Consciousness, Literature and the Arts

Archive


Volume 9 Number 2, August 2008
___________________________________________________________________
The Association Process in Stanislavskis 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 performers 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 characters 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 actors transformed state and the
performers 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; beyondthe 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).

Stanislavskis terms are intriguing, hinting at a way of understanding the
transition between everyday consciousness to the actors 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
Stanislavskis 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 Stanislavskis intuitive approach
as well as answer more specific questions about the actors
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 howwithin the more modern mind/body paradigmit
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 NLPs 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 Wolinskys 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 actors transition process
into character state. (Wolinsky, 1991, 10)

Incorporating these elements can provide a more detailed and
systematic description of Stanislavskis 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 clichs 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
actors everyday state and where the character exists defines the
passageand thus the journeythat 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 characters senses (over there where he
exists) can give the actor answers to a much more interesting
question: What would Hamlet do?

The actors movement to a characterizationthe essence of what we
think of as western, psychologically realistic actingis mirrored in the
way they actually talk about working on a character. Similar to
Stanislavskis on this side and over there, I have described the
language elsewhere:

We hear actors say they werent in it [or I wasnt there or that they
phoned that one in] at a particular performance. This is no
accidental or arbitrary linguistic framing. The great actors talent is to
submerge (associate) so completely with the experience of the
imagined characters 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 actors 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 imaginativelyin order to achieve a
true artistic imitation in Stanislavskis 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
characters 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 anothers 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
Programmings 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 actors 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 Korzybskis 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 realityany time
we think of anythingby 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 possibilitiescreated moment by
momentgive 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
OConnor 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 realityonly 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 catand 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
itselfthe submodality choices through which the rendering is
createdhas 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 actors work. The actor
translates what she reads from the plays textliterally pictures of letters
on a pageinto 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 descriptionwhat are called the given circumstances.
The circumstances determine or condition our [the characters]
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 playwrights
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
actors own imagination must supply. The characters sense of himself,
his relationships, and his place in the plays world, driven by a will to do
or achieve something every moment (called playing an action),
must lead to the texts 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 characters sensory map and his/her submodality distinctionslike
real people, unique to each dramatic characters 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
actors 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, Stanislavskis entire method is based on the
process of discovering which submodality distinctions within the actors
sensory systems provide the greatest useful stimulus to his imagination.
Such distinctions create a compelling character and completely
engage the actors 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 plays world. (Like Prousts 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 actors 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 performers work. This is also why two
actors can have very different versions of the character Hamletand
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 actors 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 actors 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 directors 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 distinctionor through a
small set of theman 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
characters life orientation.
As much as an actors 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 actors everyday state) to there
(the characters 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
characters 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.

Wolinskys 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 dont 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 persons
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
remainsembedded in mind and bodylong 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 ones 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 experienceunconsciouslywhich 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 actors 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 persons 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
someones eyes take our sole focusand we remain fixed only on
those eyesthey 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
senses 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 performers 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 actors 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
cant, You always, I shouldnt. 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 sceneoften so hard won in
rehearsalsseem 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 arent 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 winterwhile under hot stage lightsis due to the brains 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 dont 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 distortionyet 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 experienceindeed, may even be welcoming
the experienceand 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 statescharacterized by a
narrowed sensory reality that seems to take on a timing and speed of
its own while manifesting occasional hypnotic phenomenacreate
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 Actors Association Ritual
Now, with the help of NLPs sensory modality distinctions and Wolinskys
trance criteria, we can map out what I have coined in other work the
actors association ritual. (Turner, 1996; Turner, 1999) By stepping into
the characters point of view, in that body, the actors 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
characters 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 characters
awareness. Through the power of repetition and enhancementas a
ritualthis process takes over the actors 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 feelingwhat feels right
within the scenes 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 actors but
the characters, from the characters 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 characters visual
and auditory presence. This is a result of repeated readings of the
plays text. The plays 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 actors sensory imagination be
filled in with details about that entrance. One actor may see, in his
minds 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 IIIs 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 actors 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 actors conception distinguishes
the skilled actors individual spin on the scripts 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 whitethis is partly how we encode our history and
categorize it.)
In any case, the totality of sensory imagerycharacters, environments,
stage directions, directors comments, additional researched
materialestablishes a goal for the association ritual, building the
imaginary world as the target. These elements in various combinations
stimulate the actors interest and emotional commitment. The actor
reaches a pointsooner or later in rehearsalswhere a critical mass of
sensory detail is achieved. It becomes easier and easier to picture the
character with the installed qualities. Eventually the characters dream
body and world, full and rich in detail, stand in his minds eye, if you will.

As I have said, the actors 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 clich, 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
Wolinskys trance criteria. That is, first the actor imagines the characters
situation (or more precisely the characters 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 characters 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 criterionappearance of
hypnotic phenomenamay happen. For example, the actor (within
the character body) may suddenly remember an event from the
characters 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 characters mother or father may come to mind
(false memories), creating a powerful inner state or frame of reference
that influences the characters living, expressive orientation. Positive
hallucinations of the imaginary environment in which the character
livesnow 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 actors 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 plays 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 characters 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 texts 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 characters 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 characters 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 Stanislavskis 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
actors 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 plays
world.
By associating so completely with the dramatic character that he feels
literally in the characters shoes, the actor has a true experience
performed for the pleasure of an audience. This is the meaning of
Stanislavskis threshold of the subconscious, and we can track the
special physical and psychological changes that make this happen
through sensory distinctions and trance criteriaessential elements to
the process Ive 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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Notes
[i] Pick any period in Hollywood filmmaking and you can find the same
kind of hierarchy.
[ii] See also NLPs meta-model described in (Bandler and Grinder,
1975b) that explores these linguistic distinctions.
[iii] In addition to Stanislavski, we can see hypnotic phenomena used in
the techniques of other recognized teachers of acting such as Uta
Hagen, Michael Chekhov and Charles Marowitz.
[iv] The language of a text as a metaphor can start us thinking, but it is
embodied (associated) experience that we act upon. (Lakoff and
Johnson, 1980)
[v] See Hagens useful description of this process in her Respect for
Acting.
[vi] There may be connections here to recent speculation about so-
called mirror neurons that fire not only when we perform a certain
action but also when we observe others perform an action. The
empathetic response of the actor to the vision of a character or
dramatic scene may be a particularly sophisticated use of this
neurological response. See (Iacoboni et al., 2005) and
http://www.interdisciplines.org/mirror for a broad overview and
(Meltznoff, 2005) for developmental and social human implications.
[vii] Chekhovs use of Psychological Gesture is instructive. It combines
a significant gesture/body shape with a core need or value that helps
define a character at the same time that it anchors the characters
presence.