大木園地(博)-戲劇議題與研究方法

活動地點：國立台北藝術大學戲劇學系T305教室(台北市北投區學園路1號) 報名方式：

(1)活動專屬網站www.moregren.com/gesar

(2)報名專線(03)327-5656普椿實業股份有限公司承辦

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《魯米 生平‧思想‧餘緒》
Sefik Can（謝費克‧詹）著，李建弘等譯

過去，魯米都將大部分的時間花在神學院或經學院的議事廳閱讀書籍，如今夏姆斯禁止他全神貫注於書本上。他也不允許其他人探望他。他坐在大學學院的門口，質問那些前來探視魯米的人：「你們帶了什麼禮物來以示懇求與感謝呢？拿給我看，我就讓你們見魯米。」某天，終於有人忍不住對這位奇怪的男子發怒，說：「你又帶來了什麼讓我們需要回報你呢？」夏姆斯答覆：「我帶來了自己。我因為他的緣故獻上了自己的頭顱。」
在《書源》中，蘇勒壇‧瓦拉德敘述魯米與夏姆斯是多麼親近、以及夏姆斯對魯米的深刻影響：「當群眾親眼目睹這種依賴、忠貞、迷戀及愛時，他們變得妒忌並開始議論紛紛。導師們和其他重要人物公然散播謠言：『這位徹底改變魯米的人到底是何方神聖？為何當我們之中沒有人能看出夏姆斯的偉大時，魯米卻是他為超凡者，並這麼尊敬他？』」他既欠缺精神的狀態又缺乏知識。我們可能稱呼他為有”神視”（Divine Glance）的人並相信他的心眼是開通的嗎？當夏姆斯發覺事態嚴重到已無法控制，且所有人都反對他時，便在某一天突然消失無蹤。就這樣，在十五個月又二十天之後，夏姆斯於1246年的二月十五日離開孔亞。
讓我們先聽聽魯米蒙福之口所吐露之關於其對音樂和旋轉的觀點：

To Be An Actor
By Janet Zarish


My name, as you just heard, is Janet Zarish and I am an actor. I am also a teacher, who trains young actors, prepares them for careers as professionals. I lead a dual, and at times, rather complicated life, doing both these things,not to mention trying to squeeze in some semblance of a personal life, as well. And until recently, like most people, I imagine, I found, or gave myself, precious little time to answer the question: Why do I do what I do? I was just doing it.
So there was something intriguing, appealing to me in Julee’s request to speak to you today, in the prospect of writing about the kind of work I do and the kind of training I believe in; in the idea of writing about the kind of actors we send into the world from our graduate program at New York University. And, perhaps, I thought, I’d like to write about my own acting life, as well; what rewards me most, and challenges me. In short, there was a part of me that was attracted to the idea of standing outside my life, for a bit, to observe myself; my career, my life, my methods. But how to begin?
The story is told about the composer, Igor Stravinsky; that he was chastised by a critic, for allegedly discarding all the rules of music, of composition, of harmony, and rhythm, and making music seemingly free of form. Stravinsky replied to the critic, that the truth was exactly the opposite. No artist can create without form, hesaid. If I have discarded old forms, he said, I have simply replaced them with new, equally limiting forms within the strictures of which to compose. Any artist will tell you, Stravinsky said, that there is no freedom, without form.
Now, I know this story fairly well, and refer to itfrequently, because “Freedom Within Form” is one of the principles on which our conservatory program at New York University is based. We preach it constantly, to ourselves, to each other, and to our students; Structure supports creativity.
But, I thought about the Stravinsky story then, for a different, more immediate reason. For it was patently clear to me that, until I had a form, to contain my thoughts, I could not write the paper I now knew I wanted to write for Julee Chu. Eventually, of course, I believe I found that form, in a roundabout sort of way, since, obviously, I am here, speaking to you, now. But that didn’t happen right away. It certainly didn’t happen in those first days. No, at that point my thoughts on the subject, as they so often do, came in and out of my mind seemingly of their own volition, and according to their own rules.
