Consciousness, Literature and the Arts

Archive

Volume 9 Number 2, August 2008

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The Association Process in Stanislavski’s “Threshold of the Subconscious”

By

Craig Turner

UNC Chapel Hill

One of the fundamental goals of modern acting technique is to create a shift in the performer’s normal self-awareness. This shift enhances concentration on the performance by reducing anxiety responses while strengthening control over movement and speech. Even more important, a shift in awareness provides the creative ground for generating unique and compelling character behavior.

Within contemporary actor training theories (Stanislavski, Chekhov, Strasberg, Hagen and Meisner), a key distinction between a mediocre performance and a more compelling one is found in the relative completeness and depth of the shift. It is a truism that there are “performers” and there are “actors.” The difference between the two lies in a willingness to relinquish the comfortable knowns of self-identity. The performer plays out of a personal presentation of self, as an interesting “personality.” The transformative actor, in comparison, substitutes the character’s sensory world for his own and is the model for modern western acting to this day.

Many Hollywood “stars” are, in this sense, performers. The reason we go to see Tom Cruise, Keanu Reeves, Cameron Diaz, and Catherine Zeta-Jones is because they are attractive and pleasing personalities.[i] Performers are not paid to change that much from their own voices, body shape and emotional range. Compare these performers to the “actors” such as William H. Macy, the early Dustin Hoffman, Robert Duvall, Helen Mirren, and Linda Hunt, whom we recognize as artists belonging to the transformative tradition. We look forward to their ability to show a greater variety of forms and qualities in their acting.

I hasten to add that both performers and actors may be attractive, famous and commercially successful people, and we can enjoy both styles immensely. The distinction I suggest here is that we can come to expect changes from role to role in a greater degree when speaking of the actors. Keanu Reeves may well be attempting to transform, but analyzing his body movement, his voice, speech and character behaviors demonstrates a comparatively limited palette from role to role. On the other hand, watch William H. Macy in the made-for-TV movie “Door to Door,” about a salesman with cerebral palsy, then compare to his work as the harassed and hapless car salesman in “Fargo” and you see a range that is truly astonishing.

In An Actor Prepares, Constantin Stanislavski first described the differences between the skilled actor’s transformed state and the performer’s attempt to “play at” a role: We see, hear, understand and think differently before and after we cross the "threshold of the subconscious." Beforehand we have "true-seeming feelings,” afterwards—"sincerity of emotions." On this side of it we have the simplicity of a limited fantasy; beyond—the simplicity of the larger imagination. Our freedom on this side of the threshold is limited by reason and conventions; beyond it, our freedom is bold, wilful, active and always moving forwards. Over there the creative process differs each time it is repeated. (Stanislavski, 1989, 282).

Stanislavski’s terms are intriguing, hinting at a way of understanding the transition between everyday consciousness to the actor’s creative state as a journey, a kind of initiation passage. Unfortunately, although he added numerous examples of training and rehearsal techniques throughout his work that support and enrich this transition idea, he was vague about the shift as it is experienced by the actor. As he said, “I can only teach you the indirect method to approach [the subconscious] and give yourselves up to its power.” (Stanislavski, 1989, 282)

But maybe we can directly understand this shift without losing Stanislavski’s creative sense of play and magic. Using recent insights into how brain and body operate, perhaps we can more explicitly understand what happens in this activity of creating a character. With these newer ideas, we can expand on Stanislavski’s intuitive approach as well as answer more specific questions about the actor’s transformational process as a procedure, such as: What is the threshold of this passage from self to character? How does the actor not only recognize it but experience it? What can the actor do to create the most effective movement through this passage from “here” [within himself] to “over there” [within the character]? Most importantly, is it possible to explicitly describe this place of transition and then to suggest how—within the more modern mind/body paradigm—it enhances artistic creativity?

Two modern systems concerned with state change are relevant to this discussion. One, Neurolinguistic Programming (NLP), which was created in the early 1970s, is especially interested in exploring subjective experience and beliefs. (Bandler and Grinder, 1975b; Grinder et al., 1981); (Dilts, 1990); (Andreas and Andreas, 1987; Andreas and Andreas, 1989) A significant part of NLP’s popularity in the teaching/learning and personal development fields stems from its interest in sensory systems and their relevance to state change.

The second relevant system is Stephen Wolinsky’s descriptions of Deep Trance Phenomena and how they underlie our everyday sense of self. His work in hypnotherapy (described in his important Trances People Live) offers useful markers applicable to the actor’s transition process into character state. (Wolinsky, 1991, 10)

Incorporating these elements can provide a more detailed and systematic description of Stanislavski’s “threshold of the subconscious.” Rather than a romantic notion of artistry and a vague “giving ourselves up to its power,” we can create a clearer framework for discussing the process of acting by understanding and describing the act of impersonation at a deep sensory level, a level at which the actor actually experiences it. 

Empathy and Transformation

“Becoming” the character is one of the most common clichés of acting. The basic question for nearly all systems of acting is how to achieve that identification. A common underlying thread is the belief that the actor must join the character in her world, “over there,” and to experience the emotions and sensations belonging to that imaginary place. The distance (psychological/emotional/sensory) between the actor’s everyday state and where the character exists defines the passage—and thus the journey—that must be traversed to achieve authentic transformation.

