Passion, Visions, Trance: Using Laban Technique to Train Actors in the Performance Non-Ordinary Psychophysical States in German Expressionist Drama

Abstract

Passion, Visions, Trance:Using Laban Technique to Train Actors in the Performance Non-Ordinary Psychophysical States in German Expressionist Drama Gerald Large (bio) In Washington State, where I teach acting at the community college level, high school juniors and seniors can take community college classes for credit (a program called Running Start). Thus, my acting classes are populated mostly by sixteen- to twenty-year-olds. Occasionally a returning veteran will give the class a try, as do students of a certain age. Rarely do I have a theatre major. This demographic is liberating in that I needn't worry about training hopeful professional actors. I can explore a broad palette of training methodologies. I can play. But "play" in the context of an acting class must be meaningful for the students. Play needs to touch them deeply. Surprisingly, I found that a movement from a century ago and a continent away provides a promising playground for my students: German Expressionism. The explosive, transcendent, and socially forward-looking plays by August Stramm, Georg Kaiser, Oskar Kokoschka, and many others give us characters who frequently move from a quotidian existence to non-ordinary states of mind. Characters in these plays don't just have objectives of a mundane nature. They are absolutely manic in their passionate desire to transform both self and society. They have visions. They sit in trancestates as if suspended in time. When I casually asked my students if they'd be interested in exploring the performance of non-ordinary states of mind—specifically, heightened passion, the act of having a vision, and trance states—the response was a resounding "Yes!" This was followed by the obvious question: "How do we do that?" How indeed? I've never taught "expressionist" acting, and my experience with the plays of this movement are not as a director but as an enthusiastic reader who takes copious notes. Digging around in the back of my filing cabinet, I found a file labeled "GE." There I find pages of notes of Stramm's Sancta Susanna (1911), Ernst Toller's Transfiguration (1919), and other plays of the genre. Then I found what I was hoping I'd kept: notes on the dancers, choreographers, and the schools of dance of the German Expressionist movement, including Mary Wigman, Rudolf Bode, Dorothee Günther, the Bauhaus experiments, Rudolf Laban…. This is when I have my "aha!" moment. I'm neither a dancer nor choreographer, but my lifelong interest in both modernism and modern dance has put me in touch with Laban many times. Rudolf Laban (1879-1958) was both a prolific choreographer and dance theorist, whose writings include a seemingly inexhaustible supply of dance categories, theories, and instructions. I knew Laban technique had what I needed to help student-actors explore the performance of non-ordinary states of mind. In this essay, I relate the lessons I found useful in teaching an introductory acting class on the performance of non-ordinary states of mind as found in German Expressionist plays. Specific techniques I explore are Flow, Effort Elements, Motion Factors, and the Passion, Vision, and Spell/Trance [End Page 29] Drives. Additionally, I use scenes from Reinhard Sorge's The Beggar (1912) as the touchstone from which to explore the performance of heightened passion, experiencing a vision, and the trance state. _______ After two weeks of introductory theatre games and improvisations, I sit with the class and introduce them to German Expressionism. I briefly talk through several plays, screen short clips from silent Expressionist films, and show them paintings from the movement. Then we dive deep into Sorge's play The Beggar (which students have previously read).1 Textual analysis is completed by students divided into small groups. They work through several basic questions on character relationships, then they list scenes where they think characters are in a high state of passion, experiencing a vision or hallucinations, or are in a trance. When the groups have completed their task, we reassemble and go through each question. In general, students are perplexed by many of the play's disconnected scenes, by the sudden appearance of angels, and by the abrupt shifts from prose to verse. I welcome the confusion...