Questions About the Body: Authenticity and Sanity for Live Performance in the Age of Zoom
"Censored on Final Approach" - Infinite Variety Productions
My friend Sybil and I were entering the Hudson Theatre in September of 2019, when a man jumped the line ahead of us, carrying a beat-up suitcase, wearing an overcoat and a surly expression. He walked with purpose through the crowd, security not giving him a second look. He went immediately to the bar, pounded a pint of beer, and slowed down for the second one.
This all took place in the five minutes it took for Sybil and me to find our seats. We had no idea what “Sea Wall/A Life” was about, but it sounded interesting, and I love Jake Gyllenhaal. We sit. The stage is lit, split between an upper and lower level, connected by a staircase that that man eventually walked up and sat on, rifling through his suitcase, the second (or perhaps third) beer looking oddly normal with hardly any context.
Then Tom Sturridge started the first half of the show, a monologue about a man’s loss and a family hurting. The show started well before the lights dimmed though: I saw him enter the building. It was his physicality, his furtive but resigned glance around to see if anyone would bother him before what I wrongfully assumed was him cutting the line; the direct, fast-paced walk through a sluggish pond of people toward the lobby bar; the quiet request for a drink, and the waiting. And it carried through the show. He didn’t want to tell this story. He had no choice.
I crave that kind of authenticity. The actor who commits not only while on stage but in the breath before the lights change and the audience settles in: I’m hooked on that power. The ability to start telling a story before anyone is even listening. Gyllenhaal in “A Life” managed the same power, his anxiety clear in the telling of the death of his father, the birth of his child, unable to stay in either story for longer than a few minutes, constantly moving about the stage and through the audience to the delight of those sitting in the orchestra section. It’s stunning when a performer commands my attention with their breath, their gaze.
In the world of small theater and education, it’s always a question in the back of my mind. Where do people learn to do that? Where is the authenticity, the commitment, or at least the look of it? I think it’s in the body. It’s always in the body.
One of the most common issues I see as a dancer in acting, especially in young actors, is the propensity to create a backstory and emotional content. There’s a whole script analysis that happens where actors have the opportunity to dive into who they’re playing. Sometimes it yields unusual results, and at the best of times, it’s both funny and heart-wrenching because of how true it sounds. It makes perfect sense that a comedic character had tragedy after tragedy happen often enough that they used humor as a coping skill and it became a hallmark of their personality.
I also see the other side of it where an actor goes so deep into the back story that they believe their version of that character is more real than what the playwright created. And then I think back to Sturridge pounding a pint. I don’t need to know what the character’s back story is verbatim; just that they have one. I can see their humanity, and I trust that if I need that information then the performance will yield it.
I see it dance too, and in a much more intimate way. I can see in a few minutes of a warm-up a dancer who is injured, who is hungry, aching, mind is elsewhere. I can see the moments when that same dancer starts to pull into the work, the second song comes on and it’s familiar, or the drummer in the corner has picked up the pace and the room starts to steam with everyone’s increased efforts. The dancer who stops looking in the mirror during the last run-through of the final combination, and they laugh with everyone else at how awesome this moment feels.
And I’m there too, living in that smile. The music stops, and everyone turns to their bags to turn their phones on and the moment has disappeared. The breathing is still heavy, and while the mind has moved on, the body remembers. It’s always in the body.
It’s in the queer people who hide in small ways while trying to reveal themselves to us, their community. Being LGBTQIA+ is a strange and beautiful thing, and hiding it is a chore with which I am familiar. I can hide my trans identity by dressing cis-male, and not need to hide my homosexuality because that’s a more acceptable thing to see than a non-binary person. People today can explain “gay” but not “they.” My physicality changes in small ways, squaring the shoulders, puffing up the chest while sucking in the waist, wide stance, direct gate.
The accepted form of American masculinity is easily detailed and performed, something I use to protect myself time and time again. Being outside the gender binary, I realize I don’t know how to move anymore. Once I shrug off notions of gender that don’t fit me, I then have to craft new forms or find ones others made and adapt them to myself. And the question is always, how much do I do? No one can see inside me to know me. Since all gender is performative, I have to do the thing to be seen. And I have to do the thing in this body. It’s always in the body.