        Sir John Gielgud, arguably one of the very best English actors of the last century, provides a rare example of an actor who is articulate about this process:

Of course, all acting should be character acting, but in those days I did not realize this . . . My own personality kept interfering, and I began to consider how I was looking, whether my walk was bad, how I was standing; my attention was continually distracted and I could not keep inside the character I was trying to represent. In Trofimov (in Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard, with the Russian director Theodore Komisarjevsky) for the first time I looked in the glass and thought, "I know how this man would speak and move and behave," and to my great surprise I found I was able to keep that picture in my mind throughout the action, without my imagination deserting me for a moment, and to lose myself completely as my appearance and the circumstances of the play seemed to demand. (Hornby, 1992, 86) [Emphases mine]

This is a most important point not only to the actor, but to the audience that will witness the performance. Operating out of solely personal sensory distinctions will give the actor answers to the question “What would I do if I were Hamlet?” This is not transformation, it is selfishness. But operating out of the character’s senses (“over there where he exists”) can give the actor answers to a much more interesting question: “What would Hamlet do?” 

The actor’s movement to a characterization—the essence of what we think of as western, psychologically realistic acting—is mirrored in the way they actually talk about working on a character. Similar to Stanislavski’s “on this side” and “over there,” I have described the language elsewhere:

We hear actors say they “weren’t in it” [or “I wasn’t there” or that they “phoned that one in”] at a particular performance. This is no accidental or arbitrary linguistic framing. The great actor’s talent is to submerge (associate) so completely with the experience of the imagined character’s world that he (the actor) appears no longer to be “in himself”; he is “in the character.” Put another way, the dream body takes over the actor’s body. (Turner, 1996, 19)

My interest here is the place where, psychologically and physically, the actor “crosses over” into the world of the character and, in reverse, how the return journey is negotiated. What are the signs of such a crossing? How much does the actor consciously negotiate and how much is a by-product outside of conscious awareness? And since acting is an art, how can the process be repeated and shaped to meet artistic goals?

The divide between the actor and the character must be crossed—psychologically, physically and imaginatively—in order to achieve a true artistic imitation in Stanislavski’s scheme. The most powerful way we have to close such a distance is to empathize, which I will discuss in detail below. If I can empathize to the point where I accept the character’s sensory world as my own, I can achieve a transformation and identification into the world of the play. This empathetic response spurs the actor to move from self-consciousness to character-consciousness and goes beyond mere sympathy, which is a more general awareness of another’s situation.  If the actor cannot find a reason to empathize, then the ability to transform is severely limited.

But how does the actor know when she is “there,” when she has deeply empathized into the role? When her sensory experience shifts to that not normally her own. Out of that different sensory experience she begins to act and that is what makes the role. The change in sensory information creates the idea that identity has changed. To help us understand how and why this process to creating a character is accompanied by sensory shifts, we turn to Neurolinguistic Programming’s description of sensory modalities. 

NLP Theory: Representational Systems/Submodalities

Until recently, we had little understanding of how actors neurologically structure the imaginary events of a play, nor how those images are manipulated. Commonly, we hear vague appeals to “creativity” or “imagination” and often leave it at that. Even within the field of actor training, the emphasis in studying a text and a role is more often on the ideas and content rather than the sensory process that stimulates the transformation into character.

The work of Richard Bandler and John Grinder (Neurolinguistic Programming, or NLP), first appearing in the early ‘70s, was a milestone in understanding how humans internally encode, modify and change their subjective experience and it is useful in helping us understand how the actor’s created world of the play is constructed. NLP suggests that human beings respond to their personal maps of the world, not the way the world “actually is.” Bandler and Grinder derived this idea in part from Alfred Korzybski’s work (Korzybski, 1958) (encapsulated in the famous dictum, “the map is not the territory”) as well as from the ideas of Gregory Bateson, who suggested that information can be defined as the “difference that makes a difference” and who emphasized studying structure more than content. (Bateson, 1990)

Essentially, NLP suggests that we create our maps of reality—any time we think of anything—by using the sensory systems as a kind of code. This code is made up of patterns of visual, auditory, kinesthetic, and gustatory elements. Memories and generalizations we make about our experience use that code in various combinations. The enormous range and variety of encoding possibilities—created moment by moment—give us our subjective experience. Human experience is fundamentally a process of filtering the enormous amount of sensory information our mind and body receive every moment and then generalizing from that, consciously or otherwise.

Typically, the strength of an experience or memory comes from how it is encoded, not, strictly speaking, from its content. We do this selective encoding as a matter of course, usually out of range of consciousness. Although the actor uses this process for special imaginative and artistic purposes, NLP suggests that this is fundamentally a natural human process (what Elliot W. Eisner in the educational context has referred to as “forms of representation”) (Eisner, 1976; Eisner et al., 2002). As Joseph O’Connor and John Seymour point out,  “We re-experience information in the sensory form in which we first perceived it” and, additionally, “one way we think is consciously or unconsciously remembering the sights, sounds, feelings, tastes and smells we have experienced” (O'Connor and Seymour, 1990, 43).  Therefore, we do not act directly on “reality”—only through our perception of what we think is reality.

Within each sensory system, we make distinctions that particularize our encoding even further. I may think of “cat” by making a picture of a cat within my visual system, but from what kinds of details will that picture be composed? These details create distinctions that are called the "submodalities" of a sensory system. (Bandler and Grinder, 1975a; Bandler and Grinder, 1975b; Bandler et al., 1985). Submodalities are the qualities that any one sensory system can sustain. Within the visual system, this would be brightness, size, texture, color, dimensionality, shape and so forth. The auditory system carries distinctions such as volume, tone, pitch, timbre, nasality, shrillness and many others. Kinesthetic mode contains qualities such as soft, firm, silky, heavy, light, hot, cold and so forth.

