B: Martin how would you bill yourself, what would you call yourself?

M:  Primarily I would say an acting teacher and an acting coach. Teacher meaning teaching in classrooms and coaching as in coaching or facilitating a performance, for film and television and for theatre.

Coaching actors to help the actor and director facilitate a performance.

B: So what would your definition of acting be?

 M:  Can we change the word definition to ideas? I would talk about my ideas because to say definition implies that I have it all worked out.

B: Ok

M: ...if we start off with the description of acting as the ability to behave naturally or realistically in imaginary circumstances, this is the first step.

The second part could be the importance of the actor`s ability to commit to the experience of the imaginal world, let’s say, the ability to commit to the intellectual, emotional and physical experience that has been drawn out or unlocked from the text, (if we are talking about something that is text driven, text based).

Have you got any questions, I mean, definitions definitions, whole books are written on definitions of acting so.... people like Robert Cohen etc.

B: I really wanted to know just where you’re at with it.  What do you mean by commitment?

M: Energetic commitment I think, the ability to jump in the water and get wet. I’m talking in metaphors; do you want me to be a bit more scientific?

B: Not necessarily, I want your language...

M: Okay

B: ...how you explain things.

M: Okay, I think one of your questions should be what are my ideas about great acting.

B: Sure.

M: As an actor I want to be an experiencer, okay, so when I commit to the experience, the commitment is one without self-criticism, self-judgement, it’s one without result obligation. It’s the ability, to work from what I call a place of readiness, or a true creative consciousness that isn’t dealing with concerns about how one’s performance is being received at the time, or whether or not the way I’m speaking now is sounding this or that way. In order to do that I guess I have to embrace some kind of paradox. I’m totally aware that I’m acting because if I lose that awareness then I’ve ceased to act and I’ve started to do something else. So, the paradox of being aware that I’m playing or acting, coupled with the sense of the believability of what I’m doing exists as an important part of the recipe for great acting.

I must immerse myself in the imaginal world. I must commit to the experience, albeit imaginatively. Great actors do this it would seem without prompting. For most of us we need some guidance and direction towards the trust of our natural impulses to play and to make believe.

Above all great acting is great story telling.

As an actor I must be the storyteller from inside the story. I must appear to become part of the story as I tell the story by experiencing it.

Our goal as actors is to be believable. I love the kind of work that draws me in, when an actor draws me in to the story, to what they’re doing I want to embrace them and say thankyou for telling me a story and not trying to tell me how good you are at story telling.

When we cease to think about how an actor is acting, and we cease to think about pretty costumes or the lovely set, we cease to be removed from the work that’s going on. Like any good work, any good painting or poem, any good novel or film, an actor’s work is the same. We experience the art and do not think about the craft until well after the story has been told.

You know, great acting draws us in, we cease to process it through some sort of intellectual filter and we start to experience the act of acting, or we start to experience the story or what the character is going through.

 So, it’s whatever that is, it’s whatever that bridge is that takes us, if you like, from our left to our right brain, or takes us from the observing arm’s length analysis of what’s going on, into being caught up in the story.

Great acting and the definition of acting and the question, what is great acting, can be summarised as that which draws us in, that which can attract us, effect us, enable us to have some kind of experience.

You know, when I read a good novel I’m not sitting back saying “gee that was a well constructed paragraph”, or, “the values in that sentence changed wonderfully from positive to negative”, or “wasn’t the syntax brilliantly balanced”  blah blah blah.

Great acting is...the stuff that just draws me in and takes me along with the story, gets me caught up in it and wanting to know what happens next.

The ingredients that go towards creating the simplicity, the truth, so wonderful, so magical.

B: Can you think of any examples of when you’ve actually had this experience with theatre, TV, film, whatever?

M: As an actor or as an observer?

B: Well maybe both.

M: I’ve asked the question to a lot to different actors, what is their greatest moment or what are their greatest moments in acting, what does it feel like, and invariably the metaphor comes around to something akin of flying or being set free, and I would say that my great experiences of acting are when I’m set free from the form I’m working in.

The form could be the form of the blocking, the form of the text, the form of all the obligations of character, relationship, emotion, etc. Through all that form, somehow there’s this sense that the …, let’s call it the unconscious, takes over and there’s this feeling of just being set free and it’s akin to flying.

In the film Billy Elliot, Billy is asked at the end of his audition as he turns to leave, what it’s like for him to dance, what dancing’s like for him, he says “it feels like electricity and it feels like, you know, I’m flying or I’m free of myself”. (or words to that effect)

I think that this is an artist’s window into the universe; we taste the infinite nature of life. We get this little glimpse at what the experience of infinity might be all about. We find the unconscious life force and as it flows through we get out of its way.