It was February, before the announcement of quarantine procedures and precautions, and I was in rehearsals for Infinite Variety Production’s staging of an original work, “Displeyst.” Ashley Adelman, founder of IVP, wrote the work based on interviews with members of a Jewish family who escaped Austria to the Philippines and then to the U.S. during World War II. In addition to shadow puppetry, I was choreographing devised sections and helping provide movement for the actors when emotional content didn’t produce expected or natural reactions to various lines. I struggled with getting actors to see past the emotion of the character. The audience can’t see what a child in 1930’s Austria during Kristallnacht is feeling if they don’t do anything.
One actor waxed on about the internal state of mind of their character, all the choices they would have made up until that point, and how it would have affected scenes later on. I stopped them with the comment, “Yes, but what did you do to show that? What actions did you take to demonstrate that feeling?” No answer. And it’s because there is a regular disconnect within actors who want to focus on the emotional content of work. This method doesn’t work for everyone. One can look to various names, Strasburg, Meisner, Stanislavski, and use those methods focusing on personal experiences or different emotional states as a basis for character development.
What I find has happened is that when actors rely on these methods to the exclusion of any other practice, I end up with a performer who has no concept of how to work with their body and who take on an unnecessary amount of responsibility to emote without providing the audience with physicalized context.
Perhaps it’s a misunderstanding of what the above-mentioned methods are supposed to do. Maybe it’s poor training in college or growing up on what acting “is.” It doesn’t help when A-list celebrities and directors use “Method Acting” as an excuse to damage themselves or harass coworkers or create a hostile working environment for other performers (Stanley Kubrick and “The Shining,” Anne Hathaway and “Les Miserables,” Christian Bale and “The Machinist,” Leonardo DiCaprio and “The Revenant,” Daniel Day Lewis and a number of his works).
The depth of performance may not need extreme commitment to lifestyle changes that go against personal morals or endanger oneself or others. It is enough to know that people play with their hands or hair when nervous to then replicate it for a scene communicating anxiety to the audience without actually feeling anxious.
We are currently working on “Displeyst” to become a quasi-filmed/Zoom/theatrical production with shadow puppetry, elements of an audio play, and film techniques. We’re experiencing a host of issues completely unrelated to the content of the show. Technical issues arise, slow internet creating lag time for responses. Personal lives interrupt the flow of a rehearsal when one performer feels the need to apologize for their child making sound in another room, and everyone else mollifies them because we get it. And yet here we are, trying to make art for people to enjoy, and writing multiple missives to find pandemic based relief for artists. Meanwhile, within rehearsals, we try to do basic blocking but can’t organize our spaces necessarily to match the needs of our director.
“With Zoom, you can’t see each other in the eye. And you don’t want to put on art for the sake of art. You want it to have a meaning for people who are watching it.” Ashley stated this in one of several conversations on how to process art-making right now, and in trying to create a meaningful experience for an audience. Watching a performer’s body pop on and off the screen is jarring at times. It disrupts the flow of time in the work when suddenly I’m simultaneously in a kitchen and an office. Separating home life from rehearsal life when they’re in the same room has no easy solution, and leaves little room for finding meaning.
In honor of Veteran’s Day, IVP released an audio version of their well-reviewed play, “In Their Footsteps,” a look at the lives of five American women who served in the Vietnam War. The audio was crisp, and the sound engineer Andrew Dunn inserted effects that enhanced the listening experience by making me feel more connected to the environment the characters were in. I was able to keep my hands busy working on other projects, and I wasn’t distracted by actors who were holding a script, or trying to act, despite very clearly being in a corner of a living room or kitchen counter rather than a hospital hall with dying soldiers. The authenticity rang clear, despite not seeing the body. When one avenue of performance is blocked, we reroute all our talent and skills in a new direction and pray it works.
It’s the need to be present, to know lines, blocking, sightlines to other performers who are present only virtually, requiring deep knowledge of applications only minimally used prior to April of 2020. Constant feedback led to Zoom adding features for hosts like organizing the gallery view so that performers could have a better sense of where their scene partners are. But this doesn’t stop the baby crying in the other room. Or a dog barking. Or the neighbors upstairs screaming at each other. The list goes on. It’s hard to gauge authenticity during a pandemic though when the majority of an actor’s body disappears off-camera on a Zoom reading. The poor lighting makes everyone look a little older, more drawn, maybe ill; or is that COVID-19 after-effects? It’s harder still to center the conversation away from the reality of the situation. We are fighting an uphill battle, the actor unable to connect to a scene partner through a blurry laptop lens.