So in our example of “cat,” we might visualize a charcoal drawing of a cat done with just a few quick lines, or a three-dimensional full-color photographic picture of a cat, or a film of a cat—and each of these visual constructions can have a different effect or “feel” for us. In each case, we have “cat,” but what is often missed is that the rendering itself—the submodality choices through which the rendering is created—has a profound effect on our response.

Changing the submodality distinctions for therapeutic purposes can reduce the negative effect of an experience. It allows the patient to get a different emotional response. For example, if a patient continues to remember a disturbing event in color, three dimensions and in an exaggerated close-up (e.g., in a phobic/anxiety reaction), he can practice creating a different response to that picture (and therefore the memory of the event) by, for example, creating a picture that is in cartoonish black and white with only two dimensions and in a tiny size with a border around it. Which sensory distinctions might create a more positive effect can vary from person to person, but by playing with submodality distinctions like this, training the patient to remember in a different way, some of the overwhelming effect that the picture installs can be reduced. In this way, personal history can be re-experienced and re-learned (at least to reduce its emotional power, not the fact that an event happened) to provide more useful outcomes besides continuous pain and suffering.

Submodality distinctions are also critical for the actor’s work. The actor translates what she reads from the play’s text—literally pictures of letters on a page—into visions, sounds and sensations that can serve as a dramatic reality. Using submodality distinctions, she can imaginatively create the information specifically mentioned or implied by dialogue and scene description—what are called the “given circumstances.” The circumstances “determine or condition our [the character’s] conflicts, can supply our motivations, and specify the nature of our actions” (Hagen, 1973, 158). For example: Where do scenes take place? What culture is it? Do environments change from scene to scene? What is the time of day, month or year? What are the character relationships stated or implied in the text? What is the history of the situation and the characters? What events are described or enacted? The givens supply a suggestive basic ground plan to the dream world of a play, but they must be translated into sensory-specific events to create the feel of real experience for the actor.

A text is not a play. The script can provide only the most basic givens. Nevertheless, the actor must start his dream there, from the playwright’s dream-text.

The play, the parts in it, are the invention of the author's imagination, a whole series of ifs and given circumstances thought up by him. There is no such thing as actuality on the stage. Art is a product of the imagination, as the work of a dramatist should be. The aim of the actor should be to use his technique to turn the play into a theatrical reality. In this process imagination plays by far the greatest part (Stanislavski, 1989, 54).

In addition to givens, there are character motives and needs that the actor’s own imagination must supply. The character’s sense of himself, his relationships, and his place in the play’s world, driven by a will to do or achieve something every moment (called “playing an action”), must lead to the text’s dialogue, making it seem not only justified, but inevitable.  Each word and phrase, the sum total of the linguistic experience of the script, is translated into submodality distinctions within pictures, sounds and/or feelings by the actor. This is an intense process and forms the basis for weeks of rehearsal work (producing what Bateson has called the “difference(s) that make a difference”).  (Bateson, 1990, 459)

The character’s sensory map and his/her submodality distinctions—like real people, unique to each dramatic character’s point of view—consist of a matrix of sensations that bring a character to life. In order to create a more authentic sense of onstage life and to capture fully the actor’s attention, these patterns will be necessarily complex. Once installed, they quickly motivate and engage the actor into an active presence. They are what shifts the play from linguistic abstractions on paper to as-if-real sensory events, from play analysis to a live theatrical event that engages the audience.

From the NLP point of view, Stanislavski’s entire method is based on the process of discovering which submodality distinctions within the actor’s sensory systems provide the greatest useful stimulus to his imagination. Such distinctions create a compelling character and completely engage the actor’s will precisely because they are so personally powerful and drive his neuro-physiology to move and think in congruence with the world of the play.

Sometimes only one sensory representation is necessary for engagement in the play’s world. (Like Proust’s “petite madeleine,” a smell or taste memory by itself can be especially powerful.) More commonly, however, the actor must take time, creating detail after detail, slowly building and layering the textures of every scene. Finally, as when water primes a pump, one final distinction sets off a powerful chain reaction, and the actor is “there.” In an instant, the actor is in a different place and body entirely and experiencing the world of the play. Stanislavski describes this process:

In the first period of conscious work on a role, an actor feels his way into the life of his part, without altogether understanding what is going on in it, in him, and around him. When he reaches the region of the subconscious the eyes of his soul are opened and he is aware of everything, even minute details, and it all acquires an entirely new significance. He is conscious of new feelings, conceptions, visions, attitudes, both in his role and in himself. (Stanislavski, 1989, 281-82)

The actor’s unconscious responses (“eyes of his soul”) to such conscious questioning and probing are quite powerful, and not always predictable. On reflection, the actor can usually point to the “difference that makes the difference,” that is, the submodality element that created a breakthrough in “understanding” the character. This variation in response to sub-modalities adds life, spontaneity and individuality to a performer’s work. This is also why two actors can have very different versions of the character Hamlet—and we can take great pleasure in comparing the two.

On the other hand, this individuality of response to sensory distinctions can make for maddeningly irregular outcomes. By definition, what we think of as “unconscious” (or other-than-conscious, depending on your model of mind) involves a different kind of logic to behavior, one that is not necessarily linear and usually more metaphorical (“Over there the creative process differs each time it is repeated.”). Actors end up repeatedly creating different sensory worlds and then trying them out to gauge their practical effects, but they cannot be sure ahead of experience where a sensory choice may lead.

