Julian Waite: University of Chester

 

Title: 
Some applications of Neuro Linguistic Programming to the rehearsal process, with the aim to enhance the vitality of repeated performances.

Stream: Repetition and Embodiment

All performers will be familiar with the sense that repetition, either in rehearsal or performance has caused us to lose something vital.  David Mamet contrasts this with the way we can summon passion in our fantasies.  Pointing out that these take the form of internal monologues where 'we make the summation in the O.J.Simpson trial; we convince FDR to bomb the railway tracks leading to Auschwitz' and so on, he suggests:

            We perform these personal dramas for our audience of one all day long...We can make our speech to our tyrant time after time, and indeed we do, sometimes improving on it, sometimes simply repeating it for the joy it affords.  (Mamet 1997.115-6)

Whilst Mamet uses his example to launch a critique on Stanislavskian preparation, I think his comments show he is working in the tradition of Stanislavski in the sense that he identifies the conscious attempt to reawaken emotion as misguided:  'Any method of action – any interchange in life, for that matter – which is based upon the presence or absence of emotion sooner or later goes bad.'  (Mamet 1997.116)  For Mamet, doing something is the way forward.  Moreover he suggests that what actors do must be based on who they are, not on some abstract 'technique':
           
            You are going to bring your...insecurities, your insufficiency to the stage whatever you do.  When you step on-stage they come with you..Nothing you do can conceal them.  Nor should they be concealed.  (Mamet 1997.119)

This concept is particularly strong in the United States and, as in the case of Mamet, is often associated with practitioners who straddle theatre and film acting.  Ivana Chubbuck is another example.  She has 'coached' a significant number of highly successful film actors and takes a similar view, explaining that her technique is precisely based on her own therapeutic journey as a person:

            ...The actor must understand himself thoroughly...The Chubbuck Technique grew out of my search to understand and overcome my own personal traumas – particularly, how they impacted my acting and my life.  (Chubbuck 2004.viii)

If this sounds potentially indulgent, Chubbuck is careful to explain that she is not talking about the 'reliving' of emotion.  We have all seen the sort of acting she dismisses:

            As a working actress, I would see so many actors who were truly dredging up deep, painful emotions, but whose work seemed self-indulgent.  I realized that having deep and profound feelings didn't necessarily make me a deep and profound person.  I saw that coddling one's pain – in life and on-stage – creates almost the opposite effect.  It seems self-involved, self-pitying and weak, the key characteristics of a victim.  Not the most compelling choice for an actor to make.  (Chubbuck 2004.viii)

I know of no better description of the dangers of confusing acting and therapy than this.  However, what Chubbuck is saying about actors knowing themselves is that it is their understanding of the very process of moving through and out of trauma that is important.  This turns trauma into 'a stimulus to inspire and drive'  (Chubbuck 2004.viii)

Now we may not all have the background of 'a distant/dysfunctional/workaholic father and a physically and emotionally abusive mother' that inform Chubbuck's work, nor does she or Mamet suggest we need to.  But their common insight is that an understanding of the way our minds and our drives work is essential to us.  Moreover through understanding our own mental procedures we perhaps can begin to understand those of others:

            Different personalities cope with life in different ways, and knowing your own range of 'coping' strategies gives you an idea of how you deal with life events.  (Evans. 2003.22)

Evans suggests that personal 'truth' is relative, and through understanding our own world view we may be able to understand and ultimately perform from the world view of another:

            Conversations and transactions between opposite types may effectively beparallel monologues, like the hospital manager who says, 'We have to lose ten beds,' and the nurse who replies, 'That's impossible, there are people in them.'              Both are true to type, and compromise may require a conceptual leap into another view of the world.    If you are able to make such 'leaps' into the inner world of other people, you can gain valuable insights, as...actors are             particularly trained in doing.  (Evans. 2003.22)

Evans also points out that these differences are apparent rather than absolute.  He suggests that we share human traits and it is preference, 'tendencies towards' traits as he puts it, that marks the difference:

             You only have tendencies towards preferred traits – you actually use all of them at some time.  (Evans. 2003.22)

This idea is very much in tune with one of the key concepts of Neuro Linguistic Programming.  This cluster of therapeutic and sales techniques was put together and christened by Richard Bandler and John Grinder in the 1970s and has attracted both popular adoration and condemnation ever since.  Both these attitudes perhaps stem from its roots in hypnosis, deriving from the work of Milton H. Erickson (see Bandler and Grinder 1975).  The fact that it has a highly behaviourist methodology with models of the mind based on computing and artificial intelligence (Bandler was a computer programmer who studied with Gregory Bateson) has also attracted strong views.

In fact I suggest that NLP is a fertile blend of emotional and practical techniques.  As an actor I find it very appealing.  The concept of hypnotic trance will be familiar to actors who put themselves into what would be defined as clinical trances in order to rehearse or perform.  The idea of systematising the processes of the mind will also be familiar to trained actors.

One NLP concept which Evans may well have been thinking of when writing his comments quoted above, is the idea of ‘internal modalities’.   Bandler and Grinder suggest that people internalise models or maps of the world, encoding them in three specific ways (or modalities) namely visual, auditory and kinaesthetic.  We all learn about the world through all three of these senses, but although, as Evans noted, we can therefore internalise all three representational systems, Bandler and Grinder suggest that in the course of time ('by the age of 11 or 12' O’Connor & Seymour 1990.29) we come to favour one over the others:

            When you make initial contact with a person s/he will probably be thinking in one of these three main representational systems.  Internally s/he will either be generating visual images, having feelings, or talking to themselves and hearing sounds.  (Bandler & Grinder 1979.14-15)

Bandler also suggests that we can only use one system at a time and that thinking in a different one requires 'translation'.  (Bandler n.d.Disk 3).  Most significantly for our purposes, people exhibit different behaviour when they are thinking in each mode.  Bandler and Grinder deal with verbal choices and eye movements (Bandler & Grinder 1979.10-77) whilst O'Connor lists examples under four headings:  eye movements, voice tone and tempo, breathing, posture and gestures (O'Connor 2001.50)  These theorists suggests that it is useful for psycho-therapists to notice which system their client is using for a number of reasons (for example in order to match and therefore communicate clearly and effectively with the client on both a verbal and physical level).  This procedure is not in fact theoretical but comes from observing what the successful family therapist Virginia Satir did in practice and modelling it (that is reducing it to a systematic pattern which can then be learned by other therapists, Bandler & Grinder 1979.12).  They noticed she adjusted her patterns to fit in with her clients from moment to moment, and also that the clients often misunderstood because of this structural difference in the communication rather than, or as well as, the content of their communication.

My insight concerns the use to which these ideas might be put by actors.  I suggest they can follow the procedure of understanding how these modalities operate in themselves.  This follows Chubbuck's concept of understanding the way our own minds operate.  Then actors can use the model of these modalities to operate in the present on-stage in two ways:

1. They can access and accurately recreate patterns of behaviour that are instinctive to them in life.
2. They can develop the ability to behave in other modalities than the one they personally favour.

The first of these may help to overcome Mamet's problem of repetition.  It also fits both Mamet's and Chubbuck's criteria of allowing the actor to 'do' something, rather than wallow in self-indulgence.  The second carries all the same advantages, but potentially allows actors to play themselves (they are accessing their own less favoured modalities after all) whilst at the same time being different and creating a character other than their own.

Let us examine how these ideas might work in practice.  I have tried out these ideas with undergraduate students over the last two years in a module entitled Theory into Practice and will quote some of their reactions at the end of this paper.  The practice involved: eliciting an awareness of the ways in which the students were using modalities; eliciting awareness of the student’s favoured modality; exercises to allow the students to foreground different modalities; and improvisation exercises to practice and develop the actor’s fluency with using different modalities.