That’s also about our great moments in acting...in terms of the experience of the actor, it’s somehow a transcendence, I think a lot of work, in terms of craft, craft building, in order for a... yes, it’s like building foundations or platforms from which to leap and there’s this great act of faith, this great act of courage when one is acting, to jump off and not try and control the next moment, not try and control outcomes. And so we’re constantly talking about letting go, letting go of result , letting go of this, and letting go of that. We come back to: To let go is to find, to find it is to let go.

B:  Another paradox?

M: Yes. So, this is something that comes up often talking about what we’re searching for in great acting. There’s a sense of something happening for the first time, there’s a sense of the impulsive, the spontaneous, the intuitive. And there are moments where, sometimes in films, for example, you really get the feeling that something’s been quite constructed for your benefit, either through the editing, or the directing, or the acting, it’s been constructed, it’s kind of pushed at you a little bit and by and large it works and you get it, but there are moments, real moments of inspiration...I’m just trying to think of now where...I’m looking up and seeing Jodie Foster in Taxi Driver on the poster and I’m thinking of Jodie Foster in Contact,  when she looks out at the universe on her way to wherever she’s going and she just looks at…, the wonder of this amazing sight of the universe and she says the words “they should have sent a poet” and in that moment she’s experiencing, The actor is experiencing some kind of bliss, some kind of...she’s not faking that feeling, she’s experiencing that feeling of bliss and I believe it and it affects me and I get caught up in that.

And I bet if I asked her at that moment was she engaged, involved and committed to her imagination she would answer a resounding yes. I bet she could probably tell me how she worked for that experience. But she probably couldn’t remember what she did. (exactly)

I would say that great acting is also the ability to embrace the contradictions in what it is to be human. The ability to find the force, the emotional life that’s driving up through a character but also to be able to understand what’s suppressing that force. So if the need is to have the affair and that’s the upward motion and the downward motion is to stay loyal to the wife, there are contradictions and conflicts, great acting is about understanding those things and being able to embrace them and bring them into the work.

Great acting is about being able to embrace the vulnerability of humanity and having the courage to use this vulnerability without fear.

Great acting is about trusting the unconscious and letting it flow through you.

The big question in all of this is HOW to do it. The WHAT is the easy part.

We all know what we want to see (give or take) but the $64 dollar question is always going to be HOW to get there, HOW to do it. And that is the magic of great acting, we as the audience never know. Like a good magician who doesn’t reveal.

The challenge of the great acting teacher is to unlock the HOW.

Which is where we pick up the next part of the interview.

B: So Martin how do we take steps toward great acting? …

M: This is always going to be the big question. It’s one thing to talk about what is great acting and what is great writing and what is great work, what is great art, but the big question for teachers and directors, anyone who is creating work or helping actors, fascilitating actors, to create great work is how. How do we do it?

Before we talk about the HOW we should mention WILL. We must find the will and the desire to search for it.  The search may take a lifetime. And even when we find it we may only see glimpses and it may still elude us. I think the story goes something like this; one night Olivier’s performance in Othello was the most amazing thing anyone had ever seen, there were standing ovations etc and when some people came back stage to congratulate him he was weeping. They asked him why he was weeping because he had done such an amazing performance, he said that was all very well but he didn’t HOW he had done it.  In the search for the HOW we might also ask, how to make it repeatable, and that is certainly a huge subject in itself.

B: Perhaps we can address that later?

M: How long do you have? OK back to the how.   I think the how changes. The how is relative to each person’s experience of the world but there are basic building blocks or basic tenets, if you like, that need to be addressed.

We must recognise and articulate the muscles required to act; this becomes the part of the HOW that we refer to as the instrument. So we exercise and strengthen such things as our imagination, our impulsivity, our confidence, our vulnerability, it goes on and on. Then we move on to the craft process of HOW.  How do we create the character obligation, the emotional obligation, and the relationship obligation in order to be believable?

This is where we must embrace all the possibilities and work out for each of us on the day what is the tool we need to use or explore right now. Do I concentrate on an inner monologue to give me a strong inner life, do I prepare with a specific sense memory exercise before I go on, and do I work from the inside out or the outside in. If I have an understanding and an expertise in using the tools then I am secure in the process that I use as an actor, and this becomes my HOW.  Too often the HOW is determined by the director we happen to be working with because we are not yet secure in a process that comes from our sense of independence.

B: Could you explain this, I have heard you mention security of process before?

