which Mrs. Winemiller appears, you’re right to want to tie up her thread in the story.

I believe you should make “actor choices” based on what the play needs. You test the fitness of those choices against what the play asks of you. And you create only what audience members will be able to add up moment to moment as they experience the production.

These are simple obvious ideas, but I think actors often have a hard time with them because actors have a hard time actually putting the whole play ahead of all the ideas they have about their individual characters. Actors often have a hard time putting their characters in their proper relationship to the needs of the whole play.

Start with the whole play and let it be your guide:

What is Summer and Smoke about? What is its theme? State it in as few words as possible. And as simple and action-oriented as possible.

Then: What does the playwright say about this theme? Make a simple declarative statement in actor’s terms; that is, in terms of action, of things you can do.

Then: It’s a play. It’s drama. That means a world of forces (social, religious, cultural, geographical, etc.) whose conflict dramatizes the theme and the playwright’s idea about the theme. It also means individual human beings, each the manifestation of one of these forces, and all in opposition to one another.

In this play, the two major forces in conflict (what are they specifically?) are manifested/anthropomorphized in Alma and John. They are the characters in the play with the most complex characters. (What does that actually mean in actor’s terms?) And they experience the greatest change from the beginning of the play to the end. (Why?)

Any good work of art accomplishes what it needs to accomplish in the simplest, clearest way possible. For example, a good play has as few characters as possible.

Why didn’t Williams give Alma only a widowed father to live with? Why does the play need Mrs. Winemiller?

Answer this question as directly and as simply as possible—and notice, the answer has the whole play, not Mrs. Winemiller, as its central focus. This answer will help you answer your question about what happens to Mrs. Winemiller during the last scene she’s in.

The director should give Mrs. Winemiller one final moment during which the audience's attention goes fully to her. You get one action, one response, perhaps one realization, to reveal what the Mrs. Winemiller thread has added up to.

Think of it as the stage equivalent of a film close-up where her leitmotif contribution to the major theme is clinched. Her contribution ends with this close-up, though what the whole play has been dramatizing about what it means to be human will need several more scenes to achieve.

So the question isn’t what is happening to Mrs. Winemiller in this last moment so much as it is what has the theme of the play needed Mrs. Winemiller to be and what has that come to in this last moment. What force underpinning the world of the play is Mrs. Winemiller the humanization of and where does it stand in this last scene? Why is it/she no longer needed in the play?

And by the way, given all that: At what precise moment in the scene should the Mrs. Winemiller close-up come? Why must it not be the last moment of the scene?

Do you see what I’m trying to get at?


[Later note: The writer and I share follow-up comments below.]