Q: How did you start out in physical theatre?

A: When I was a teenager I was very lucky to have worked with Dan Hurlin who is a extraordinary performance artist, writer and teacher. We didn’t talk in regards to the work as a genre like ‘physical theatre’ or ‘realism’ or ‘absurdism’ we just worked very physically. He taught me that acting was sweaty and theatre didn’t have to look like real life. As I got older and found myself wanting more than what my Stanislavsky-based work was giving me, I started searching for other styles that paralleled my work with Dan, which finally brought me to the Dell’ Arte International School of Physical Theatre.

Q: What is physical comedy and what are it is distinguishing factors?

A: Physical comedy is telling a comedic story with one’s body insteaad of relying on words. Words may be used, but the actor doesn’t rely on the words to get the story across. It’s slapstick from commedia dell’ arte, the old school Jerry Lewis kind of thing. Things need to be huge in physical comedy. Most physical comedy these days is seen in cartoons, everything from Tom and Jerry and the Road Runner to the feature films like “Shrek.” One of my bestloved movies is “The Triplets of Bellville” which is an animated film that came out of Europe a few years ago. There is a little dialog in the film and the bodies and movements of these cartoon characters are so filled with meaning and visual stimuli in their performance it’s amazing. It’s an interesting study in how physical theatre or performance works and how you tell stories, physically, as opposed to verbally.

Q: What is Commedia Dell’arte?

A: Commedia Dell’arte is a Renaissance Italian form of theatre and the term means the “comedy of art.” It was frequent in the 15th and 16th Centuries when troops of actors performed traditionalisti stock characters, for the most part in three-quarter mask. The traits of these stock characters were intimate to the audience, the style of acting was improvisatory, but actors didn’t get started cold as they would in an improv game these days. The gist of each peculiar scenario was standard, but what incisively transpired was improvised. As these actors had worked together for years and knew each other’s work and characters well there was a platform to work on, in a literal sense and figuratively. They performed wherever they could gain an audience’s attention – whether it was on a platform or wagon. They didn’t draw a highbrow audience paying a large total of dollars to see them. They had to pull in an audience and then pass a hat to gather coins.

The influences of Commedia are here today. You may see it in The Marx Brothers. You’ll even find Commedia’s stock characters and plotlines in Shakespeare’s comedies such as “Love’s Labors Lost.” All art forms either alter with the times or die off, and in a sense, that’s what’s happened to Commedia. Very few companies still work in the Commedia style, but I think actors may learn a great deal from working in that style. I’m excessively affected emotionally regarding an modern Camp Shakespeare at the Shakespeare Theatre Company for teens this summer that I will teach. We’ll work with a group of teenagers on improvisation, mask, and physical comedy and formulate a Commedia play.

Q: What distinguishes Commedia Dell’arte from other forms of performance?

A: Commedia Dell’arte is fifty percent physical and fifty percent verbal. Because it’s in mask, it has to be fabulously physical, a lot of of the actors might be tumblers or dancers. Broad physical gestures are integrated with witty speech so that actors aren’t standing around talking or expressing their emotions through little gestures.

There was no such thing as a black box theatre for the duration of the Renaissance; audience members couldn’t watch an actor’s deep pain or joy through the actor’s eyes. There was no – lights down on the audience and spotlights on the stage. This was the time of lit audiences. Finding ways of amplifying, communication to the audience, what actors were doing or experiencing was necessary. There were no programs for the audience; they couldn’t read in advance that this guy was playing this or that character. The things that we take for granted now didn’t subsist then.

Performers had to fight to get an audience in the Renaissance. They had to draw them in. If they were performing outside on a wagon, they had to get people’s attention, they had to work with the audience. There were 2,000 persons in the Globe. It was a very dissimilar audience than we have today. People walked around selling oranges and beer and if audiences couldn’t hear, see, or perceive the actors or story, they could lose interest and their attention. Today it’s easy to keep the attention of the audience because there’s not one thing else to look at. The lights are out and the only place to look is straight ahead. But that wasn’t always the case. There were a lot of beguilements for the audiences, they were checking out what the royalty was wearing, or who was sitting with whom, or looking for an individual to go out with. It was all very social.

Q: What regarding the stock characters?