M: Without some security in our own process the HOW will always be hit and miss. We need to create a security of process so that we look at acting like a carpenter would look at building a house. There are certain tools that we need, there’s a certain understanding of how to read the plan, there’s a certain understanding of the basic way that the foundations go down first and the walls and the roof, and then there are things filled in, and which trades come in, when, you know, in terms of some kind of sequence, before we start seeing the house. And the same thing applies for acting. And what we often want to do as actors, because we have this tendency to want to achieve a result, we skip process, we don’t put down a solid foundation, we go very quickly to try to get some kind of shape or thing called a house, but it’s often not firmly constructed through an understanding of process.

B: Would you say that you’re work fits into a certain methodology?

M: Instead of talking about different schools of acting or different methodologies, one thing that every methodology would agree is that there needs to be a methodology, there needs to be a process, there needs to be a beginning, middle and end in terms of how to construct something. I mean, I think that’s right. If it isn’t what are we doing, just hoping for the best?

B: So with your work at Studio For Actors , what would be your aim in the process, in the training of actors?

M: A sense of independence. I think that’s the single most important goal in any training. It’s like when your kids leave home, you want them to be able to survive out of the nest. I think that’s got to be it, pure and simple. So that whatever it takes, whatever it requires to gain a sense of independence, so that I can go to an audition, I can do a job and have a sense of my craft, an understanding of what I need to do.

Unfortunately what sometimes happens is an actor will throw away their training and resort to old habits because they panic and don’t trust their process. Trusting our process also becomes an important issue.

We should think of actor training like top-level athletes. We have a basic training where we build the basic skills and muscles required then we have ongoing and regular training, to keep tuning our muscles, to keep honing the craft.

B:Could you talk a little more about independence?

M:  I feel it is our responsibility as actors to continually strive towards a state of independence. Both in a craft sense and in a creative sense. We must not simply sit back and wait for the phone to ring or for the director to answer all our questions. We must have the tools to present our work and be open to guidance or direction. We should find ways to express our work like other artists who sit in studios or workrooms. We should find like-minded people and form ensembles and practise our art.

B: Within this sense of independence you talk about is there a formula or a process that you have your students apply to their work? I mean it is one thing to talk about ideals, but is there a practical aspect here you could mention?

M: Yes there is and this is the drum I am constantly beating.

We have a three step program, you know, get yourself ready to work, then get the stuff ready for the scene and then go explore the scene, and call the exploration of that scene a rehearsal and later it can be a performance.

You don’t try and explore the scene before getting yourself ready, before getting yourself ready to get ready, you know.

So, it’s like an athlete, I don’t go down to the track on the training day, whip off my tracksuit, put on my spikes and belt down the hundred metres. I wouldn’t dream of it because I’d be in danger of pulling a muscle. So, to get ready for that hundred metre dash, I stretch, I train my muscles, I go to the gym, maybe I do certain exercises that actually strengthen specific muscles in my legs or abdomen or whatever, then I do general fitness work, then I practise running the hundred metres with and without competitors, I might just practise running the hundred metres with some guy holding a stop watch, but all this is building to the day when I have the performance or the race and I have all that experience behind me of my instrumental preparation and my material preparation, you know.  And I think that it’s that basic thing that we need to have, that the students here need to really embrace, is that they don’t just get given an audition one day and then go down and do it the next day and all they’ve done is just constantly tried to run a hundred metres with that audition.

They must actually take the time to get themselves ready to get that canvas clean, to get instrumentally open, ready to receive, ready to explore, and they’re not rushing to have the end result, that there is some kind of process of exploration, and that’s the beginning of the how.

B: Do you think that there are any obstacles in achieving this aim within any given structure, like a course you run?

M: Time is always an issue because you plant a seed and you’ve got, you know, three years with a student or one term depending on what they sign up for. So in the time you have you’re watering and fertilising that seed and it will grow to a certain height or certain strength and with more time, you know, in the perfect world, it would grow stronger and taller. So yes, time is always an issue and again it’s all about what to introduce, when to introduce it and how much to introduce, how much to stay with that thing before you move on...that’s always a big question, so there are limitations, but then everywhere you look in life there’s limitations so you work within the limitations you’ve got.

B: From listening to what you’re saying about independence, do you think that you’re training actors here according to a particular aesthetic or are you training people for all the possibilities that might be out there?

M: I think that the aesthetic is down to the individual vision that a director might have in one sense, though it’s hard to talk about the aesthetic of the style of acting. I think in this day and age the two things the actor needs to have or to be able to differentiate is the kind of obligations that occur in theatre because of the nature of the rehearsal process and the fact that a performance is repeated again and again. So that’s a different kind of a muscle, and okay, maybe we can call that an aesthetic in that sense because there’s an interplay with the audience and every night is different because the audience is different, so there’s the awareness of that scenario. And then with television, let’s say, there’s a different kind of muscle, where there’s not always a lot of rehearsal time, things are shot fairly quickly, so you could if you wanted to say that’s a different kind of aesthetic.

