Post by Ace on Dec 11, 2003 19:42:10 GMT -5
Could be off topic but it's very PB related, hence Ephemera. 
These are excerpts from an interview with actor Colin Firth describing the process at the London Drama Centre where PB studied for three years and graduated from.
For the entire interview: Backstage: Firth Class
By Dany Margolies
Firth then attended the Drama Centre London, which he described as a "tough school." There he studied a Stanislavsky/Strasberg-based curriculum, which was "very unconventional in English terms," he admitted. "It was very much motivated by the extraordinary personalities of the men who ran it; they were hugely charismatic and very powerful, and rather frightening teachers. It certainly galvanized a lot of us into taking our energies to a different level."
Also at Drama Centre he studied with Yat Malmgren, a student of the man who formalized dance notation, Rudolph Laban. Said Firth, "Yat took Laban's notation into acting. We studied movement psychology and its notation. We didn't use the notation particularly, but the notation is based on principles of putting psychological concepts into space, into action, into the physical world.
"It all sounds terribly alienating and full of shit, really, to people who don't subscribe to it," he continued. "I found that after a couple of years of it, it started to make an enormous amount of sense; it came as close as anything anybody really can to teaching acting. I think it's very hard to teach acting. You certainly can't teach talent. It made sense to me, and I still use it."
Another influence on Firth's early years was Christopher Fettes. "Best theatre director I ever worked with," the actor said. "He would constantly challenge you to ask questions, not only about your character and your performance but about what you're doing as an actor: Who are you doing it for? Are you alive enough to the world around you? Are you reading newspapers? Are you listening to voices? Are you going to galleries? Are you absorbing things that will stimulate you? And if not, why not? Why aren't you asking questions? Why aren't you pursuing things? What right do you have to be standing up and watched if you're not watching the world yourself?"
As Firth recalled, "It was an incredibly vigorous process, where you'd get rather pleased with yourself about what you were doing, and he would challenge you. He would give you cowardice. He would tell you to throw it all away. I remember, at one point, I thought I was doing extremely well. We were doing Tartuffe; he put a very dark spin on it. We'd been rehearsing for weeks. I felt quite smug about where I'd got to. At the end of one week he gave general notes, and he just said to me, 'I want you to come back on Monday with something different. I want you to throw it away. I want to see what happens.' And it was a torturous weekend. I just risked a completely different physicality. He was a healthy dose of a mixture of fear and respect that he engendered. He still has it over people even now."
****
Firth said he continues to use his drama school training but with additional techniques. "I'll take anything I can get," he admitted. "My school was a little bit purist about not working from the outside in. I've tended to disagree with that over the years. I think they made things very difficult. I had to play King Lear as a student. I was 19 years old. Particularly my kind of 19. There were two other actors playing the role; both were a lot more manly than I was at that age. They could grow facial hair, which I couldn't. They were big, which I wasn't. One of them was a rough Scotsman; the other was a big Canadian with an operatic voice. They grew beards. I couldn't grow a beard. And they wouldn't let me stick anything on. This was in our student production, and we weren't allowed any accessories or anything to help us. I knew that if I could have just done something--costume, beard, just something to help me suspend disbelief--that would have connected something with the inside, and I could have worked back out again. Mirrors were banned in my school, even in the dance school. There was one little mirror in the bathroom. They just didn't want you working according to the external imagery.
"And I think they're slightly misguided," he continued. "I think people can, if it works, use it. I really don't see any point in imposing something just to make an orthodoxy out of it. Forage. Go where you can. Copy. Steal from other actors. Find things in the street. I've sometimes found that I've been saved at the very last minute by hearing a voice in a bar that makes me think, That's useful. I haven't got a start for him; I haven't got a character; and I just heard this guy. It just gives me an idea. It gives me something to refer to. So I honestly think, Yeah, great, use disciplines, pursue them, and be as rigorous about them as you can. And I think it can be very rewarding. But cheat--all the time, if you need to, wherever you can. That's what I find you have to do. Your stimuli can come from the most unexpected places."
****
Firth said he found the key stimulus for his character in the paintings. But he readily admitted it's difficult to explain the process of absorbing a character from an object. "And I don't know how much it helped, actually," he added. "I'm not saying one can. I think one can take what you can whenever you can. Christopher Fettes had us observe, when we were doing Tartuffe, any religious art from the Renaissance, partly because of the eroticism of them, the strange homoeroticism of some of these--the Caravaggios, even in the earlier stuff. They're very suggestive. It's just, I thought, this is a guy whose paintings withhold a great deal, and yet they contain enormous passion. He sets himself at a distance from his subject a lot of the time. They're works that refuse to give up their secrets. All I could do was hope to see the way he saw. I wouldn't have been able to do that if we didn't have his paintings to articulate what he saw. But I think he found--the value of an artist like Vermeer is like he saw with
a unique eye, and he imparts that vision to us via the paintings. So I had that benefit. I could see these extraordinary soft surfaces, of garments and skin, removed from us, and I just thought, Well, don't try to act looks and attitudes; just forget the camera and try to see like that--and hope they capture them when they photograph it."