The creation of the sensory world of the character is the primary focus of the actor’s work, not the creation of emotion. Modern actors are trained to create the circumstances that will bring forth the emotional levels of a scene, not to “feel things.” Actually, emotion is only a by-product of what the character is responding to within the imagined experience, not a goal. Therefore, it is no more possible to “be angry” than it is to “be a king.” What the actor can do is find the given circumstances of a scene from which anger may emerge (“I see the other character as an enemy”; “I hear his words which seem harsh and abrupt”). By selecting and rehearsing a series of submodality distinctions, the actor experiences shifts in state that create changes in observable behavior that will include emotional overflow.

There are days of hard work and experimentation through rehearsal that seem to trigger little useful motivation in the actor’s performance. Then there are those rarer days when a sensory sequence works very well, even startlingly so. As Bateson has pointed out:

The artist's dilemma is of a peculiar sort. He must practice in order to perform the craft components of his job. But to practice has always a double effect. It makes him, on the one hand, more able to do whatever it is he is attempting and, on the other hand, by the phenomenon of habit formation, it makes him less aware of how he does it. (Bateson, 1988, 138)

The actor must also work both with a director’s vision of the play and with the imagined sensory circumstances of the other actors. Balancing this complex web of dream states is time-consuming. It relies on individual discipline in generating possibilities and in teamwork to achieve a whole dream world.

We now have the first element of the association process, provided by the NLP insight. By focusing on a select sensory distinction—or through a small set of them—an actor can change state such that he does not feel or behave like “himself.” The sense of being someone else is what engages the playing of a script, creating a “curdling,” if you will, of body feeling/action/emotion, spontaneously extending beyond the sensory choices themselves and into unexpected other parts of the character’s life orientation.

As much as an actor’s technique relies on frequent and conscious adjustments, there is still a point where conscious control must cease. Any athlete will tell you that attempting to think through options during a game is useless, our conscious mind is too slow for such an effort. An actor in performance feels the same paradox.

At some point, transition from here (the actor’s everyday state) to there (the character’s world), control must be relinquished to a great degree. That loss of control often accounts for the feeling of performance anxiety felt by most people, and truth be told, even by many skilled and experienced professional performers. Eventually, however, that loss is reframed as a positive exchange for the possibilities of the character’s world, full of enormous potential creativity, inspiration and insight.

What we need is a model for that reframe, and for that we turn to the ideas of Stephen Wolinsky.

Wolinsky’s Trance Criteria

Stephen Wolinsky, a highly regarded hypnotherapist and scholar of meditative practices, has created an approach to hypnotherapy based on the idea of trances and their power to hold us in their grip. He suggests that trance states are created as a response to specific life circumstances as defense and a way to cope with difficult or destructive situations. Helping the patient see how he creates his own personal trances is the first step in reducing, then eliminating, their power.

Common, everyday trances occur to all of us. You hear a song from your teen years on the radio and suddenly, for a moment or two, you are back in time. But the radio changes the song and you come out of that trance. A simple trance might occur when you are watching a basketball game on TV so intently that you don’t hear a word your wife says. Another quite common trance is the one many people submerge into when they drive a car. Very few people consciously drive a car; most do it unconsciously while thinking about other things.

Part of the power of trances is due to the fact that they come and go unconsciously. The frequency of these lighter, transitory ones simply demonstrates how pervasive they are. In the case of everyday trances, as soon as we become aware, we can choose to stay within and have a nice experience, or we can pop out when we like.

There is another, more deeply dysfunctional trance that, according to Wolinsky, can form in childhood and generalizes throughout a person’s experience by adulthood. For example, in order to protect herself against abuse, a child may learn to freeze her body and breath to stop the unpleasant experience. Unfortunately, she may learn to freeze so effectively that she continues to shut off body feeling unconsciously even when she consciously seeks intimacy as an adult. The trance remains—embedded in mind and body—long after the original experience is gone.

Even an identity statement can generate a profound trance. As Wolinsky says, “In a nutshell, to be in a trance identity means that we have fused or become one with a set of experiences that defines how we view ourselves. Whether that identity is ‘I am a loser’ or ‘I am a competent editor,’ in both cases one’s experience of self is narrowed and circumscribed.” (Wolinsky, 1991, 17) The problem is not that the patient has created a category of behavior (“editing,” “losing”), it is that she begins to generalize the behavior into an identity and it becomes a limiting trance.

Each of us learns by experience—unconsciously—which kinds of trance we can create and sustain in order to cope. “Most adults have had a lifetime of experience in creating the kind of trance states that are most effective in handling their particular circumstances…”(Wolinsky, 1991, 20) In the therapeutic environment, removing the power of an identity trance gives the patient more choices in responding to life events.

...I presuppose that anyone who is in the grip of a complaint, problem, or a symptom has hypnotized himself or herself into a particular state of consciousness in response to some kind of experience which could not be processed at that moment…[I do not emphasize content, what I do emphasize is]...the trance process by which the person ultimately creates the symptom.(Wolinsky, 1991, 21)

Outside the therapeutic environment trance states provide a powerful creative vehicle for an actor’s imagination. Identifying with a character so empathetically that the quality of sensory experience changes is a kind of trance. We have numerous examples from non-western cultures of traditional ceremonies, dances and other forms of theatre that incorporate trance techniques and allow the shaman or performer to “become” an animal, character or elemental force.