Then you have film, which again, within film you have films with low budget, films with high budget and so there’s different...in some films actors get rehearsal and in some films actors don’t get rehearsal, pretty much their audition is their rehearsal.

The best learning is doing it out there but I suppose the principle elements of the aesthetic, if you like, or the methodology, is that our aim as actors is to be believable and if I’m believable then, I’ll go back to what I said earlier, I draw you in, I involve you in the story. As an actor I’m a storyteller, the way I tell the story is I live in the story, I don’t live out of the story pointing to the story in third person, I live in the story and I live my part of that story, so my role, my goal is to draw you in.

Now the paradox is that I can’t concentrate on drawing you in because then I’m not actually involved with what I’m doing, I have to trust that will be the outcome of truthful involvement, engagement, with other actors with the story. So in a broad sense my methodology, if you like, is to find ways in which an actor can be believable. Now believability on stage and believability on film some may argue are different, some may argue are the same and that’s a whole other debate. We can go into it if you want but I think because of the way theatre is structured, because it is a repetitive performance, sometimes with a small intimate audience and sometimes with a really big audience, there are certain requirements that an actor has to be aware of which will, if you like, modify the performance. So a camera three feet away from me and a microphone dangling above my head allows me to generally be a lot more intimate and that kind of intimacy is not always possible in theatre. It’s a bit of a challenge, let’s say, in a truly intimate moment on the stage with a big audience, to find the level through the choices and the stakes that I have so that I can be understood and appreciated from the audience’s point of view and still create a level of intimacy. It’s quite a different kind of muscle, yes.

B: And do you feel that you are able to help actors in training cope with those muscles?

M: I think that’s the kind of thing that they learn to appreciate through the act of doing, you know, by being on stage and coping with the rigours of that kind of performance and coping with the rigours of being in front of a camera. You can definitely talk about it and make people aware of it, you can practise for it. Doing it is best.

B: Talk a bit about how you teach actors to cope with an audience or a camera?

M: Mainly I would say that you can’t play to the camera and you can’t play to the audience because if you do that, then you take yourself away from where you need to be involved. You know, if part of your brain is constantly telling you to speak up or be louder, then you’re actually involved with the action of pleasing the audience, you’re not involved with the action of changing the other character, changing the other actor.

The way that you make yourself understood by the audience is by the choices you make, what are the stakes you have chosen ...of course there has to be an amount of stagecraft, but my stagecraft has to become like a martial artist, it has to become intuitive. I can’t be worrying about my basic moves in battle. As a sportsman I can’t be worried about “oh yes now how do I kick the ball again? I stretch my toe”, you know, “how do I catch the ball? I have to open my hand”. I can’t be thinking about that, the reactive stuff in battle, engaged in the performance, all that by then has to be intuitive. Now how much of that is intuitively learnt in three years for example in an institution is again another question. We are always dealing with the issue of time.

I think it was Laurence Olivier who said the first job of an actor is to turn forty, and it’s really about building a wealth of experience.

B: How do you think your experience, your background, training, all of those things, how has your life actually affected where your pedagogy is at this point in time?

M: I think it’s totally informed it because my pedagogy is synonymous with some kind of personal philosophy and I think the two are very closely linked, especially to do with the subject of acting because acting is about life.

I feel actor’s have a responsibility to continually expand their awareness and understanding of life. To expand their spiritual horizons and I would say that’s the job of any actor. It’s the same thing to be constantly expanding an awareness of the human condition of life, of one’s self. So the pedagogy, if you like, is inextricably linked with that kind of philosophical position.

The two are not seperate and that’s where the work is personal.. I can’t keep myself at arm’s length from my work. When I write a poem, when I sing a song, when I hear, you know, great singers singing to me, they’re not singing just purely functionally or instrumentally, their passion, their heart is tied up with their work, so pedagogically, my heart, my passion has to be tied up with what I’m doing.

Therefore the way I view the world, my philosophy of the world is also caught up in that. So coming from training as an actor in my early twenties, being frustrated by some kind of eclectic approach to acting where we were never really given process, we were given little capsules of experiences, which did build some experiential awareness but ten years after that I was finding myself very much a hit and miss actor. There was a real hunger to ask questions relating to process.  How could I create a deeper understanding of process, how could I learn more about my tools or find what tools were out there that I didn’t yet know about.

So the life experience has been one of conscious and unconscious searching to expand awareness and to broaden horizons and I’ve discovered that is also tied up with the question of acting, how to build a better actor, how to be a better person, how to be a more aware person, how to be a more aware actor, they’re really just, you know, synonymous.

B: Do you find then that you are actually aligned with particular philosophies, methodologies, teachers?

