Why Physical Training?
What a community of actors with a common vocabulary can achieve.
by Jon Froehlich
These are some introductory thoughts for members of the community who may not have experienced physical actor training before, or who may wonder how training the body relates to acting, performance, etc.
First, a simple distinction: performing on a stage has some crucially different characteristics than performing for a camera. The main difference being that acting for the theater occurs in unmediated space; meaning, the audience can see (and, however subconsciously, sense) all the actors, from head to toe—as well as the whole space. The audience is therefore directly susceptible to the concrete rhythms, energies, and relationships that the ensemble creates, or fails to create, in that shared space.
This requires the stage actor to sensitize and organize their whole body as an expressive organism—and in coordination with other bodies and the dimensional space, that everyone’s sharing in real time. This can occur over time through an ongoing immersion in forms, disciplines, and techniques which engage the actor’s physical instrument until one’s whole organism becomes as fluently articulate in embodied expression as our brains are with speaking, thinking, and conceptualizing.
In short, being able to dynamically coordinate ones body has a direct impact on an actor’s total availability, range, and artistry. This is because physical coordination enables the actor not only to orchestrate themselves in the big picture of staging and composition, but to interpret and express character in fully embodied terms, as well. How is character expressed in rhythm? How is character expressed in shape? How is character expressed in relation to space? The actor’s palette expands to its fullest expressive power, along with its facility with emotion and psychology.
At this point it’s often asked, “Yeah, what about emotion and psychology? How does physical training have anything to do with the actor’s inner life, emotional work, and psychology?”
It’s a great question! Here’s one way to talk about it:
When using physical and embodied approaches, the actor’s emotional and psychological work aren’t diminished in any way; rather, they’re simply opened up, explored, and integrated from a very different perspective. How? By intentionally allowing one’s inner experience of the exercises to organically play into and influence the exercises themselves. This means that instead of leaving out one’s organic flow of imagination, thinking, & feeling (or worse yet, believing that these things have to be pushed aside as an irrelevant distraction from the “real work” of developing physical technique), instead, embodied training allows, sensitizes, and strengthens those most natural of connections. It enables inner impulses of every kind to be explored dynamically—and therefore to be integrated more deeply—from embodied action first, rather than starting from thinking or analysis. That is, it is a “pre-analytic” process that integrates the total psycho-physical experience in both conscious and subconscious ways.
One can learn to trust the deep wisdom and playful freedom of one’s body, and discover the hidden riches that come from not needing to have all the answers before taking action. And over time, emotional and psychological expression emerge from the performer’s whole organism as an ‘attuned instrument’, for which each actor has gradually developed their own resonant, integrated ‘keyboard’, ‘strings’, ‘baffles & stops’, etc.
The beauty of this approach is that it is completely complementary to traditional approaches to emotion and psychology (the ones that characterize the majority of theater education in the United States, and with which most are generally, or perhaps intuitively, familiar). Or at very least, there is no competition between approaches, and nothing is excluded; in the end, finding ones own integration of both approaches enables the actor to take on and express anything that’s thrown at them, whatever the style, genre, direction.
At this point, it’s possible that there may still be a lingering feeling that “surely, physical training is for physical theater—and I’m just not interested in physical theater. I don’t need, or want, to be some kind of acrobat, or dancer, to do what I want to do! If I want to get a workout, I can go to the gym.”
Completely fair! I would just close by saying this:
It’s most important to emphasize that physical actor training, in addition to its many physically strengthening and range-expanding benefits, deliberately centers the actor and their integrated experience of the given exercise, over ‘mere technical accuracy’. Meaning, while there is a technical dimension to the work, and the trainings constantly challenge actors to ‘get better at’ many different skills, forms, exercises, and techniques, the point of the exercises is not merely to ‘perfect’ them technically, or to ‘do them right for the sake of doing them right’—as tends to be more true of dance.
Instead, the exercises of physical theater are intended to actively prepare you for every aspect of expression that is happening on stage: inner, outer, and in coordination with others and the space. Physical training creates the conditions in which one can develop one’s own coordinated play instinct, inside and out, as a fully integrated human artist and collaborator. The invitation is to dive in as a practice of expressive freedom, and to interact with the forms and structures of the physical exercises as a dynamic springboard for sensing and expressing with one’s whole organism. At the center is your imagination, your creativity, your instincts, your emotional keyboard, etc.
And most important, it’s all in your own time. It’s all at your own pace. Play to your limits; explore gingerly; follow your instincts. There is no focus on competition, comparison, etc.
In fact, it doesn’t matter how much previous experience, or even aptitude, that any given person has. (You don’t even have to be an actor!) Instead, whatever your level of experience or ability, the point is to encounter—and dare I say enjoy?—the vitality of the exercises wherever you are in your journey, with your body and imagination. One develops a relationship with one’s own instrument, while simultaneously playing with others, in a supportive, highly collaborative environment of “serious play”.
Just as it should be in rehearsal and on stage.
How does this happen? It’s difficult to express in writing: from here, what will best make sense of these descriptions will be to experience them directly for yourself—by ‘trying on’ the training exercises, with fellow actors—and to begin to let that direct experience inform your understanding.
Are you interested in trying out a training session?
Contact us HERE, or at our email address in the banner at the bottom of this page, to get connected.
Acknowledgements: The above is a synthesis not only of Jon’s personal experience, but of Rachel & Jon’s ‘apprenticed intersections’ with key mentors, in whose ‘infinitely sparking’ lineages we now fully move, and strive to pass on. “Mille grazie” to maestri Niky Wolcz, Steven Wangh, and Stephen Legawiec and Dana Wieluns Legawiec. Our work at Infinite Spark doesn’t exist without you.