How can we we know when a trance is present? Wolinsky says there are three core characteristics of any trance:

       1. A narrowing, shrinking or fixating of attention

Restricted attention is an abstract way of saying that a particular sensation dominates or frames our point of view. For example, a human face has a nose, eyes, mouth, chin, forehead, and so forth. Gazing at another person’s face, we can be aware of each of these parts in sequence or in gestalt. But what happens when we focus on just one element? We suddenly reduce our impression of another human. If someone’s eyes take our sole focus—and we remain fixed only on those eyes—they begin to seem bigger or more intense. At that moment we are entranced and may be unable to respond to other visual signals needing our attention.

In the case of the auditory channel we can become so “hooked” into the sound of a voice that we completely miss the presence of another sense’s input. Recent scientific studies in the dangers of cell-phone use point out this very fact.(See, for example, Scholl et al., 2003)

Normally, we shift quickly and smoothly from one sensory channel to another as we experience our life. But when a particularly powerful trance state occurs, sensory flexibility begins to operate in a much narrower band of consciousness. We are cut off from our inner, deeply functioning unconscious resources.

As Wolinsky says,

A symptom [here he means the presence of a trance state including the narrowing of sensory focus] can be thought of as the non-utilization of unconscious resources. When we are in a symptom state, we are not making use of inner resources that are normally available to us. This happens because the central characteristic of any trance state used to create the symptom is that it shrinks our focus of attention. (Wolinsky, 1991, 31)

This ability to narrow focus is first of all a basic skill for an actor. Part of the pleasure of a theatre performance can be attributed to the feeling that we are watching the characters without them overtly acknowledging us; we are “looking through a keyhole,” as it were. Like an athlete in a game, the performer’s focus must be limited to the circumstances of the playing, not on the crowd. Allowing the awareness to flow to the audience will instantly create behaviors not grounded in the dramatic circumstances. Additionally, and in a more advanced sense, transformation into a character demands a focus so narrow that the actor’s own personality will not intrude.

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

A trance gives us a feeling that the experience is happening to us, although we have actually created it ourselves. More importantly, we feel that it is not possible to alter it or adjust it or stop it. The loss of control is subtle, yet powerful. In this kind of limiting trance, we are more likely to use non-performative linguistic constructions, for example: “I can’t…”, “You always…”, “I shouldn’t…”. Typically, under the influence of a trance, we generalize, distort and delete sensory information in order to maintain the trance.[ii] There is a kind of inevitability in a trance state.

This inevitability becomes a plus in acting. A natural flow to a scene, as if it is happening for the first time and free of conscious manipulation, is extremely difficult to attain consistently, but when it does happen, the actors know it. Choices in playing a scene—often so hard won in rehearsals—seem to sequence effortlessly when in this state. Part of the satisfaction, even joy, of acting is the feeling of this playful state which seems so organic and natural. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has described this ability to lose self-consciousness in flow activities (such as acting) as not a loss of the self, “and certainly not a loss of consciousness, but rather, only a loss of consciousness of the self” (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990, 64)

       3. The spontaneous emergence of various hypnotic phenomena

Hallucinations are one kind of hypnotic phenomena associated with trances. Seeing things that aren’t there (called “positive hallucinations”) suggests how powerfully a trance can pull us out of actual reality and place us in another.[iii] But hallucinating can be useful. Architects and gardeners hallucinate buildings or flower beds not yet present. An inspiring leader hallucinates that “better tomorrow.” Actors too can use light hallucination for playing a scene. Hallucinating the castle at Elsinore creates a place where Hamlet can exist.

Likewise, feeling the freezing temperature of a scene that takes place in winter—while under hot stage lights—is due to the brain’s ability to create sensory responses that are not related to the actual environment (this is called “ideosensory behavior” and is another type of hypnotic phenomenon). A third type of phenomenon would be what is called “automatic behavior.” This has occurred, for example, when you hear an actor say that they “don’t know where that gesture or reaction came from.” What they mean is that they did not consciously choose it. Automatic behavior can feel quite magical in the context of acting.

Many actors describe their time awareness as so fundamentally altered that on-stage moments seemed to pass unusually quickly or slowly (“time distortion”—yet another type of hypnotic phenomenon). Wolinsky sees this as a consequence of our mind and body really being one thing:

It appears as though time and resistance are directly correlated: the greater the resistance, the more time is experienced as moving slowly. Without resistance, time “flies by.” This is another paradox of how we create our experience of time: we experience time as passing very quickly when we are enjoying ourselves. Why is this? Somatically, we are not resisting the experience——indeed, may even be welcoming the experience——and thus our muscles are loose and relaxed, our breathing, rhythmic and soothing.(Wolinsky, 1991, 176)

Hypnotic phenomena are the will o’ the wisp of acting: trying to force them almost always fails. It is usually better to pursue other actions that can be achieved onstage while letting the phenomena happen when they will. The phenomena are a by-product of the trance, not the goal.

This felt sense of the trance within the body is critical for the actor who must rely on self-monitoring techniques to maintain state. Athletes also rely on body sensations to monitor and tweak performance.(Millman, 1979; Huang and Lynch, 1992) The ability to notice subtle body sensations and then adjust to them in a useful way while performing in front of an audience is a difficult and yet most basic of skills. 

Within the therapeutic world, trance states—characterized by a narrowed sensory reality that seems to take on a timing and speed of its own while manifesting occasional hypnotic phenomena—create serious problems for the patient. The trance is a trap that prevents full functioning of the person. Within the world of acting, however, trance states are part of the most creative and powerful operations an actor can generate. Through trance, a character can be imagined and then lived.