M: No. I would like to be able to say spiritually that I’m a Universalist, if I was asked, you know, what’s your faith, I’d say it’s faith in life, it’s a Universalist view that essentially... I’m saying that acting muscles are the same no matter who’s acting or what methodology you’re being taught, the essential muscles are there. Like in any kind of sport, you know, the muscles are essentially there, there are certain ingredients that go in every activity...martial art, any kind of creative expression, there are certain ingredients that are synonymous.

So I’d say that philosophicaly I’m a Universalist and therefore if I carry that over to my actor training I have to say the same thing. So, you know, I am influenced by Stanislavsky, Bennedetti, Meyerhold, Meisner, Strasberg, Hagen, Chekhov, Adler, and more, they’ve all got a view or a hold on certain aspects and some are articulating in a way that I can maybe identify with or resonate with more easily than I can with another but essentially they’re all talking about elements. I think you can boil it down to what are the elements that are running through the methodologies, what is the search, what are all these great teachers trying to find, trying to articulate? So I’d like to think that I have a Universalist approach but I’m probably going to be branded as a Method based teacher because I go into… I do look at the instrument of the actor and I do get people to reveal themselves and to open up, to access their vulnerabilities, because I feel that that’s the stuff that makes us human.

If we sit in the social self, if we sit in the protective side of things we don’t examine depth, and all the great actors and all the great performances involve contradiction, involve the complexity of being human which is to do with vulnerability and the protection of that vulnerability. So if I don’t know and trust and don’t have the courage to source and access my own vulnerability, then I’m staying on the surface and I’m never exploring the depths of the ocean, I’m never discovering, you know, the vast richness.

B: There’s a term that you used in discussion just then, it’s a term you have used throughout, this term instrument. First of all do you use it in you class work?

M: I use it for convenience and sometimes it seems a little clinical.

What do we mean by instrument? I suppose we could say it is the stuff that makes us who we are, the stuff that makes us unique, so in this world we have the experience of being human and we see the universal human experience, loss is loss, love is love, grief is grief, but we all have a unique relationship with those emotions, we all have unique relationships with ourselves, we all have a unique expression and this is the wonderful paradox of life.

So when we talk about instrument, we’re talking about our vehicle, if you like, our canvas, because in acting we’re not removed from our work, we are our work, our work isn’t a pottery on a wheel, or, you know, a canvas on a wall or words on a page, our work is us, so if we were talking about painting I would say the instrument would be the canvas, the palete, the colours, the brushes, the palete knife, the instrument is the stuff on which I work and the stuff that I work with. So instrumentally as an actor, my canvas, if you like, is the truth of who I am, ... the colours I paint with are my emotions, the timbre of my voice, the ...the crude experiences, my history, my conditioning, all these things inform the shades and the complexities of who I am, they’re all components of the instrument.

Now if the painting, if the canvas is creased or if the canvas is dirty or if the canvas isn’t taut, then I need to stretch it or clean it or size it to make it so that the paint doesn’t soak through, if the brushes are dirty or if the pencil isn’t sharpened I need to sharpen it, so the same way with my instrument, I need to find out where my colours are muddy...so if for example I have, let’s say, a resistance to ....the feeling self, that I’m much more socially comfortable with my intellectual self, then I’m, we could say, instrumentally restricted because I’m functioning intellectually, but I’m actually locking away or hiding, or protecting the part of me that is the feeling self. Instrumentally I need to find exercises and improvisations that help me become comfortable with my feeling self.

In the human experience, I need to feel comfortable or less afraid of that feeling, that vulnerable self, so I actually can practise being vulnerable, I can actually practise talking about my feelings and exposing my feelings to classmates or to someone else. You could say that vulnerability is a muscle that all great acting requires. And you could say that that is an essential colour, you know, that if I try and paint without it then I’m going to be limited. If I can’t go to that part of the spectrum because I am not comfortable with it...the instrument is limited.     I talk about it through the metaphor, because we are separating, the canvas, we are separating the thing on which we work. This is sometimes quite difficult for actors because we confuse our work with our instrument, they are connected but they are not the same. We can work on the actor’s craft and we can work on the actor’s instrument.

 We need to be able to talk objectively. So if we talk objectively about the instrument we can separate from taking things personally.

Example; if I am holding tension, lets say fear, fear is a big one, fear of failure, fear of judgement, fear of criticism, fear of being made to look silly, fear of an audience, fear of all these different fears, and if I’m holding on to those fears then I’m using energy to contain them, which takes a certain amount of...mathematically it takes away a certain amount of energy that I could be putting into my work. So, instrumentally I need to be made more aware of what is it that I’m afraid of, it’s through a process of naming and exposing and revealing, becoming more in touch with these fears and letting them go in order to channel or convert that energy, which is inhibitive or protective, in order to channel that energy from protective to creative.