One of these ever present thoughts was of a time, several years before, when during a particularly successful, but terribly unsatisfying professional visit to Los Angeles, I first considered trying to teach acting. Like much of what has changed my life, this possibility came as a total surprise, in the form of a suggestion, from an old friend and colleague, that we, together, teach a professional class. This idea was, actually birthed out of an intense need we both felt, having been classmates in acting school, to put back into our lives, in the midst of all those inter-changeable TV show, our love of plays that were deep, and difficult, and important; full of gorgeous language and ideas. Like most actors, like most artists, we wanted to be challenged.
Let me give you a little background about me, so I can put all this in some kind of perspective. I had been acting, professionally, at that point for quite a few years. Having begun performing professionally as a child, I had eventually attended the Juilliard School, in New York, one of the elite conservatories in the United States, and had begun working, steadily, and interestingly, directly upon my graduation. Both in school, and in the professional world, my experience had been wide and diverse. I had performed on stage in the works of Shakespeare and David Mamet, George Bernard Shaw and Terrance McNally, Shel Silverstein and Harold Pinter. I had acted on daytime soap operas, nighttime dramas and sitcoms, in television commercials, and voice-overs, and I had recorded books on tape. I had acted in Hollywood films and independent films, and gone from medium to medium, from comedy to drama, from period to contemporary, from Broadway to regional theater. I had a somewhat rare and successful career.
And, I can confidently say that in all that time, I had never once thought of being a teacher. So, when my friend suggested the idea, my initial thought was – what would I teach?
“We’ll teach young people to do what we do”, my friend said. “Whatever your method is, you’ll explain it, describe it, and teach it.”
“But that’s the problem”, I said. You see, I haven’t the faintest idea what I do!”..
For some reason, my friend remained undaunted by this, and we, the two of us, did open a school, and I somehow taught in it, and that was the beginning of my teaching career. Since then, I have taught private classes in a number of other schools and Universities, and am presently teaching in a three year training program at New York University, where I hold the title “Head Of Acting”, in a program which, in my time there, has been generally regarded as one of, if not the, foremost conservatory for Graduate Actors in the country.
Naturally, teaching and directing has become a large, and voracious part of my life in the intervening years. But, not without some difficulty, I have refused to give up one career for another. I continue to act in plays, movies, television, and commercials. And, although the juggling can be exhausting, although some of my colleagues have suggested that I am masochistic, or crazy, and although I sometimes fear that one or the other of my careers is suffering, I continue to try to balance my two lives.
Why? It is an interesting question, and one in which I have begun to have more insight since the preparation for this paper began forcing me to start looking at my life from a little more distance than I was accustomed. And, one fairly simple answer is that I think my acting makes me a better teacher, and my teaching makes me a better actor. Having started my teaching career as clueless about my own method as I did, I have found that the more I understand about my students’ struggles, the more I become attuned with my own and the more vigilant I am about trying to address them. And, the more I discover about myself, the more insight I have into the problems of my students.
A while ago, I heard an interview being conducted on the radio, and as I listened, it struck me that what was being discussed penetrated to the heart of one thing I have come to understand about my acting, and to a great extent, as well, about what I have been striving to teach. So, I sent away to the radio station for a transcript of what I’d heard. The interview was with a well known author named Daniel Boorstin, and when it arrived, this is what it said:
“In my book, ‘The Discoverers’, one of the themes was that the great obstacle to progress is not ignorance, but the illusion of knowledge. And I think that the same thing is true in the present work I’m writing on the creators, on the arts. I think the hallmark of a work of art is that we can never discover in advance of what it holds. There’s mystery in the works of creation and discovery. And I think that to grasp that mystery, to be prepared for the unexpected, is the task of those of us who are helping others learn about the world.”