The Actor’s Association Ritual

Now, with the help of NLP’s sensory modality distinctions and Wolinsky’s trance criteria, we can map out what I have coined in other work the actor’s “association ritual.” (Turner, 1996; Turner, 1999) By stepping into the character’s point of view, in “that” body, the actor’s personal body feel and point of view is fundamentally, and quite literally, transformed.

I use the term “association” here in the NLP sense: a change in the point of view from dissociated (the picture or sound is outside of you; you are observing it) to associated (you are now experiencing the event from within the scene, as a participant). As an example, imagine you are watching a roller coaster ride from about a half-mile away: hear the screams of the passengers, watch the tiny cars zoom up and down on the curves. Now imagine you are actually in the first car of the roller coaster as it hurtles forward and suddenly down, feeling the vibration, hearing the rattles of the rails and the screams of those around you, and seeing everything around you in a kind of blur. The difference in your experience between these two imaginings is the difference between dissociating and associating the same event.

Similarly, we can “sympathize” with someone by appreciating their living circumstance, but when we “empathize” with someone (associate) we believe we can feel what they are feeling, that we can share what it is actually like to be them. (Politicians remind us that they can “feel our pain.”) The critical distinction to be made here is that, for an actor (and not our “performer”), the ability to associate into a character’s body, senses and world provide a kind and quality of information unattainable from a dissociated state.

The association ritual begins with the actor seeing the character from the outside and ends with the actor living through the character’s awareness. Through the power of repetition and enhancement—as a ritual—this process takes over the actor’s behavior in rehearsal and performance. It is a kind of possession that replaces dissociated, logical thinking about the text (used effectively by directors or critics) with associated intensity and depth of physical feeling—what “feels right” within the  scene’s circumstances. 

Complete association occurs when the actor sees, hears, and feels the body and the imagined environment of the character as his/her own. Actually, then, we can say this sensory experience is not the actor’s but the character’s, from the character’s world. It is one thing to think about a character who is “paranoid,” this is a dissociated abstraction. It is quite another thing to have a powerful sense (or numerous senses) of what it would be like to experience paranoia (containing submodality distinctions such as “I can see eyes watching me everywhere,” “I can feel someone watching me,” or “I can hear the voices of people who are talking about me”). Character feeling, then, as a product of the association ritual, anchors itself in the bones, muscles and nervous impulses of the actor.

The Association Ritual Process

To begin the association ritual, the actor invokes the character’s visual and auditory presence. This is a result of repeated readings of the play’s text. The play’s descriptions of characters, the actions they take and the words they choose are all translated into pictures and sounds and feelings, the submodality distinctions described in NLP. Stanislavski cautions that the initial images from the first reading of a play can be long-lasting (they are “seeds” that can grow) and perhaps influence the final performance in unexpected ways.(Stanislavski, 1989, 3) Thus the actor must clearly and carefully note them so they can be monitored.

A play text is usually heavy with dialogue, but there are also other elements to consider. Descriptions of environments where scenes take place and any physical actions detailed can also spark imaginative responses. A script that notes “the character enters the room and walks to the bar” will of necessity out of the actor’s sensory imagination be filled in with details about that entrance. One actor may see, in his mind’s eye, a way of walking that bespeaks an attitude of hesitation in entering that bar. Another actor may notice a body part or mannerism that is unique. (There are the obvious visuals like Richard III’s humped back or the limp of Laura in The Glass Menagerie, but any character can have slight to outlandish physical characteristics that help to define a role.)  Or the actor may notice details in the environment of the bar, the colors, shapes, other characters and so forth that may be used to create a sensory context for embodiment.

It is important for us to understand how different this is from an ordinary reading of a play. Reading is a natural process of translating text on a page into concrete sensory elements. But at that point the similarity to what actors do ends. For most readers, the point of view is dissociated and varied. The average reader can engage with any character, or none, and enjoy the play from a more meta perspective, from outside the scenario as an observer. This applies even to the skilled insight of a critic or scholar and is a response to the overall patterns of the text, as seen from many angles. The search, in short, is for understanding.

The actor, however, is looking for the details that lure and intrigue in such force that he feels compelled to enter and participate. He wants to find an associated point of view existing within the world of the play embodied in a character. Using submodality distinctions of Neurolinguistic Programming with the text generates exciting and personalized details that can help do this. The character becomes more compelling as it becomes more specific to the actor’s own senses. Whatever insights are found, they must contribute to an embodied living out of the dramatic circumstances, not just an intellectual understanding of them. The actor, in short, searches for an experience.[iv]

Which details begin to dominate the actor’s conception distinguishes the skilled actor’s individual spin on the script’s text. A “performer,” by contrast, would take the entrance direction above as a simple motor signal: “come onstage.” The questions of “Where have I (the character) been?” or “What am I entering this room expecting to see/hear?” or “What aspects of this room attract my attention and affect me?” may not even occur to this performer. Thus the vast number of details that might be present in the way in which the character enters will be missed.[v]

It is instructive to observe sitcom actors in this regard, as they artificially move and pose for their comic line setups and deliveries. What we frequently see in these shows is dominated by the needs of camera angles played out from an external perspective, with actors turning out their torsos to camera rather than naturally facing each other, for example, and having to pause to deliver a line until they know their camera is “on.” The texts also tend to aim for a result in “laugh lines” rather than character-generated engagement in the given circumstances. (This is not to say that these performances are not sometimes humorous, or that there can never be creative acting in these shows, only that the way of producing a weekly television series makes it difficult to create deeper, more varied and interesting choices in the material.)

