Nothing moves, but
everything changes. “Hold the ball in
your hand. Now, without changing your
grip, allow it to be there. Did you move
your muscles? Don’t. Without moving. Hold it. Now allow it to be
there.” Polina Klimovitskaya teaches the actor profound and simple change. “Simple changes and one is no longer
bound.” One becomes free as an animal,
open as a child.
For the actor the simplest thing will always be the hardest. We grow so impeded, so rational, so ensnared, that the most natural thing seems unattainable. It takes true, hard work to regress, especially where memory can be of little help. To move spontaneously again, to learn to be…To truly inhabit a character, to know a character in our bones, we must train a part of ourselves exceeding what our intelligence readily allows. And to be fascinating on stage, to steal the show, wake the audience, unify the spectacle, it requires nothing less than the reawakening of our most reticent instincts. Klimovitskaya is a method unto herself, in other words, a master; she teaches a clear vision, encompassing a wealth of past teachings and showing us what the future will require of us if we mean to stay awake and create an authentic, living theatre for our time.
Polina has been doing it for years- a veteran of the Moscow Art Theatre in Russia, Klimovitskaya holds an MFA in Directing from State Theater University, Moscow, and a Ph. D. from Yale University. She started her work as an actress and director in Russia, studying with disciples of K. Stanislavsky and E. Vachtangov, and directing with the last assistant of the great stage innovator, V. Meyerhold. In the US she has performed at Yale Repertory Theater, and played Mama in the Academy Award winning film Molly’s Pilgrim. Polina has directed numerous productions in Europe and in America, and is the founding director of the Terra Incognita Theater.
She knows that she should write a book, or a book should be written on her. People have been trying. It is difficult to capture her teachings. My first summer study in her class stayed with me for many years; I remembered each moment of every one of her classes- I recalled tossing a ball, eating an apple, walking, sitting- each action seemed one of the most dynamic I had performed in my life. When I told Polina that I wanted to try to “write her” we were as skeptical as we were exited, for what she teaches “ is living, it is harmonious, which is to say, alive, creative, never static,” and that goes for her process, also. When I found out she would be teaching her “animal workshop” this summer at Michael Howard Studios, I told her I wanted to try.
For years teaching the “animal” workshop, she has observed its continued effect on actors of every age, coming to her from every variation of background and training. The work is transformative through and through. It is innovative, visionary, complete. And it is not a mystery. I ask her when and how her interest in this work began.
“There is a basin of water, throw in a stone, you hear it fall. Throw a stone into a bucket—you wait longer, it’s more mysterious, takes longer, you hold your breath. Throw a stone into a deep lake, and you don’t know where the bottom is—with some people, you hear the pebble, shallow,” Polina smiles and ruffles a hand through her auburn hair. Her English is eloquent and her words always apt. A thick, graceful Russian accent colors it in. “An actor is like that. That depth is how we can describe what makes an actor magical, charismatic, attractive…some have a magnetic attraction. My interest began when I was very young, about 13 years old. My friend was the most beautiful girl in class. She was. And not because she was my friend, she really was the most beautiful—but all the boys followed another girl, ‘why’ I asked myself. I started to watch animals, children…great actors, they are all the same. What pulls us, what is that attraction? The ability to live from the somatic body. I didn’t use this terminology, then.”
I ask her to describe what the result of her work is, in most actors. “What I teach draws from the creative, deeper, spontaneous center, call it magical, call it magical to create.” She is twisting her arm, weaving the expression of what this might be, a web just inches away from her navel. “We don’t work for result, working for a result is like trying to get a new lover…the night you go out and try to get a new lover, it is impossible. But go out, just go out to enjoy yourself, and someone will call in the morning. We must let go of waning to grab hold of anything. St. Therese would go through a long process, for small moments, only small moments, of praying. We keep training, and our training, is like St. Theresa’s prayer. The memoirs of St. Theresa are like acting.” Praying embodies the abandon that the actor must fall to in order to work. “If we could figure truly out the process of art, if we believe in absolute control, could not a computer do for us what we do?” She asks. “Modern society wants to control, but creativity is not a microwave. We want to drop into deep somatic level, where the spontaneous mind lives.”