I shall briefly describe here the work based on two behavioural manifestations of internal modalities:

1. Eye cuing.
2. The use of language predicates.

Eye cuing is the insight that people move their eyes systematically depending on the type of internal information they are accessing.  In other words, people's eyes tend to move directionally up, down or centrally to the left or right depending on whether they are making a picture internally (up), hearing a sound (central) or having and internal kinaesthetic experience or constructing an inner dialogue (down).  These movements can be observed (if done carefully and sensitively) by taking someone you don't know that well and asking them questions which will inevitably require them to utilise these different sensory systems.  Here are Bandler and Grinder's instructions transcribed from one of their workshops:

            Start out by asking visual...questions.  What color are the carpets in your car?...What shape are the letters on the sign on the outside of this building? All of those are questions about things that people here have seen before.
            Then ask questions about things that the person has not seen and will have to construct:... How would you look with purple hair?
            Then ask auditory questions: What's your favorite kind of music?  Which door in your house sounds the loudest when it's slammed?...
            These are all ways of accessing auditory experience.  The cues that the person will offer you non-verbally will be systematically different from the cues they offer you to the previous set of questions.  Then ask a set of kinaesthetic questions:  How do you feel early in the morning.  What does cat fur feel like?  (Bandler & Grinder 1979.24, US spelling original)

Students generally do observe these cues, although of course the usual problems occur with such observation exercises (for example the subjects become self conscious and stare fixedly at their questioners – Bandler and Grinder discuss a number of similar pitfalls to observation in a controlled situation, see Bandler & Grinder 1979.24ff)

My next step is to invite the students to play with these different eye movements in order to elicit different states in themselves.  For this I set up improvisations where one particular type of eye movement is likely to be prevalent.  For this idea I am indebted to my colleague of many years ago Michael Wright, the director of Act English, a TIE company in Italy.  I recall him doing a very funny demonstration of a child lying.  This was years before I knew anything about NLP, but it came back to me and had a different meaning after I had come across this idea of systematic eye movement.  What Michael had noticed, and improvised brilliantly, was that young children when they are telling a made up story, tend to look strongly up while they do it.  The curious thing is that if you do this, you will find your whole body adopting appropriate movements, very much in the way Keith Johnstone describes when using one specific physical change to teach status:

            If I speak with a still head, then I'll do many other high-status things quite automatically.  I'll speak in complete sentences, I'll hold eye contact.  I'll move    more smoothly, and occupy more 'space'...We were amazed to find that apparently unrelated things could so strongly influence each other; it didn't seem reasonable that the position of the feet could influence sentence structure and eye contact, but it is so.  (Johnstone 1979.44)

The same thing happens when employing Michael's 'trick' of looking up when playing the truant child.  I realised that the reason this happens can also be interpreted as to do with the fact that the child is strongly creating visual pictures for himself in order to create his fictitious story.  I experimented with the fact that this 'character' should therefore look up and to the right when constructing and to the left when remembering.  This sounds much more complicated on the page than it is in practice.  The instruction is for the student improvise being a child who is very late home from school.  Students are to prepare an actual sequence of events for the child (for example they went to the shop, bought and ate sweets which is forbidden).  Then they place that sequence of events mentally up and to the left and swivel their eyes to the right when departing from it.  So I might improvise:

Child:  Well (look up to the left) I came out of school with my friend (swivel to right) and we went to the park.

And so on.  Students had great success with this exercise.  It is an easy matter to devise other situations for the other eye cues, for example have a musician talk about the concert he did last night and the new work he is writing.  For kinaesthetic a sports person is to improvise exaggerating the seriousness of a fall from a mountain bike.

Students begin to discover their preferred internal modality through doing this because they will report feeling more comfortable in one or perhaps two of these states.  I have even had students claim that they cannot visualise the child's journey, hear music or summon up the physical sensations one has when riding a bicycle.  O'Connor has an excellent set of exercises (guided meditations) to help develop the different internal skills ( O’Connor 2001.54-58) which assisted in most cases, and I suspected a certain desire to be special in the one or two students who persisted in reporting an inability to access internal states.  After all, unless blind I cannot understand how a human being can really be incapable of visualising.

The second sequence of exercises I have devised derives from the use of language predicates. 