Actors work in different ways, often because their preferential sensory modes differ. One actor has a vivid visual imagination, creating pictures quickly and easily from what he reads in the play. Another hears the voices of all the characters in great tonal detail as they “speak.” (Stanislavski, 1989, 169) Eventually, more than one sensory system is stimulated as the preferred system reacts and builds momentum.

Any sensory information that might be considered negative can be re-framed in order to understand the positive context. Think for example of “bad” characters, or the challenge of playing a monstrous personality like a Hitler or Richard III. In order to play the role, the actor must construct the positive intention of the behavior and this starts with the sensory images chosen. Another example might be a character yelling at and attacking another. For the actor, the challenge becomes how to create a moment where what the character sees and hears stimulates “yelling and attacking” as an inevitability. There is no “bad” here, not in the moral sense. There is only the deep understanding of motivation as it is played out in response to sensory distinctions.

The style of a piece can also affect the sensory choices an actor makes. A farce character and situation achieves a different kind of plausibility and attraction if, for example, all the imagined colors of the scenes are richly saturated, or if the character is conceived as an animal or in an outlandish costume. (Notice how your memories of pleasurable, happy events are usually bright and pleasantly colored, and how your unhappy memories are often dark, dim and perhaps in black and white—this is partly how we encode our history and categorize it.)

In any case, the totality of sensory imagery—characters, environments, stage directions, director’s comments, additional researched material—establishes a goal for the association ritual, building the imaginary world as the target. These elements in various combinations stimulate the actor’s interest and emotional commitment. The actor reaches a point—sooner or later in rehearsals—where a critical mass of sensory detail is achieved. It becomes easier and easier to picture the character with the installed qualities. Eventually the character’s dream

body and world, full and rich in detail, stand in his mind’s eye, if you will.

As I have said, the actor’s desire to merge at this moment of association is a form of empathy. Empathy is the follow-on of sympathy and requires action. All of the preliminary study, research and refinement of sensory submodality details develops to this point where the actor desires to merge with the character, to embody the sensory elements necessary to function in the role.[vi]  The moment of association is at hand. The next step is the transformation from “understanding about” to “being in,” going from observing a dream to actually living in it. To use the cliché, the actor now willingly walks a mile in the shoes of the character.

Entering the Character

Initial moments of movement into the character are usually performed in private and are used to test various aspects of the character found in research and imaginative circumstance building. Minus the distractions of other actors and the rehearsal hall, it is simpler to perform the first associations in this way. The process model I suggest for this is a kind of “over and into” sensory experience, initiated and enhanced by Wolinsky’s trance criteria. That is, first the actor imagines the character’s situation (or more precisely the character’s body within the situation). Notice here one of the Trance criteria of a “narrowed sensory focus” on an imaginary image/sound pattern.

When the image looks and sounds right, the actor imagines moving over and into the character body/place, noticing what sensations arise. Some actors only imagine moving over while physically staying where they are. Other actors literally get up out of their chair and slowly put themselves into the character body and space they have created before them (in their living room or study).

Inhabiting a character body at first is done slowly and easily, rather like putting on a glove, with each body part in turn adding positively or not to a total sense of character. For example, one place to start with my visualization of Falstaff would be to inhabit the belly I see before me, that is to start with that body part awareness.  I might “slip into” that belly, imagining it as my own, and simply stay with that belly for a few moments/minutes. Imagining the belly as my own, I can sense how its weight, size and shape begin to affect the rest of my body container, perhaps noticing how my lower back hurts with the added forward weight or how my knees tend to lock under the strain. If the body part does not “feel right” (the criterion for this phase), then it can be replaced with a variation (bigger, smaller, different shape, etc.). Yes, a Falstaffian belly is an obvious choice. But I might as easily start from an idea of how Falstaff cocks his head to one side or breathes asthmatically to find my way into an association. 

What is interesting here is how many new sensations/psychological variations come from within the association exercise itself and not from the previous dissociated study of the character and the play. These sensations often arise in the moment, surprising and unannounced, as ideosensory behavior. At this juncture, the trance characteristic of an experience happening to the actor can be quite powerful and sometimes sudden, and at other times slow and deliberate. An actor cannot really know which details will be the most important until they are experienced, so there is an experimental feel to this phase.  Additionally, a sensation that seemed useful in a previous association rehearsal (i.e., it took the actor out of herself and helped place her in the character’s body/world) now seems lifeless and so is either enhanced or abandoned.

As body parts are added/taken away/enhanced/focused on, there is a kind of cascading effect, a growing sense of completeness in how the character body comes to life and is maintained. Imagine the difference between looking “over at” the Falstaff example with “his” belly and now “looking down” at “my” belly and watching it jiggle and move in and out with his/my breath!

This profound changed in viewpoint and sensory stimulation begins to acquire a life of its own and creates a living, active state in which change can occur. Now the third trance criterion—appearance of hypnotic phenomena—may happen. For example, the actor (within the character body) may suddenly “remember” an event from the character’s past that is not suggested in the text, but which “makes sense” while the association ritual is active. Unexpected and unplanned gestures or mannerisms occur (automatic behavior). A sudden image of the character’s mother or father may come to mind (false memories), creating a powerful inner state or frame of reference that influences the character’s living, expressive orientation. Positive hallucinations of the imaginary environment in which the character lives—now seen through the eyeballs and visual system of the character (shortsighted, astigmatic, color blind!)—are exciting and lend energy to the task.