And this struck me as pointedly relevant, because, if there is one thing I have come to understand more clearly than ever as I try to explore my job as a teacher, it is that I hope, somehow, to communicate to my students the aspect of acting which I DON’T know, and CAN’T know, because it is unknowable. This unknowable is the mystery that is at the heart of any creative process; the mystery that is at the heart of acting, which, as an actress myself, I know, and feel, instinctively, but, of course cannot explain; at least, not in rational language. Consistent with my belief in “Freedom Within Form”, this mystery exists, and flourishes within the parameters of craft, and method. I realized, re-reading Boorstin’s interview, that there was something in that mystery, something I couldn’t define, which touched the heart of my need to act, and my need to teach, although it was not until a bit later that I could articulate more of what that mystery ultimately meant to me.
So, then, what is my method” After all these years, how do I explain it, describe it, and teach it? Well, to some extent, my method, and the method that has evolved in the program at NYU in the last several years, is deceptively simple, and incredibly complex. There is no method. Beware of a method. All methods are valuable as individual tools. All seek a way in to acting and none, alone, are the true answer. They are fragmented sections of the whole.
The Meisner technique is wonderful for listening and availability, the Strasburg technique or “the Method” is wonderful for opening up a personal, emotional instrument, Stanislavsky, who came closest, I feel, to using the whole of an actors tools, is wonderful for making the world and characters alive, vital and specific within the world of the play. And, the final “God” of much acting instruction, the teaching of INTENTION, is of course, invaluable. But what about all the other complex and subtle ways an actor needs to open up to his text, his fellow actors and himself?
An actor’s is a very rarefied talent. I have to tell you that we audition almost a thousand students each year from around our country, and around the world. We only choose eighteen. And, might I add, we can barely find eighteen, so complex and unique a gift it is to truly be an actor, or, might I say, an artist. And we are not necessarily looking for a fully developed talent. In fact, Zelda Fichandler, the amazing Artistic Head of our Department, has said that at a students audition, we are, literally, looking for five seconds, just five seconds of sustainable, rich, truthful, spontaneous, and original life. If we see five seconds of that living and breathing, we can diligently, and gratefully, spend three years bringing it out.
And, I can also say, we fight over a good many of these same students with Juilliard and with Yale University, probably the other two of the, currently, finest conservatories. Think of that. Together, we see over a thousand students and in the end, we have all spotted many of the same, exact students amongst them all. I tell you this so you can get an idea of the complexity of talent we’re looking for, the rarity of that talent, and, consequently, the complex way a group of teachers must work together to uncover, mold, encourage and release the talent in the artist.
But, again: What is our method, if we believe in no method? What is the nature of this Freedom that we strive for, and what is the form we use to contain it?
Put in its simplest terms, in the first year, our students are taught in their acting class, to essentially find their own particular, personal sense of truth by studying naturalistic plays. In the second year, we add to their process what they initially find to be the burden of that dreaded word “style” – heightened language and the different physical and cultural worlds characters exist in. And throughout their second and into their third year they work, tirelessly, to synthesize all that they’ve been taught from every class - voice, speech, text work, clown class, theater games, circus, the culture of style, psychological gesture, acting, Alexander technique, and more.
The first year can be a difficult experience for our young students. Most of them, before attending our school, have had a history of being lauded for the work they have done in amateur, University, and sometimes professional productions. It is not surprising that many of our students arrive believing that they already have a pretty good idea about how to act.
Much to their surprise, the first step in our process requires the students to un-learn virtually everything that they thought they knew. Because, although they are talented in many, varied ways that they themselves may not yet understand, they, most often, are used to getting away with old tricks and have never been forced to work rigorously, and personally.