B: So in a way you’re saying that being able to objectify it by calling it the instrument you allow the student that little bit of space from it?

M: Yes.

B: It’s a safer way to go about dealing with those fears, those tensions?

M: By identifying my experiences, my fears, I find I’m not the only one in the world having them, “Oh wow”, you know, “I see you’re in the same boat, that doesn’t make me feel quite so awkward about it”.

For all sorts of reasons we get very protective, one way we have of protecting ourselves is through control, you know, we want to control outcomes, and yet we know that the great art is discovered in the moment. We hear that phrase being in the moment all the time.  What does being in the moment mean?  Instrumentally it’s about being in a place of trust, the trust to be spontaneous, the trust to react, according, within the obligations laid down. Instrumentally I need to feel uninhibited, unrestricted, instrumentally open, dropped-in, centred, all the terms that you hear across the board in dance, in voice, in martial arts. You know, you hear reference to that place of what I call coming back to the place of readiness, it’s the point where I am, if you like, calm and centred and I can move in any direction from that point, I’m not self-restricted, self-inhibited.

It’s an ongoing daily process because things happen in our lives, we get hit over the head with something one day, and we are carrying this big bag of stuff on our shoulders. In order to play a role do we want to take that bag in with us, or do we want to discover some way of being able to put it down, clean that part of the instrument, and let go of that.

Maybe we can’t always resolve every issue, more often than not we can’t, but there are ways of identifying the energy that’s there, say protecting us from a hurt, or dealing with a hurt or dealing with a fear, or some kind of anxiety or energetic constriction. I want to be able to identify that, be aware of it and let it go in order to put as much of myself into my work as I possibly can. So that’s what we mean when we talk about instrumental readiness, instrumental freedom, and instrumental openness.

You know we see it, we see when someone gets up in front of the class, we can see tension in their upper body, or their neck is taut or their jaw is stiff, or there’s some kind of controlling, physically we see it, some kind of controlling mechanism, which is dealing with tension or the anxiety of being in front of the class. It’s a controlling, protective mechanism and it’s expressed physically and we perceive it as a kind of tension and energetically if we just sit with it we can actually feel it in ourselves as the observers. So much is communicated all the time and we take these hits from people all around us, and sometimes don’t even acknowledge them, that there is this level of discomfort that’s sitting in a person.

Now if I’m feeling really afraid of getting up in front of the class or whatever, typically my chest might be really tight and I might be holding on, my shoulders are sort of slightly held, and I’m asked the question “how are you feeling?” I say, “I’m feeling fine thankyou very much, I’m feeling fine, really good you know”, and now we can just tell straight away that that’s not actually what’s going on. Energetically we know, but as soon as the actor says “oh I’m feeling a little afraid of being up here, now I’m feeling a little tight in my chest, I’m feeling a little aware of my shoulders holding on, I’m feeling a little stiff in my jaw, and now that I’ve said that, oh I feel relief, I feel a little better”, and we can immediately see that in the physical body all that tension has actually dropped and funnily enough the voice centres more deeply in the body and all of a sudden we feel more relaxed and calmer observing this person.

Why? Because they have named and exposed a fear, an anxiety that’s been emotionally controlled and physically controlled has been released by naming it, so instrumentally that energy is converted, I’ve released it, I’ve released the thing that I was afraid of, I’ve exposed it and, what do you know “phuff”, it evaporates. “How do I feel now? I feel much better for saying that, I feel much freer, I feel much more relaxed, I’m now able to look at you more directly, I’m now getting a deeper sense of who I am, I feel open, I don’t feel so protective anymore”. Now do I want to work from that place or do I want to work from a place where I am protecting myself? I know the answer to that question; I want to work from a place where I’m confident, energetically confident in who I am as a person, not feeling I have to protect myself from judgement.

B: So is that free for you?

M: That’s free.

B: Because you have also spoken about the sense of freeing as in flying.

M: We talk about that in terms of the craft process, of taking off into the imaginal world but before we can go there we need a free instrument. For example; the feeling that I no longer need to protect myself, that I have the confidence and the courage to expose my humanity for all its glory, my uniqueness, I need not be ashamed, I need not be concerned with judgement or criticism, here I am, and it’s an extraordinary situation because instinctually, if we’re on show in front of hundreds of people our instinct is to protect ourselves but we can’t work within the walls of protection if we are to play range for what the character, the role requires. It requires us to be able to explore the human condition that does involve vulnerability and does involve protection, you know it does involve the complexities, so we need to be able to find that.