A: Stock characters are archetypes – the old miserly man, the cunning servant, the braggart soldier, or the young lovers. They’re with us even today – we may see them in the Simpsons” and they’ve been part of theatre for years. In commedia, each reputation had established costumes, mask, signature props, poses, stances, actions, plot function, kinship to the audience, kinship to other characters. When the audience saw the guy with the long, pointy, droopy nose, wearing tight trousers over skinny legs, they knew it was Pantalone. He was the misery old man of high social status. Arlechinno (Harlequin) was a servant, the spry one always looking for food. Each stock characters had signature lazzis

Q: What are lazzis?

A: Lazzis are the running gags, stunts, and pranks that were performed by the characters. Arlechinno might have a bit with regards to a fly that is bothering him that he tries to catch and eat. It was another way to physicalize and display reputation to the audience. The stock characters may reach beyond the conventional fourth wall, as we recognise it.

Q: What do you mean when it comes to reaching beyond the fourth wall?

A: Today, while actors understand that the audience is there, the characters, themselves, don’t. Realistic drama and realistic acting has a give and take with the audience, but it’s subtle. Good actors may sense what’s happening in the audience and work that, but it’s much more overt in these earlier forms. When film started, and with it the beginning of realism, that distinction wasn’t made. Characters then performed with an cognizance of the audience. In Shakespeare, it’s very clear at sure moments that the reputation is talking to the audience, and a lot of people believe that it’s actually happening even more, it’s just not as evident. Several Shakespeare companies take everything to the audience and actors make a lot of eye contact with the audience. Shakespeare and Company in Massachusetts and the American Shakespeare Center in Virginia approach their productions this way.

In clowning, audience contact is crucial. It’s a give and take amid the audience and the performer in a very direct way. Some people balk at that, like it’s the audience participation thing, but it’s dissimilar – it’s not regarding dragging an individual up on stage and making them do stupid things.

There are dissimilar worlds of clowning ranging from the established circus clown to the existentialist clown like with “Waiting For Godot.” Clowns have a sort of resiliency. Tragic things may occur around them, but they bounce back, they are resilient, not one thing crushes them for too long. They’re not childlike or stupid, but there is a naivety to them because the regular logic of our world doesn’t inevitably apply. Clowns tend to be very physical and often a heap of of them don’t use language at all, so they have a universal form of communication.

Q: Are there skits or are the actors just performing improv?

A: Both, the actors have their clowns’ personage that they’ve devised and they might have an outline of what happens in their skit, scene or production, but how they get from each point may change a lot each time they do it. It’s similar to improv theatre today, the same attainments are being employed – it’s with regards to taking in and responding to what’s given to you on stage, whether it’s from your partner, or the audience, or the chair. Anything may be your collaborator in clowning, whether it’s a humane or inanimate object, and you take vantage of that. In regular theatre, if your shoes squeaked, you’d undertake to figure out a way to diminish it, whereas in clowning, you exploit it. You exploit your own faults in clowning. It’s a challenging way to work. The history of clowning is big and you may find clowns in most cultures. In America, we have a very definitive circus clown archetype – the Bozo or the sad hobo clown of the circus – with heavy makeup, floppy shoes and the squirting flower. But clowning doesn’t have to be regarding walking on stilts and juggling. 500 Clowns out of Chicago doesn’t wear red noses; they paint their ears red and are sort of scarier looking. Bill Irwin, who is in all likelihood the best clown we have in this country, doesn’t always work in a red nose. He did when he basi started out with the Pickle Circus in San Francisco, and he started constructing a theatrical motion that he called New Vaudeville with shows such as The History of Flight and Largely New York, which integrated much of his clowning skillfulness and physical comedy.

Q: Why don’t we see more of these types of performing now in Washington?

A: There’s seems to be a reticence here for dissimilar forms of theatre. Street theatre and busking is illegal. In other cities around the world, there are global buskers’ festivals, where all sorts of street performers do awful things.

The growth of Fringe festivals has permitted artists to explore and experiment with dissimilar types of performances, and the Festivals concede the audience to experience theatre in ways they hadn’t thought of or known about. In this city, humans say there’s no audience for dissimilar kinds of theatre, but I’m not sure that’s true. Especially when you look at the success of the Capital Fringe Festival, and companies like Synetic. Other cities seem to foster physical theatre better than this area, but I have hope for DC. Chicago, San Francisco, and Philadelphia are in all probability the three biggest areas for more physical theatre, including puppetry, mask, clown, and multimedia and everything in between. Some of it’s crap and a good deal of of it’s astounding and a lot of it lies in amidst – that’s great. We want all of that here, too.