At its heart, this kind of unmasking that the student embarks on, requires that the actor begin to recognize patterns that he has, heretofore, felt comfortable in. The trick demons of acting are common – the impulse to put emotion before thought, or the impulse to “act out” the true process of thinking. The tendency to concentrate on feeling instead of intention, the habit of substituting energy for specificity, of making language less important than everything else or using language as a sort of “decoy duck” that flashes itself around with no true heart underneath; in short, many of the things for which they have been applauded for in the past, are discarded in search of a simpler, deeper, more honest sense of personal truth along with an active, deliberate sense of craft. This pursuit is difficult, daunting, and can be truly confusing and, at times, terrifying. But, in that confusion, and in that terror, lies the mystery we seek.
The mind, the conscious mind that is, is not always the actor’s best friend. He must learn to let the mind go, find new paths to spontaneity, to truth. And we can free his instrument in many ways. We can teach him to breath more fully, to release into a physical life, to open his voice into more expression and power. But, still, I find, there are times when I must enter into a kind of physical adjustment of the actor that defies conscious explanation. And here is where teaching through the body comes in.
The mind can make new grooves, new pathways. It can be retrained to not follow the same pattern, the same experience or understanding. That is why, I believe that training needs to be addressed through direct connection to the body, so that a student can experience a change and not have to understand it to own it; to begin transforming himself.
If the body has a new experience that is better, it will remember it, and build on that moment of experience. It has been documented that the body will actually replace an old, inferior way of doing something with a more truthful, and efficient way of going through the same thing. The body holds on to what is better for it, if you keep feeding it that experience.
So how wonderful for the student to know that, if they are pushing themselves while acting, I can merely guide their body into a gentler, more available place to come from. I can actually say to them:
“Do you feel yourself holding now?”
“Yes”.
“Where?”, I ask.
“In my shoulders”, or “in my face”, or “in my hips”, or “chest” or wherever their tension, their need to protect themselves is coming from.
“Does that feel comfortable to you?”
“No” they say.
“It might be exciting to see what can come without that tension, yes?”
“Yes.”
“Can you try to let that go of that and move forward without it?”
Usually the answer is yes.
I can coach the student to become familiar with that habit within himself. I don’t have to say why that habit exists. I don’t need to analyze him. I can merely coax him into the awareness of giving something up and replacing it with something better. This is why I say it isn’t fruitful to come from a method in acting. This profession of being a messenger of the human experience is too complicated for one form of teaching. I must observe the student and assess his or her particular needs. Sometimes a student needs an unimpeded body, sometimes he needs to fill himself with a stronger intention. Sometimes he needs to connect more to the language. Sometimes he needs to listen better and make his fellow actor more important than himself. Sometimes he just needs to breathe.
And, a lot of time, when you release these students’ places of tension, of holding or protection, a whole new form of expression opens up to them and everything falls into place. And then you see them acting on a plane of truth and craft that is seamless, personal, and powerfully creative and original. Wisdom, frequently, is in the body, waiting to be found.
Quite frequently, during this period in the training process, a student will feel that they have lost all their instincts, that they are floating in the ether, unable to hold onto the old, and to grasp firmly onto the new. And I tell them that they must accept, for a time, that they may feel “discomfort.” They may feel that what they are doing is wrong, because it feels so strange, so foreign. But I assure them that there is something better ahead, and that they must see themselves through the eyes of their new selves, and avoid the desire to run back to an old habit of being, a place that feels more like home. It is desirable to sometimes feel like you don’t know what you are doing.
And, more often than not, by the end of their first year, they have experienced this new way of working, of exploring, and found the faith to believe that it leads them to truth, and to creation.
At this point, we confound them, by adding to their process the concepts of style, language, and heightened reality, taking them out of the realm of contemporary naturalism, and often hurtling them back into the abyss of doubt and confusion, from which they thought they had finally escaped.