Before we get onto what is free in terms of the craft, free in terms of the instrument is also about being attractive and having presence.

If I am energetically centred and  dropped-in and in my body and not needing to protect myself from judgement, criticism, anxiety etc, I become a lot more attractive. Attractive in the sense of I attract your interest, you being the audience, I draw you in. So, and this is the thing, this is the part of the work that I think a lot of people have missed or not focused on enough because it goes in the bag of... too much like therapy, or too much like psychology etc, etc, but I think it’s simpler than all of that, it’s just about acknowledging our humanity and having the courage to share our feelings and having the courage to face our fears and it doesn’t take a highly trained psychologist... for one person to ask the other person “how are you feeling?” It’s a really simple question, you know, maybe I am oversimplifying it to some extent but that’s really where it starts, it’s about acknowledging our humanity and having the courage to acknowledge our humanity rather than to hold onto things.

Put it this way, the more I’m holding energetically the less free I am, the more I’m holding on to control the more I’m keeping away from myself, and the irony is that the actual letting go process, the letting go of concerns and anxieties and the letting go of needing to control the outcome is actually strengthening, it’s empowering.

 But the instinctual part of us says “no you must protect yourself from this intrusion, these people’s eyes and their possible judgement and the more I protect myself the less inviting, the less attractive I am. And there’s, the paradox of it, that’s what, so I actually need to find the courage to be vulnerable, I need to find the confidence to be human, and that’s what the great actors have, they have that ability.

Whether they know it consciously or whether they just have it, that’s the ingredients of presence, I think freedom, freedom to be me, freedom to be unique, freedom to share my experience of the world with you the audience, that’s presence, that’s, yes, that’s wonderful.

Freedom in terms of what I meant by free to fly, it’s when...the sum exceeds the total number of it’s parts. The art that conceals the craft, it’s the letting go of the result, it’s trusting my rehearsal process, however short or long it’s been, it’s trusting the moment of now, it’s trusting choices that I have made.

B: You mentioned something earlier about being instrumentally open or free I think you called it a place of readiness. How does that apply to this sense of presence or atractiveness that you’re taking about?

M: It’s completely connected. If you draw three circles, and place each circle at the point of a triangle, we can say that one circle represents self-conscious behaviour, the second circle is result-conscious behaviour and the third circle is habitual behaviour. Now our job in actor training, and this is the instrumental side again, is to become aware of where we tend to be, especially when we’re under pressure, under the pressure of doing a piece of work.

Okay, so self-conscious behaviour could be things like I’m criticising myself as I’m working, I’m worried about what you’re thinking, I’m worried about how I’m blocking Result-conscious behaviour is to do with worrying about the next moment, controlling the sound of my voice, worrying about the next line, will it come or won’t it, you know, just being always ahead of myself, never really enjoying the spontaneity of now.  Habitual behaviour is all the stuff that I do...that I’m unaware of, I do it because that’s the way I’ve grown up or that’s the way I’ve been conditioned, you know, I tend to shuffle from side to side when I do a piece of work, or rock backwards and forwards, or tense my shoulders, or fiddle with my fingers.

Habitual behaviour can be physical, it can be emotional, I have a habitually...when I explore a role I go into assertive and aggressive, that’s what I do habitually and so what I’m doing by doing the instrument work, I’m becoming more aware of the tendencies, I want to be less result-conscious, less self-conscious or habitual and/or the combination of all of those.

If I move towards the centre of the triangle at the centre is true creative-consciousness, or the place of readiness, where that freedom exists both instrumentally and in terms of my artistic expression when I, if you like, let the power of life flow through me, when I tap into something and let it flow, I get out of it’s way, I get out of it’s way intellectually, I just get out of it’s way.

Arthur C. Clark used to say that when he got into the groove of writing his novels, he would read what was coming next on the typewriter with as much fascination as his readers, which to me is exactly the thing of allowing that creative flow-through, just allowing it to come out. And I think when actors find that, that’s what they mean by the feeling of flying and the sense of great presence and being attractive. It’s just glorious.

B: What would be, in the ideal world, your ideal teaching, training environment?

M: It would be getting a group of teachers together that shared a philosophy; they would have specific areas of expertise, in both the instrument side of the work and the craft side of the work. It would be where the work was rigorous and joyous, where acting outcomes could be explored with the freedom of time to discover process.

With any kind of actor training, if you try and do everything then you’ll probably do nothing very well so you certainly have to be selective of the sort of areas that you would focus on.

I think in good actor training is to create a solid T. So you have a breadth of understanding and a depth of experience. The T isn’t too short stemmed and very wide, so you haven’t tried to, you know, basically cover every approach or every genre or every style, and not given the students depth of experience in any of them. By the same token, you don’t just want to focus on one thing and give them massive amounts of experience but their range is narrow. It’s an ongoing debate; it’s an ongoing negotiation with the methodology and the institution.

