How to Rehearse Ichi-Go Ichi-E – PART 2

So I’ve been explaining the way that we rehearse, and today we’re onto As-Iffing, a technique strongly rooted in Stanislavski and taught to me at the Atlantic Theater Company’s Acting School in New York City. We’ve bastardised our technique since then…

Acting AS-IF

After we’ve done our table work and worked on making sure the actors are in the habit of acknowledging each other, we move on to habituating them to the actions they will carry out. By actions, I mean psychophysical tasks that they will be doing during each scene. These are real world tasks, something achievable in the real world, unlike the fictional world goals, wants or desires of the character, which are not achievable and therefore remain fictional and that the actor never really commits to carrying out.

So we give them a real world task to carry out from their real world scene partners. In Practical Aesthetics, these are called Essential Actions, I simply refer to them as TASKS. To practice embodying the TASK and acknowledging the other actors, we do As-IFFING. This helps to habituate going after the TASK, while acknowledging the other actors’ behaviour and switching between TASK and ACKNOWLEDGE. The context has been gleaned from the fictional world through the analysis at table work. The TASK has already factored in some of the imaginary circumstances, so we do not need to waste time and energy pretending we are in the castle at Elsinore, or Castle Greyskull for that matter.

As-Iffing

I need to get you to give me a commitment. That’s my TASK. I have transformed my character’s desire to have your character Christie be his girlfriend into something universal and essential, the TASK – to get a commitment. Now when I go after my TASK, I am working off you constantly, acknowledging your presence and noticing the changes that occur in you. As you change, I adapt my behaviour towards you, altering my tactics to suit your changed behavioural state. I have trained through Repetition to notice even small changes in your behaviour, so that I can act upon them. Now I change my tactics to try to change you. I have already found a parallel situation in my own life, an imaginary daydream that has given me the context for my behaviour. I am not going to try to connect to the fictional circumstances of the scene. Instead, I am going to look for something that tells me about the type of behaviour I would exhibit if I was trying to get a commitment from a loved one. A real person in an imaginary situation.

(At this stage, we do something called PREP, a one person version of As-Iffing, where we speak out our daydream as-if the person were there. We don’t pretend they are. We just say and do those things that we would if the person were here and you were trying to get a commtiment. This helps us as a marvellous resource for tactics for our scene/as-iffing, but further more, tells us what really going for the task within a context feels like)

While we’re busy doing this to each other, we also begin to bring in elements of blocking, so that even the blocking relates to our moment to moment interactions and not just responding to the end result words of the script.

The end result words of the script? I mean that the words are the end of intention. Someone wants something and these are the words that end up on the page, but they are not the intention, they are not the drive. They may be beautiful, poetic, harsh, amazing, but unless I understand what is behind them, I will not be able to bring them to life in the moment.

Tomorrow we’ll talk about GIBBERISH, there is a blog relating to this already.. but in the context of rehearsing ICHI-GO, ICHI-E, one chance, one meeting, or to get the most immediate performance possible, GIBBERISH is an amazing tool in rehearsal for keeping the lines fresh.