Because, as Stravinsky keeps reminding me, there can be no true freedom without the limitations of form. And although the students have been studying, with other teachers, some of the more intellectual aspects of craft, such as movement, text analysis, use of the voice, and body, it is often a great challenge to get them to go merge their heart with their head; to make the leap of adding to their process a very rational, conscious craft to their work, especially after a year of obliterating much of the rational, judging impulse. It is a particularly difficult task to find the perfect balance between deliberate work and intuitive work, between emotion and craft. And initially, the actor will often, once again, feel disconnected from his talent, from himself. Until, of course, he discovers that both can merge into an organic and highly skilled form of expression.
Just a few weeks ago, as we finished up the final semester of the second year class, with scenes from Shakespeare, two of my students did a scene from “Measure For Measure”, Isabel visiting Claudio in jail and telling him he must die unless she gives up her virginity for him. And, as I watched the scene unfold, I was deeply affected. The work of both of the actors was gorgeous, both in its feeling, and in its clarity; its moment to moment journey was so specific and effortless.
Afterwards, as usual, we discussed what had happened, and when I asked them why they thought that their work had been so full and rich, they both talked about being connected to the stakes, to finding a personal connection to their characters plight and personalizing that for themselves; of giving themselves a preparation that filled them with the imaginary circumstances before they started the scene. All of these responses seemed to have played a role in the remarkable work the two had done, but I felt that there was something else at work as well, something that they weren’t saying. What was it? What else happened?
Suddenly, the two of them both spontaneously broke into these guilty grins, as if they had been keeping some secret from me, and from the rest of the class. What was it, I asked.
“Well, said one of them, as if confessing a mortal sin to a priest, “I used all the text work I learned in my text class, with Shane Ann”.
And the class groaned. I knew why. She continued.
“I worked on the scanning, the antithesis of the words, the range and musicality of my voice, and the building of the thoughts.”
Shyly, almost embarrassed, her acting partner piped up.
“I hate to say it, but I did too”.
Another groan from the class, as a voice from the back emerged.
“I hate that class! I don’t want to admit that that homework works”.
And hate it they do, quite frequently, at this point. It seems cold to them, and uninspired; baldly technical, and seemingly in conflict with the liberating feelings of pure emotion they’ve been experiencing for the last year. It feels like “Math”, coming from the head and not their large, pure, all-important, massively wild and passionate “Actors Heart”.
I can sympathize with their plight, because there is a level of inherent fight in teaching technique. But, again, without form, there is no freedom. And, when the two exist together, as they did in class that day, the result is gorgeous, transcendent, and magical, lifting those who watch, and those who create, together, out of the confines of their small and tidy lives, into another realm of existence; a magic realm where art makes all of us bigger, grander than we ever could have imagined.
Now, I wrote all this down, eventually, all the things I’ve just read, and then I looked it over, more than once, and I thought, so that’s it. That’s my method, those are my thoughts. But, again, as I say, I was standing apart from myself, for a change, watching myself instead of just being myself, and I thought, well, if I’m going to find a form for this paper, something to contain my thoughts and turn them into something bigger, I guess I have to look at my dual careers from a new perspective; to address the larger question that hovers over all others, which is, of course: why do I do these things? Why do I teach, why do I act?
Because both endeavors, I must admit, get harder each year. Opportunities for fulfilling acting roles seem to shrink year after year. When our students get out, is there the kind of theater out there we train them for? Theaters are less supported than ever before by a government that seems, at times, openly hostile to the artistic impulse. And, just as alarmingly, even eighteen gifted students with the potential for inspiration seem harder and harder to find.
Of course, this is not the fault of our young applicants. They are simply reflections of the times in which they live. Language, in our time, has been severely devalued. Over the last five years or so, it has seemed that our students’ verbal skills have been further compromised than ever before. And why should this surprise us? Increasingly, they have spent their formative years isolated, alone in a room, staring at a computer screen, watching DVD’s, sending emails, and, to a great extent, having interpersonal relationships that only occasionally involve actually being in the same room with another human being.