Q: Would you talk a good deal of in regards to your background and training?

A: I went to undergrad school in New Mexico State and studied with Mark Medoff, the playwright, who was the head of our program, and I got my MFA from Catholic University in Washington, D.C. While in college, I interned at The Actors Studio in New York. That was before James Lipton and the institution of the school. Back then, it was just actors in a room attending their American method of acting sessions twice a week. It was for the duration of that internship that I figured out that the traditionalisti approach was not for me. That’s not to say I didn’t be grateful for it; there are a lot of brilliant method actors, but I knew I’d never be one of them. All I knew at that point was that method acting and realism were not for me, but I didn’t know what was. Luckily, in graduate school I was introduced to a vast array of modern, nontraditional, nonrealism theatre which I genuinely liked.

I was always fascinated in Shakespeare because it is so big and expressive, and like galore humans around here, I toured with Shenandoah Shakespeare in Staunton, Virginia. Everybody knows Shakespeare’s good, persons get that, but before I worked at Shenandoah Shakespeare, I didn’t actually understand why Shakespeare is so exceedingly good. When you’re speaking those words each day for assorted years, you find so much more in it. You find out how aweinspiring Shakespeare actually is and the Shenandoah Shakespeare style of working, I think, helps illumine the play and the text for both the actors and audience. But even then, I still knew that there was this whole other world of performance that I wasn’t in truth tapping into.

I later worked in a company in New York called the Collapsable Giraffe which is sort of a devised theatre group or ensemble. We would be in a room, have galore inspiration or text and just create. Most of the people there, besides me, had worked or were still working for The Wooster Group in New York, which is a theatre which uses new forms and proficiencies in formulating new and conventional works. The Collapsable Giraffe and The Wooster Group share a similar esthetic that I find interesting and exciting. From there, I trained at the Dell’arte International School of Physical Theatre in Blue Lake, California, where I was taught clowning, commedia, and overall physical theatre.

Q: What was that training like?

A: It was great, but it was difficult. They were hard on us students and we in all likelihood collectively cried more than laughed for the duration of training. We laughed too, but we all separately and collectively cried a lot. One teacher was scary. At times, he yelled and threw tennis balls at us while we were on stage – with the best of intentions. He wasn’t attempting to injure us – his goal was to keep us in the present and reactive on stage. Some persons tried to stay in reputation and dodge the tennis balls and that made him throw even more balls and yell even louder. As actors, we were so deeply rooted in our method of acting and training that even in clowning we put blinders on and refused to react to outside things. In clowning, that’s in truth what it’s all about. It’s being present and taking in what’s happening in the space, whether it’s in the audience, in the air ducts, or a squeak in your shoe. We all experienced feeling of annoyance at being hindered or criticized in attempting to find that unexplainable place of wholly living in that clown personage. We wanted it so badly, and the more we wanted it, the more it seemed to evade us and the more frustrated we got. We didn’t speak on stage for months because their faith is that the motion comes primary and the voice comes after. Like children, we learn to walk before we learn to talk.

Q: What’s so difficult with regards to clowning?

A: Clowning is in regards to going to a very scary place. A lot of persons in clowning pick what they find most humiliating when it comes to themselves and exploit it. When you in truth push on those places you avoid, it opens you up to a lot of new and stimulating places and freshness. You’ve got to have a thick skin and be actually resilient in clowning. When I started in clowning I thought I was resilient, but in retrospect, I don’t recognise if I actually was. This kind of training is not for everybody, but it is very valuable. Mask and clowning attainments are unbelievable tools for established modern naturalisti actors to have. Jackie Chan is very clowny and very funny. It’s talent how he understands physical comedy in an elevated way in the midst of violence.

Q: What do students learn in your clowning and physical theatre classes?

A: It’s sort of unlearning everything that we’ve learned in regards to acting in some ways. Students in acting classes have been told not to make audience contact, that when it’s done, it seems faked or contrived. But with clowning, that’s the trick, connecting with the audience and making the performance real. The actor is still in reputation and has the same objectives, but is sharing and interacting with the audience and the environs rather of performing for the audience.