Again it’s time, the ideal is time and I’d probably say four years not three within an acting academy for example. I’d say a good combination of passionate, committed, dedicated teachers, teachers that are connected to the industry, not divorced completely from it, that are somehow still involved, so their awareness is expanding and changing as the industries for which the people they’re training changes, and to give people as much experience as possible. Leading back to the essential philosophy, which is about empowering the independent actor.

B: Thanks Martin. Is there anything else you haven’t mentioned that you would like to add?

M: Yes. I wanted to articulate my passion for the actor to embrace, for our training to embrace form and content and to understand that they support one another.

If you say the content is my emotional life and what I’m experiencing and putting into it, that’s all well and good but without some kind of structure, without some kind of form there is no definition. If it’s water, it just splashes everywhere, so if the form is the glass and the content is the water it’s very useful when it’s in the glass and I can drink from it, but if the glass smashes and the water goes everywhere over the floor it’s very hard to get that satisfying drink.

The form comes about through an intellectual process or an intellectual understanding. There are deductions made from the unlocking of the text, there are decisions, artistic decisions made from a director designer point of view, from a DOP point of view, there are artistic decisions made which require or obligate the form...the lighting designer, everything. There are different elements that speak for the form. The actor’s job is to understand and embrace the form but not work only for the form because then this becomes intellectual and dry, so it’s like the glass with no water in it, it’s a great glass but it’s not really quenching my thirst because there’s nothing in it to drink.

I can admire the glass till I’m blue in the face and I think some artistic endeavours, that personally I haven’t related to over the years, have been to me all about being intellectually interesting.

Now, if I’m just working with content only, then I’m going to hear words like indulgence and you know, soppiness, or crap, or wank, but the content is the human experience, it’s the part that lifts the words off the page to make them mine. It’s the part that personalises the experience. So I have to be able to personalise the experience, I have to be able to have the courage to put my unique interpretation, my Hamlet is different from that person’s Hamlet, that’s the way it is, the form is the same, the content is going to be different because, you know, Branagh’s Hamlet is different from Gibson’s Hamlet, they’re different, they’re universally connected, we understand the universality of the things we’re striving for. You could say the form even changes because one director’s form is different from another director’s form, essentially the words are pretty similar depending on the edits and the cuts and that sort of thing but the form generally provides the structure and Mel Gibson provides his truth, his content, Branagh provides his truth, his content and we resonate differently with those performances, we have our aesthetics, we have an aesthetic appreciation of varying degrees, but I think it’s encumbent on us as actors to be working to embrace these two, to bring the yin yang together, to bring these two together and not be dominated by one or the other, to actually allow the whole to be greater than the sum of its parts, that’s what I was trying to say before, yes, so that whole, that wholeness is much greater than just one plus one, you know, form and content, it becomes elevated, it transcends, it goes into the place that is infinite or universal or free, or inspired or spontaneous or intuitive.

It goes into that realm that is not quantifiable, is only experienced, enjoyed, felt. So it’s that constant, and in actor training it’s our responsibility to deal with both sides, to deal with and to develop our deductive powers, develop our ability to unlock text, to find meaning, to find the universal meaning, to discover the organic intricacies that might be woven into the text that on first, second, third, fourth reading we didn’t unlock but on the fifth time we tried, we explored, we found something that was there in the text, and to bring that off the page, to have that experience is the content that we bring.

I wanted to add that as an important part of training, actor training, and actors in general, to develop a passion for unlocking content by appreciating form, so there’s a kind of a flow, I call it a creative flow. You might start with form, then you experience, you test the waters, you explore and discover the content, which then feeds back into and enriches the form and so it goes. It’s like a maybe a DNA spiral or something that keeps ascending. So you start with your deductive observations, you explore for this in rehearsal, you discover a bit more about what’s in the text, that informs your next exploration in rehearsal, and so it goes. And form enriches content, content enriches form etc, etc, and the two are vital

B: Thanks Martin.

©2001

Martin Challis is an actor, director, acting teacher, acting coach andfounder of The Studio for Actors Brisbane Australia. He is a co-director of the Ensemble Works Theatre Company and a teacher of acting at the Queensland University of Technology Creative Industries Acting Program. Martin has been developing his voice as an acting teacher over the past decade gaining a reputation as a man with a passion in search of great work.

Bernadette Pryde is a voice teacher who has worked at several Australian drama schools. She is currently the principal voice teacher at QUT creative Industries and is completing her MA by research in actor training. Bernadette conducted these interviews with Martin as part of that research.

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Winter 2001