“The metaphor is this: every text will require us to come to it from somewhere, so that it can affect us, in a particular way. Every play is a new meeting. In life we meet people, establish friendship, attraction—the way we are attracted to one person is not the same way we are attracted to another. We gain self-knowledge, and can have better relationships; we grow more flexible, in touch with inner animal, then it doesn’t matter if it’s Shakespeare or avant-garde, if it is Peter Mary or Jane who you are playing. What the actor prepares is not an image.” The point is, who is meeting the challenge. And for this one must learn not only to react, but to respond. “The more and deeper that I sense myself, the more spontaneously will I respond intuitively.” She has hit upon the basis of the work she does with animals in the workshop. “There is no more intimate way to go within, to experience ones layers of anatomy and psychology.” There is a method to the magic. But talking about it can’t get us there. “Enough talk! We might know it. If knowing it were it, we would have nothing to do. Instead we have two hours and forty-five minutes left of class. We must work.”
“Begin by walking. What if we were to walk quietly? What changes? Acting is an art of suggestion. What if we were to feel the floor with our feet? Like it or don’t like it, but feel it. There is a spider two inches below the navel. That is the center. Try walking from the center.” Her warm up is always very thorough. And very difficult. Polina puts in a tape, a drum beat, it sounds like a fast heartbeat, and very low. Her students are to move with the drum. Not dance to it, not try to copy it, but to move with it. Why is it so difficult to move when you are not to dance, only move? We don’t know how.
In harmony there is no missed spot, no possibility of error. It is like an actor in character, who can trip and summersault across the stage and do no wrong, for character is not portrayed, but embodied, inhabited. Polina has begun to move. She lifts her feet and sets them down, testing the ground. Very slowly, she begins stepping, it is like she is feeling something out, sliding into some precise harmony just looming in the air about her. Her hands move, she is dancing, but it is not a dance, she spins, “spin” she tells us, “circles, feel the space.” At the moment of watching Polina, the receptive student will not be able to help but feel no less than an expansion within herself. There is a change, and this is an easy change. You watch a free thing and something releases in you, that simple. Something like the pleasure of bird-watching. Polina is a master of teaching, but also of leading, of being, of sharing. It is a visceral instruction--bountiful, immediate. Her spoken instructions appear mysterious at first, but the actor is meant to wonder about them intuitively, before plugging them in to the larger picture. “Get into your bones. Try to get into your bones. What does it mean, get into your bones?”
*
The students choose an animal, and research the animal in depth. They must know each detail, from skeleton to mating ritual, skin type to general appearance. Above all they should take note of their own reactions, their immediate response to these investigations. Talking about the animals, they begin the associative work that goes on in the creation of any character, the ignition of what Stanislavski called imagination and Polina refers to as deep associative structure.
A tiger, a cobra, a rhinoceros, and a horse. Polina interrogates. Male or female? Does the animal display monogamous or polygamous behavior? Which sense is the strongest? What bit of information provokes the strongest reaction in the students? What attracted them, what repulsed them? “They are so alone, very separate…and male tigers kill their babies. That is very disturbing to me,” says the girl who has chosen to work on a tiger. “The cobra has the choice to insert poison in a bite, or hold it back,” the Cobra shares. I hear Polina mutter “Richard the III” under her breath.