This is where a whole connection happens, percentage of which is indescribable. When the mask connects with the audience, it’s riveting and dynamic, a kind of magic happens that is inexplicable. Clowning is more established than innovative acting, but in our modern view of acting, actors may get away with not being in the moment. With clowning, it’s in truth what it’s all in regards to – the actors have to be open and respond to whatsoever is happening.

Actors may feel vulnerable because they can’t rely on proficiencies they’re comfortable with. People commune a lot through their eyes and facial expressions. Actors tend to act a lot with their faces because they’ve learned that from watching movies and television. By putting on masks, we’ve cut off that method of communicating and that leaves us with having to find other ways to communicate. The mask becomes the translator, the transducer of the character, and those emotions that would other than as supposed or expected be conveyed through our faces are sent through our bodies.

Sometimes an actor on stage may pull back, and if that actor has on a mask, that pulling back is magnified. Things that worked without the mask, don’t translate, they’re not huge sufficient to commune to the audience what’s going on. Working with a mask becomes second nature with practice. It’s not a huge crusade forever. Any technique becomes having little impact with practice, it’s just a matter of getting applied to using your body to express the characters and make contact with the audience.

Q: Would you talk regarding your approach to instructing clowning and physical theatre?

A: Good teachers of these forms don’t inevitably teach, they provoke, they set up circumstances for actors to work through and learn by doing, as opposed to lecturing regarding it. I may tell students to be in the moment and play with their surroundings until I’m blue in face, but they won’t get it until they experience it. The actual doing of it is where they’re going to commence to learn it and experience it.

The beauty of the instructing and learning of acting is that there are a million dissimilar approaches and what most people get taught is that you will learn a lot of things, numerous of which will work for you and some won’t. There are brilliant method actors in this world who are amazing, breathtaking. They found a path that works for them. That doesn’t mean it works for everybody.

For instance, I don’t like the separation of voice and movement, where the physical work happens in one class on one day and the voice work happens in another on another day. Even in my studies, we learned voice a couple times a week, for an hour, that was it. I found a disconnect in learning how to match what we were doing vocally with what we were doing physically. We were making these huge dynamic shapes with our bodies and sentiment our hearts out, but galore people had never had any voice training and they couldn’t be heard or understood because they couldn’t elevate their voices up to what they were doing with their bodies. One of my goals when I get my Ph.D. and become a professor is to create pedagogy where actors’ voices and bodies are trained simultaneously.

Q: What would the Avery technique be?

A: I’m still developing it and that’s why one of the reasons I’m hoping to commence a Ph.D. soon. Right now, it’s all in notes and ideas. There were galore in truth fantasti moments at Dell’arte where we studied Tai Chi. For the most part, Tai Chi is reasonably silent because it’s a meditative martial art, but a couple of times the teacher played music, which took us to another level. One day, in voice class while working on harmoniousness and singing together, we practiced Tai Chi and that helped us find dissimilar connections. Many people have a tendency to hold their breath while doing something strenuous. In acrobatics class, we did forward rolls, cart wheels, or whatever, down the mat, while humming or singing. It’s hard to do, but it’s serves actors in two ways – it keeps them breathing and in touch with their voice, while exerting themselves physically. Things like that are key.

Q: When did you get into the arts?

A: I was always around the arts as there are a lot of musicians in my family. My grandmother is an unbelievable jazz pianist and she still plays in her jazz band that jams each month at her house. My uncle has been a singer/entertainer for at least thirty years. My mother is a musician and an unbelievable singer. She studied music in college, teaches music, and plays standup bass. As a little child, I attended the rehearsals of shows for which she directed the music. My father, though not trained in any queer one, was a outstanding appreciator of the arts. My sister is a visual artist, and as with me, her interests have moved around. She went to the Parsons School of Design and while she’s worked in a lot of dissimilar media, she now has her own business making habit mosaics and doing tile installation.

As a kid I wanted to take ballet lessons and to learn how to dance. I grew up in a very little town in New Hampshire so there wasn’t much prospect for that, but as soon as chances for acting came around, I jumped right in. I was also very lucky. An unbelievable performer and puppeteer named Dan Hurlin, who is likewise from New Hampshire, is a professor at Sarah Lawrence. When I was a teenager, he ran a children’s theatre in New Hampshire so I got to train with him. We loved him, we thought he was amazing, but outside of our little world, we didn’t know how valued and astounding he actually was. His work, altho I didn’t know it at the time, formed percentage of what my aesthetic is now – looking for challenging and new ways of performance.