What I see as an educator, a choreographer, shadow puppeteer, and the several other skills I’ve had to pick up to make ends meet is a very complicated problem that people are not addressing: what happens to the body when it’s constantly in trauma (re: pandemic, unemployment, mental illness, PTSD) and still expected to perform to higher standards?
In the attempt to reconnect to my own body, this year I dove into family history and my story as a trans non-binary artist and started making a solo work. I am writing and recording audio tracks to overlay my dancing. I am reaching out to friends interested in filming dance, composing, costume design, and IVP is producing the work. Ashley is directing me, and while I am getting a lot of work done, I find myself at odds with several thoughts running through my mind: I am making a dance piece. I do not have space in my house to dance. It’s getting too cold to dance outside. I’m nervous about asking my yoga studio for dance space, despite the fact that they’re one of the few places open; and I work there. My own training has come to a standstill in many respects. Depression, anxiety, ADHD, impostor syndrome have all become heightened during this time as dance studios, galleries, and theaters around the country (and world) have closed.
Some brave spaces like the GALA Hispanic Theatre in Washington, D.C. have reset the narrative on live theatre, redoing their entire HVAC system, organizing the flow into and out of the theatre, restricting the number of patrons from 270 to 25, and using plexiglass to divide the stage from the audience. What a monumental shift for an established company, one who was able to financially sustain the renovation during a pandemic, and with high hopes of maintaining a performance season.
Meanwhile, several notable studios like Broadway Dance Center and Gibney Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center have shifted to online platforms, and theatre and dance college programs around the country work to craft outdoor spaces for safe physical distancing while still having a live experience. Students are barely getting by on the tiled kitchen floors of parents’ homes they’ve had to return to. Financial situations have become so dire that New York-based artists can no longer sustain their lifestyles on income from multiple service jobs. Professional level companies struggled to pay their principal dancers a living wage before COVID-19. Performers supplement income between contracts with teaching and other gigs.
Many segued into other fields like I did, learning yoga, Pilates, or other movement methods following the latest boutique fitness trends. Dancers rely on teaching physical practices as a continued form of training. If their studio or gym closed and they don’t have an online following, teaching becomes difficult to do at best, if not outright impossible. With theaters like GALA only serving a small percentage of patrons, the likelihood of paying performers an actual salary is set at the hands of a theater’s ability to also renovate their space to follow COVID restrictions or even just pay rent. Technique will suffer because of a lack of income to afford training. The cycle runs the body down quickly.
Regardless of Joseph R. Biden winning the 2020 presidential election, performers will continue to suffer disproportionately in comparison to other industries. With Broadway shut down for longer than projected, the whole live performance industry waits. A whole host of artists are now pushing the boundaries of art and performance in directions no one expected, and we all have to go to bed in bodies that are stressed, tired, confused, and straining to reach for our humanity.
In addition to technological advances through online platforms, we are at an ethical crossroads for the arts. While we start streaming Broadway productions on YouTube and make commercial and expensive art available for the masses, we can also address the stories told on stage. We can continue to ask questions about why there are still so few Black and Brown ballerinas in the best ballet companies in the country; why theaters are putting on classic works instead of innovating with queer-centric stories of contemporary populations; and why there are still people who question the necessity of the performing arts and making it inaccessible to all classes.
The arts traditionally are not valued at the same level as other aspects of society, seen as more a luxury than an invitation to join with our collective humanity for a moment and feel things, deep things. To be reminded of community. Small companies like IVP are still making productions. We the performers, the buskers, musicians, dancers, actors, singers, are still pushing our bodies to the limit to make art for the viewer to enjoy. To be distracted and entertained during a global pandemic. We dance and sing on camera, sharing our souls through our bodies, which we love. It’s always in the body.
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Sam Robbins is a Jersey City/NYC based queer dancer, artist, and educator, and they also sometimes cook.