“Associate things that ordinarily will not associate, then you will become an artist…” The students watch videos of the animals roaming the wild, every day. Wild animals only. “When you speak about your animal, try to describe something within yourself, it’s extremely personal, as with text and characters. What is the organ through which Hamlet survives? This is crucial. It’s impossible to know it before you perform, before you experiment, otherwise it’s all intellectual. Knowledge only comes when we work. Brain doesn’t help to act. The psyche is also an organ with a function.” I inquire further. Polina compares acting to love making. “One of the main things is we need to continually merge, it’s giving up on the notion of oneself, and yet being profoundly in the body… being another person, your cells, everything responds, moves differently…with good acting you dissolve in love, and you have to follow whatever it is. What do you need to learn to be a good lover? To be in your body and to give it up…focus and relaxation, you cannot hold, holding will prevent you, and yet you need to be very focused…” She freezes as though allowing all she will say to gather within her beforehand, in the wisdom of one of her generous smiles. “The purpose of love making is dissolving rigid internal structures. No matter how cynical or pragmatic people are they still dream of real love where split between body and mind is overcome. In sex or method acting, the split remains. Ultimately everyone wants to overcome rigid self form- it’s very suffocating, no matter what people say there is in all of us same longing for freedom, liberation...”
Polina does not suggest that we undergo a Freudian psychoanalysis. But what she teaches requires a certain willingness on the actor’s part to open up to what our conditioning, our civilizing, represses with a vengeance. We have to air our inhibitions. We have to perceive our bodies as we have never perceived them, experience them as we never would have otherwise. That does not mean undergo therapy, “acting should not be therapy!” but it means investigation, experiment, uncovering some fearsome layers. In the end it may be therapeutic, but not because of the work itself, rather because art, as Polina often emphasizes, is. She once shared with me the greatest complement she received after a show: a man told her he got into a taxi after watching her work, but had to get out a few blocks later. “He wanted to walk, he wanted to feel life, he wanted to live because he felt that life was wonderful.”
As actors, we portray the basest characters and passions. And this means, know them in our bones. Polina’s animal work leads us to viscerally experience these human states, without judgment. “We have been taught since childhood what is pretty and what is not. Have you ever seen a piece of wild, natural land, untouched? Is it ugly? Have you ever seen a piece of nature that people didn’t put their foot in, that was ugly? Is a true wild animal ugly? A tiger jumps on a zebra—we must learn to observe this without finding the tiger a criminal. There is nothing criminal about that tiger. The zebra smells a certain way, it must be slain.” We judge Blanche and Mitch. But the audience must watch them as we watch a zebra. “I can be portraying the ugliest person in the world, but the whole point is there are no disgusting people. The actor is disgusting, tragedy is always beautiful, never ugly, because its humanity. Human beings are precious and incredible, and when they go wrong, there is a beauty in it…” It was an extreme statement, but Michael Chekhov said that if Hitler could be properly enacted, no more Hitlers would be born into the world.
*
Polina is much more than an acting coach and theatre director. She is an intellectual aware of her work as an element of time and place. “When I teach you, I am thinking about the future, ten, fifteen years from now. We are not fixed people. And you must realize that, if you are to avoid conflict in yourselves. Today, in society, change comes much faster. We are standing on a threshold. We are about to leap from one era to the next. You, your generation, will have to make the jump. The only way to make it is to be flexible. Rocks cannot move, but water can flow. Water has a better chance of survival than a rock. My process is very simple. Always to reestablish contact with an old forgotten friend.” Polina is talking about the animal nature in us, the one we neglect and eventually forget altogether; that force of nature that sits in waiting, a “treasury,” as she puts it.
“Each particular period puts out its conditioning, and asks artists to overcome. Writers thorough intuitive mind, actors through body—in our time, we are living a culture from the image about life, externally, it’s all about body image, society cultivates it.” It makes our work just that much more difficult. Polina teaches a process, as well as the concept of a process as a lifetime endeavor, a lifelong love. And a tireless surrender: “the result is in the audience’s soul, as an artist we only go through the process.” She teaches from such a wealth of experience, that it will take a book just to tell her life. I kept her up until three in the morning hearing her stories about the Soviet Union, about the earliest plays she directed, her struggles and successes as a woman and a Jew wanting to direct in Russia during impossible times. At the end of a long night, Polina looks at me out of her two, wide-awake eyes. I must have asked her what she feels she has become, or some such petulant question. “I don’t consider myself a theatre director, I don’t know, the result will be in you…in the end there is no result, just life.”
http://www.michaelhowardstudios.com/Michael_Howard_Studios/Teachers.html
http://terraincognitatheater.org
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