My father supported the arts and me in them. I was a biochemistry major in college studying to be a genetic engineer, but I do not forget as a child my father saying to me, you know, you might want to act and he applied all kinds of little systems to move me towards acting and the theatre knowing that’s actually where I’d end up. He always knew I’d be in the arts, even when I didn’t recognise it.

The Fervent Years The Group Theatre And

• Amazon Sales Rank: #240798 in Books
• Published on: 1983-03-22
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Dimensions: 1.01″ h x 5.41″ w x 8.20″ l, .96 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 352 pages

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful.
A magnificent and inspiring historical document
By J. Remington
The Group Theatre, modeled off of the equally influencial Moscow Art Theatre, was an artistic organization that completely and drastically revolutionized not only American Theatre, but World Theatre as well.

Formed in the 1930′s and comprised of what has become a literal who’s who of Theatre: Clifford Odets, Elia Kazan, Harold Clurman, Robert Lewis, Stella Adler, Lee Strasberg, Cheryl Crawford, John Garfield, Sanford Meisner and many others, The Group Theatre sought to create a vibrant and organic native theatre that sought to not only mirror the times but also instigate radical social change.

At no other time in American history has an artistic group been comprised of so many talented individuals focused on one aesthetic and political goal. Despite one’s political leanings (make no mistake, The Group Theatre were extreme leftest liberals), The Fervent Years provides and endless and bountiful amount of inspiration and stimulation for any theatre artist.

Clurman writes in a fine dramatic style that boils with passion, wit and insight. The Fervent Years is required reading for all devotees of The Theatre. But don’t let that scare you, it is a most entertaining read at the same time.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful.
A Motivating, Historical Piece
By njbookworm
Admittedly, I read this under duress in my “Theatre History Seminar” course in college. However, it turned out to be one of the most inspiring pieces I have ever read.

_The Fervent Years_ chronicles the birth and triumph of The Group Theater. This group of actors, directors, producers, and theater enthusiasts sacrificed time, money, and easy fame to explore the roots of drama. The product of their efforts was the creation of a truly American style of theater.

Although the book has a decidedly theatrical spin, I think that all readers (from all backgrounds and interests) can benefit from reading this excellent piece. Right before I have to face a major challenge, I whip out my copy and give it another read.

Also, Clurman’s self-centered, self-celebrating anecdotes never cease to amuse.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful.
A wonderful book about a passionate endeavor.
By TEA
This book is a beautiful account of the struggles and events surrounding Harold Clurman during his time with the Group Theater. Harold starts off by revealing how his life brought him to establish the Group along with Lee Strasberg and Cheryl Crawford. It then continues and describes the significant struggles and events encountered by the Group and its members along with some beautiful and extremely important observations Harold made, not only regarding the theater community and its participants, but also about our society in general and its effect on art in general.

This book is an absolute must for any serious actor or director. For that matter, anyone serious about life would gain from reading this book. The Group Theater was a wonderful “experiment” fostered by some very passionate people who not only helped to shape theater in America, but they also played a significant role in laying the groundwork from which some of the best acting and directing has emerged as seen in films and theater since that time.

I won’t give anything away for the sake of would-be readers, but generally speaking, one of the great things I took away from this book relates to a character arc that he, Harold Clurman, went through in relation to experiences he had early on where he did not yet fully understand why some negative theater reviews upset him. Over time, he elucidates how he came to understand his emotions had intellectual justification. It’s great, because you see a man with enough wisdom to observe his emotions of being upset, yet he gives himself time to understand the logical meaning of those same emotions, justified or not. It’s almost as if he’s willing to give himself time to check his own reality. The side irony (or perhaps not so ironic) is that I observed a connection between what he eventually realizes in that one aspect of his life when compared to greater troubles of that era. This is all only one nugget of the book, but it was the most meaningful to me.

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The Fervent Years The Group Theatre And Picture

The Fervent Years The Group Theatre And Picture

The Fervent Years The Group Theatre And Pic

The Fervent Years The Group Theatre And Pic

The Fervent Years The Group Theatre And Picture

The Fervent Years The Group Theatre And Picture