How can they be expected to retain the passion, and how can we expect the ferocity, that we look for, to shine through in those five seconds in an audition? Maybe, the thought inevitably occurs to me, we are in the last throes of a futile attempt to locate a certain kind of passionate gift and ferocious commitment in a time that no longer cherishes or promotes it. And, at such moments, I confess that the inevitable fumes of despair threaten even my usually optimistic beliefs.
Several weeks ago, as many of these thoughts were swirling around inside my head, I attended a seminar, a debate really, between two University Presidents, of two prominent Universities in New York. One of the Presidents had been charged with having de-emphasized the Arts in his University. And he, very intelligently, and very reasonably, described a World in which Economics, and the Sciences, and Law, and Medicine were the centerpieces of the future, upon which education should be based. And the other President listened, quietly, and respectfully. And when it was his turn to speak, he said, very simply, that the reason he felt that it was imperative, in this World, for the Arts to be central to the educational experience, was that, in all the fascinating, exciting, challenging classes he had attended and observed over the years, there was one word that he had never learned about in Economics class, or in Biochemistry, or Genetic Engineering, or in Law or Physics. There was one word that he had only heard mentioned, and talked about, and felt in classes in the Arts. The word was “love”.
As I sat in the auditorium that afternoon, in the silence that enveloped the audience after the word “love” had been spoken, I remembered what Aristotle had written, about his belief in Art, in its ability to teach transcendence; something that cannot be put into words. Its ability to lift a human being into a place of beauty and grace that is unspeakable.
And I thought about a story that a friend of mine had told me not too long ago, about a group of inner city teenagers, from difficult neighborhoods, with no background in the arts, certainly, who were taken, by bus, on a school field trip to attend a performance of the ballet at Lincoln Center For The Performing Arts in New York. On the way to Lincoln Center, the teachers on the bus felt only dread, because the kids were uncontrollable, loud and raucous. And the heart of their boisterous interplay seemed to be a compulsion to insult, to humiliate, and to belittle eachother. To one of the teachers, it seemed clear that the entire bus was filled with young people intent on making themselves feel bigger by diminishing those around them, making everyone else feel as small as they could. They insulted each other, each other’s mothers and sisters, and the teachers were thinking, Oh my God, this is going to be a nightmare.
So, upon arriving at the theater, the teachers wisely rearranged the seating of the student, trying as best they could to minimize what they fully expected to be constant talking, laughing, and a continuation of the violent, small, stupid insults that had been flying on the bus. And, naturally, at the beginning of the ballet, some talking, and a great deal of laughing, occurred.
But then, something surprising happened. Because they were seated mostly apart from their friends, and enemies, the students began to experience the ballet as individuals, and they fell silent. Much to the surprise of the teachers, when they all reboarded the bus for the trip home, the insults, the competitiveness, the need to diminish others had vanished. In fact, the bus ride home was incredibly, almost hauntingly, silent. Somehow, in isolation, in the dark, with the music and the dance, each of the young people had been lifted, out of themselves, perhaps. Or deep within themselves, maybe, to a place that could experience beauty, a possibility of being human that had no definition, that existed in as pure a place as when one looks at the vast sea or the miracle of a canyon, or gorge, or a flower, or a baby. Through losing themselves, somehow they had located their humanity.
The experience of beauty, and the ability to inspire that experience in others; this is the impulse, the belief, that has always motivated me, even from a time when I didn’t understand it, and couldn’t have explained it. It is also the strand that unifies the different areas of my life, both professionally, and personally. It is the reason I’m an actress, the reason I’m a teacher and a director, and I came to realize, the reason I wanted to come to Taiwan to speak to you.
So, thank you, Julee, for asking me to come here, half way across the world, to say that, in the times in which we live, in these times of horrible crises throughout the world, in which so much of what is of value is under relentless attack, we must be more vigilant than ever. It is precisely in times like these that all that is beautiful and fragile; all that soars and inspires; all that transcends and transforms, must be cherished and nurtured like never before. We need more actors, not less. We need more artists, not less. We need