AIS #1 - Introduction
Spontaneity is central to human life. The spontaneity of children - so delightful (and sometimes embarrassing!) to adults - is a touchstone of humanity. A ‘cornerstone of individual well-being and human sociality’, spontaneity is closely linked to both trust and effectiveness (Slingerland 2015, p. 18). Partly, this is because ‘spontaneous behavior is hard to fake’ (p. 11).
Spontaneity is central to acting too because it is connected to vitality and aliveness and believability. Finding reliable means to generate spontaneity onstage is a holy grail of theatre, one that has been pursued by many of the world’s great theatre traditions and practitioners (Roach 1993, pp. 16-17; 225-226; Spolin 1973, pp. 4 & 392; Shetsova 2021, p. 111; Stanislavsky 1980, p.13).
Yet, making spontaneity intentional is evidently contradictory, even paradoxical. How can anyone, actor or not, “intend” to be spontaneous? Does not the very effort to be spontaneous on-demand, in and of itself, defeat any true spontaneity? Attempts to purposefully, deliberately control one’s own spontaneous being have been likened to a self-conscious, ‘monstrous’ manipulation of self by Shakespeare, no less: Is it not monstrous, that this player here, but in a fiction, a dream of passion, could force his soul so to his own conceit (Hamlet 2:2; see also Strasberg 1964, p.117)? Or, as one writer puts it more prosaically: “people can, after all, learn to fake a really good smile or a sob. That’s what actors do all the time” (Smail 2008, p. 151). Isn’t such behavior acting as faking it? As “playacting”? And doesn’t such behavior bring us very close to Lord Olivier’s ‘what is acting but lying, and what is good acting but convincing lying?’ (2021; see also Sudol 2013, loc-266-418)? Finally, does not acting as lying itself underpin the plague of the mendacious and the performative in the political sphere and beyond (Runciman 2008, pp. 8-9; Williams 1989, pp. 8-11; Goffman 1974)?
How then to reliably generate the freshness, aliveness and ‘truthfulness’ that comes from genuine, real-deal, endogenous spontaneity?
My approach offers means to effectively intend spontaneity, means which avoid acting as fakery and as falsity. And which counteract pretension, affectation and fabrication in acting. And all that these entail. My Art of Intentional Spontaneity training (AIS) enables performances that are both startlingly spontaneous and yet highly repeatable, manifesting as vibrantly alive, vital, energetic, full bodied, whole-hearted, warm. And with an underlying joyful festivity (Vakhtangov in Malaev-Babel, 2013, p. 252). AIS is the paradox at the heart of acting realised: “as if for the first time, each time”. In other words, mine is a particularly efficacious way to approach, reach for and attain intentional spontaneity, so much so that we dare call it such with capital letters: Art of Intentional Spontaneity. That’s not to say that I promise perfect, easy intentional spontaneity 100% of the time. Not at all.1 Yet, contra Diderot, with devoted practice AIS enables reliable playing from the heart and soul (Roach 1993, Becker 2004).
Primarily, my AIS training is for actors, directors, theatre workers and other performing artists. Its value is that participants gain ‘a capacity for beyonding” (Burke in Smail, 2008, p. 9). That is, they learn to feelingly play the human condition - telling stories, enacting plays or other kinds of scripts or other works that reflect or confront our lives - without the debilitations of excess self-consciousness.
AIS has a purpose which is a lot wider and bigger than just another method for actors. Its reason for being lies in the way it directly addresses various levels and kinds of performance anxiety. In our day-to-day living, we all find ways of dealing with fears, dreads, apprehensions. In life or theatre, it doesn’t really matter, the same struggle goes on: a constant on-going tension of ’not being comfortable in one's skin’. We usually find ways of coping by learning to manage and to keep the resultant anxieties in check with many different forms of control system. Acting in the arts often covers these fears, rides over them, only to emulate or react to them when creating fiction. We often get caught in between.
I say it is impossible to dream when you are awake. The kind of engagement I try to help actors to build is like a purposeful daydreaming. That’s where the intentionality starts. To convey the intentions of any given incident in a script - and its purpose, its implications, its movements - we must surpass our natural biological- psychological anxieties. This is the bridge out of the purgatory people always get stuck in, consequently building ‘unnatural’ cover ups and mannered behaviour. What AIS tries to do is: help the person to move forward, towards exploration of other paths, towards other ways of ‘presenting’ which hopefully tally with the given script - and / or its direction.
The Art of Intentional Spontaneity is a craft for reliably achieving spontaneous yet repeatable aliveness - and not a mere facsimile or representation thereof - on stage or screen (McNish 2014, Critchley 2020, pp. 278-280). It is a significant way out of very convoluted, messed up predicaments pertaining to actors and acting.2 And it is a way towards becoming agile and ready to perform, like getting ready to paint: collecting and preparing the paper, the screen, the brushes. AIS is a very wide (as wide as you can stretch) funnel. In this sense, it is a foundational creative process useful across styles and genres, and a range of performing arts, including many forms of dance, and postdramatic theatre. It works with text or devising. It is in no way limited to naturalism or realism (modes that I personally go out of my way to avoid).
“Don’t come empty handed to the first rehearsal’ (Brook 1968, p.30). This pamphlet is framed as a guide to proactive pre rehearsal, to the actor actively getting ready, tuning up for a specific upcoming production by using AIS. Its objective is to help actors to prepare to go into rehearsal with a director or manager or “conductor” or with an ensemble using an “outside-eye” process of some kind. That said, experiential learning is required. Alongside reading about it, anyone who wants to practice Intentional Spontaneity should first do the work with me or with someone I license. This statement underpins all the concepts floated in this paper.
Extract from ‘The Art of Intentional Spontaneity’ by GJ Kalic.