=======================================
Ace
These are excerpts from an interview with actor Colin Firth describing the process at the London Drama Centre where PB studied for three years and graduated from.
For the entire interview: Backstage: Firth Class
By Dany Margolies
Firth then attended the Drama Centre London, which he described as a "tough school." There he studied a Stanislavsky/Strasberg-based curriculum, which was "very unconventional in English terms," he admitted. "It was very much motivated by the extraordinary personalities of the men who ran it; they were hugely charismatic and very powerful, and rather frightening teachers. It certainly galvanized a lot of us into taking our energies to a different level."
Also at Drama Centre he studied with Yat Malmgren, a student of the man who formalized dance notation, Rudolph Laban. Said Firth, "Yat took Laban's notation into acting. We studied movement psychology and its notation. We didn't use the notation particularly, but the notation is based on principles of putting psychological concepts into space, into action, into the physical world.
"It all sounds terribly alienating and full of shit, really, to people who don't subscribe to it," he continued. "I found that after a couple of years of it, it started to make an enormous amount of sense; it came as close as anything anybody really can to teaching acting. I think it's very hard to teach acting. You certainly can't teach talent. It made sense to me, and I still use it."
Another influence on Firth's early years was Christopher Fettes. "Best theatre director I ever worked with," the actor said. "He would constantly challenge you to ask questions, not only about your character and your performance but about what you're doing as an actor: Who are you doing it for? Are you alive enough to the world around you? Are you reading newspapers? Are you listening to voices? Are you going to galleries? Are you absorbing things that will stimulate you? And if not, why not? Why aren't you asking questions? Why aren't you pursuing things? What right do you have to be standing up and watched if you're not watching the world yourself?"
As Firth recalled, "It was an incredibly vigorous process, where you'd get rather pleased with yourself about what you were doing, and he would challenge you. He would give you cowardice. He would tell you to throw it all away. I remember, at one point, I thought I was doing extremely well. We were doing Tartuffe; he put a very dark spin on it. We'd been rehearsing for weeks. I felt quite smug about where I'd got to. At the end of one week he gave general notes, and he just said to me, 'I want you to come back on Monday with something different. I want you to throw it away. I want to see what happens.' And it was a torturous weekend. I just risked a completely different physicality. He was a healthy dose of a mixture of fear and respect that he engendered. He still has it over people even now."
****
Firth said he continues to use his drama school training but with additional techniques. "I'll take anything I can get," he admitted. "My school was a little bit purist about not working from the outside in. I've tended to disagree with that over the years. I think they made things very difficult. I had to play King Lear as a student. I was 19 years old. Particularly my kind of 19. There were two other actors playing the role; both were a lot more manly than I was at that age. They could grow facial hair, which I couldn't. They were big, which I wasn't. One of them was a rough Scotsman; the other was a big Canadian with an operatic voice. They grew beards. I couldn't grow a beard. And they wouldn't let me stick anything on. This was in our student production, and we weren't allowed any accessories or anything to help us. I knew that if I could have just done something--costume, beard, just something to help me suspend disbelief--that would have connected something with the inside, and I could have worked back out again. Mirrors were banned in my school, even in the dance school. There was one little mirror in the bathroom. They just didn't want you working according to the external imagery.
"And I think they're slightly misguided," he continued. "I think people can, if it works, use it. I really don't see any point in imposing something just to make an orthodoxy out of it. Forage. Go where you can. Copy. Steal from other actors. Find things in the street. I've sometimes found that I've been saved at the very last minute by hearing a voice in a bar that makes me think, That's useful. I haven't got a start for him; I haven't got a character; and I just heard this guy. It just gives me an idea. It gives me something to refer to. So I honestly think, Yeah, great, use disciplines, pursue them, and be as rigorous about them as you can. And I think it can be very rewarding. But cheat--all the time, if you need to, wherever you can. That's what I find you have to do. Your stimuli can come from the most unexpected places."
****
Firth said he found the key stimulus for his character in the paintings. But he readily admitted it's difficult to explain the process of absorbing a character from an object. "And I don't know how much it helped, actually," he added. "I'm not saying one can. I think one can take what you can whenever you can. Christopher Fettes had us observe, when we were doing Tartuffe, any religious art from the Renaissance, partly because of the eroticism of them, the strange homoeroticism of some of these--the Caravaggios, even in the earlier stuff. They're very suggestive. It's just, I thought, this is a guy whose paintings withhold a great deal, and yet they contain enormous passion. He sets himself at a distance from his subject a lot of the time. They're works that refuse to give up their secrets. All I could do was hope to see the way he saw. I wouldn't have been able to do that if we didn't have his paintings to articulate what he saw. But I think he found--the value of an artist like Vermeer is like he saw with
a unique eye, and he imparts that vision to us via the paintings. So I had that benefit. I could see these extraordinary soft surfaces, of garments and skin, removed from us, and I just thought, Well, don't try to act looks and attitudes; just forget the camera and try to see like that--and hope they capture them when they photograph it."
=======================================
Ace