Initially I tried to introduce this indicator of modalities in a similar way to the eye co-ordination by getting students to listen to each other telling stories or talking about their lives.  In practice this worked with only a few students, most reporting that such words didn't arise often enough in practice.  The passage above is, of course, artificially dense.  Also, in life there are many words which are not related to any system, for example: 'think, understand, be aware of, believe, sense, know'.  (Bandler & Grinder 1979.25).  The way I have developed to work on this takes rather longer to achieve but produced some spectacular results.  My procedure was to give students a list of predicates from one of the three systems (see  O’Connor 2001.65-6 for an extensive list).  In pairs they then practised telling stories inserting as many as possible from the list, with their partner listening and correcting if they accidentally inserted predicates from other systems.  After some time to orientate themselves to this, they resorted and the exercise became a game of spotting which system the other  person was utilising.

After this they repeated the procedure for the other two systems.  One essential part of this was that they simply then had a number of predicates from each system memorised and accessible. I then set groups to improvise in simple situations (on the beach, sharing a house, etc.) with the only character indication arising from their use of predicates keyed in with the appropriate eye movements.  Very rapidly this produced some astonishingly accurate and funny improvisations.  One extraordinary thing which arose was the reproduction (without my having mentioned this) of exactly the situation which caused this work to arise in the first place – namely that people in family therapy mis-communicated when using different systems.  Thus when three improvisers were given the situation that they were all to be 'visuals', the characters tended to sit around chilling out and agreeing about everything.  On the other hand if I put a 'visual', an 'auditory' and a 'kinaesthetic' together, they all began arguing and usually had complex triangular relationships (where one felt her lover didn't grasp her problem, he couldn't see eye to eye with her, and the third could hear that there were issues needing discussion).  In line with Keith Johnstone's observations quoted above, students also showed complex body language in these improvisations.

The students themselves communicated a sense of revelation from these and similar exercises I have done with them.  I was open about the experimental nature of the work and asked them to write feedback on what they had discovered after sessions.  Here are some extracts which were all anonymously submitted:

            During the improvisation exercise I felt that the improvisation came very easily and naturally. This was due to the freedom of mind experienced during   the exercise. 

            I found it interesting to see how using different predicates automatically created tension and this could be useful when devising.

            I found the techniques for the modes very useful to create mood, as you simply had to recall them when performing. 

            (About predicates)  It was at first difficult to stick to just one way of thinking, and we found that several times we slipped back into thinking about and voicing other areas and their predicates.  However with practice we started to             build on what could be an interesting piece of theatre.

            I found all aspects of NLP quite difficult initially.  However after putting the theory into practice and studying its effects, it all suddenly clicked into place.

The use of modalities in this way is, as far as I am aware, an original piece of research.  At present my observations, and my subjects’ feedback, suggest to me that this concept provides a useful behavioural tool which could help to overcome the problem David Mamet describes of the deadliness which comes with attempting to repeat in the theatre, particularly in terms of emotion.  I observed in practice what the third student reported above, that for some students the action of inserting predicates or adjusting eye movements was sufficient to put them in the appropriate mood, simply by remembering to do these actions.

References:
Bandler, R.  (n.d.)  The Bandler effect  (Video set)  London: New Line Production
Bandler, R. & Grinder, J. (1975)  Patterns of the hypnotic techniques of Milton H. Erickson, M.D.  California: Meta Publications
Bandler, R. & Grinder, J.  (1979)  Frogs into princes  Enfield: Eden Grove Editions
Chubbuck, I.  (2004)  The power of the actor  London: Gotham Books (division of the Penguin Group)
Evans, A.  (2003)  Secrets of performing confidence  London: A & C Black
Johnstone, K.  (1979)  Impro: Improvisation and the theatre  London: Methuen
Mamet, D.  (1997)  True and false: heresy and common sense for the actor  London: Faber
O'Connor, J.  (2001)  The NLP workbook  London: HarperCollins
O’Connor, J & Seymour J. (1990)  Introducing NLP  London: HarperCollins