Details like these create a kind of authenticity that the actor lives in and can act on and through in performance. They enhance the feeling of reality and unique ownership the actor must possess to make a character his own. Continued private practice builds on the sensory distinctions, simultaneously creating an even more specific character sense. If you watch an actor working by himself at this stage, you will see him try one combination after another of submodality distinctions. Ignoring the actual environment around him, the actor is fiercely focused on creating the world that will sustain the role.

Staying in the Character

It is important for the actor to establish some sign (termed an “anchor” in NLP) that reminds him when he is inhabiting the associated character position and when he is not. A physical anchor (a different position in the room or a particular way of standing or holding a special object) can be useful as a way to “mark out” whether the actor is “in character” or “out of character.” An anchor strengthens the stability of the created character. It also can create a kind of psychological framework that pulls the actor’s concentration away from distractions such as too much audience awareness, performance anxiety, and mind wandering from the performance tasks. We see many kinds of anchors in athletes who use various ritualized physical actions to help them focus on the game. Anchoring is powerful precisely because it is based on repeatable or sustained physical action linked to a desired psychological state.[vii]

Anchoring is especially important as the association process gains fluidity and speed. The first associations are very slow, sometimes taking minutes to complete. This slowness is important as a way to more precisely allow the body to “catch up” with the imagery and to notice even minute changes in position and feeling. But as the process is used and the anchored state becomes familiar and almost automatic, the time required for process speeds up considerably, now taking only seconds to achieve. This efficiency is very important when the actor enters full rehearsals.

As the association process gains power and velocity, the actor tests out the feeling of embodiment for its creative possibilities within the scope of the play’s action. Lines can be memorized more effectively and easily if the actor understands what prompts them. The actor now goes into scenes from the play more specifically, explores choices at length, walks about, speaks, imagines other characters. 

In addition to the associated state the actor can make use of a dissociated position. After working for some moments within the character position, fine-tuning various elements and their combinations, it is possible to emerge and look at the newly adjusted character figure. Information about the character can now be tested both within the state of the character and tempered with the occasional dissociated viewpoint.

Using the Associated Character in Rehearsals

Brief physical behaviors are linked to others, then integrated into longer chains of activities and then scenes from the play. Soon the actor is in rehearsals with other actors who are, hopefully, exploring and creating with their own association rituals as well. Scenes from the play are now practiced with others. Can the actor retain the feeling of association, that he is “not himself,” even with other actors in close proximity? Perhaps, at first, just two or three lines of dialogue seem to work. Problems found in rehearsals can be worked on still in private, but more and more the process must find its way into the group work. This stage tests the strength and depth of the association in the face of external factors that might disturb the dream of the character.

The presence of other actors becomes a help and not a hindrance. Each of the other actors is also “becoming” a character. The individual trances start to mutually reinforce each other and thus the collective association deepens. Actors respond, not to each other, but to each others’ associated state. In very subtle ways, the mutual trance corrects staging and behavior, and the sensitive director  will recognize this.

An actor can “come out” of associated state when she hears a director ask for a pause or stops the rehearsal to give notes. That is, the actor can stop the scene, dissociate from the character, receive the note and interact with the director and other actors as actors, then go back into character to carry out the suggested adjustments. However, it is also possible to listen to a director while remaining in character. This kind of processing strategy eliminates the actor as a kind of interpreter to the character, instead favoring the character’s ability to respond more immediately and authentically to new directorial input.

Finally, actors successfully negotiate whole scenes in associated character state. They have found their justification, deep feeling, and direction from within their imagined circumstances. In these moments, additional useful hallucinations can occur: the rehearsal hall transforms into the environment of a scene, sounds as voices or naturalistic elements can be heard (positive hallucination) or another actor is seen not as she is but as the imagined other character might be (negative hallucination). Time sense may distort such that “quick” moments in the text are experienced as “quick.” Ideosensory behavior (“I think it is cold in this scene and my body then actually feels the cold”) becomes automatic, other-than-conscious.

The associated body “possession” can surprise the performer with its rightness and speed of reaction to the text’s events and dialogue. Character thoughts seem to happen spontaneously and trigger responses appropriate to scenes, with less actor-conscious thought. Automatic behavior generates interesting new patterns of movement, speech and reaction, all appropriate to the character’s orientation. The actor feels she is in a different place, reacting from within a persona not her own. The living process of association gives the actor the feeling of “as if for the first time,” even though the fundamental elements of the text (dialogue, relationships, situational context) stay constant. Rehearsals are surprising forays into open-ended explorations of the character’s world, not mechanical work-throughs of logically justified intellectual material.

This is a process that often takes the entire four to five weeks of a standard theatre rehearsal period to produce. As Stanislavski’s work shows, it is consciously repeated activities that eventually result in unconscious behaviors. The association passage from self to character has been negotiated. What was once a personal, internalized dream of a character in a play now has weight and shape and will use the actor’s body, mind and sensory resources. The kinesthetic understanding of the dream character (“feels right”) has replaced the initial sensory representations (the “looks right” of pictures and the “sounds right” of sounds from a dissociated position) about the play’s world.

By associating so completely with the dramatic character that he feels literally in the character’s shoes, the actor has a true experience performed for the pleasure of an audience. This is the meaning of Stanislavski’s “threshold of the subconscious,” and we can track the special physical and psychological changes that make this happen through sensory distinctions and trance criteria—essential elements to the process I’ve described here as the association ritual. By “giving up” themselves to an imagined creation through this powerful transformative mind/body process, actors anchor a powerfully resourceful state of creativity and stability.

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