Introduction

Dad initiated me into seeing. Sunday was his day to take the kids off my mother's hands. He and I would go to the park, or the bus sta­tion, or anyplace where there was a flow of people. We'd sit and watch folks pass by, and make up stories about them, attempting to guess their circumstances: Were they happy, Why or why not, what was their work, were they playful? Did they have a sense of humor? (Dad seemed to think this was very important.) Did they live alone? Did they have money? Were they honest, crooks, liars? We would imagine what it was like to be living in those bodies, shapes, weights, postures.

When I was 17, he gave me a book, Autobiography of a Yogi by Yogananda. Since then, books of that genre have been on my night table and their content has consumed my thoughts. The titles and authors have changed, as have the continents of origin—Western Europe, India, Japan, Tibet. But the substance remains the same. Who am I? What is experience? How do I proceed through this life? These inquiries, always stirring in the back of my mind, have influenced the way I've gone about making theater and devising this training. Not consciously, just as a whis­per, choosing this over that.

I began dancing school at six—ballet, and then modern. I loved hard work, motion and silence. I loved dancing, saying I was dancing and being identified as "a dancer." I carried this personna into my early twen­ties, when I began to teach and choreograph, finally inventing for myself, finally feeling my own way.

In the mid 60s, a friend who was Chairman of a University Drama Department asked me to teach movement to the theater students. I accepted the job, naively thinking I would be teaching dance.

The first day, after greeting people, noticing how they were dressed, and how they behaved, I asked them what they wanted to learn. "To embody our characters," they said. Without a clear understanding of what that meant, I said, "Okay. Walk." After watching a few steps, I knew what my job was. These students had to get into their own bodies. They had to embody themselves before they could embody anybody else.

I began with simple explorations of ordinary tasks— walking, sitting, standing, reaching for things. We were improvising, even though "impro­visation" hadn't come onto the scene yet, nor into my mind. I was mak­ing things up because that seemed to be the way to get things done. It wasn't long before I fell in love with the improvisation process, sponta­neous expression, and the strange and graceful phenomena when the mind surprises itself.

In 1969,1 moved to Berkeley, California, and joined the march toward feeling. My interest in improvisation really took off. It fit the climate of the territory and the times. Berkeley, too, was improvising: politically, socially, and psychologically. My students and I moved with the collec­tive surge into the performing of the unknown.

For years I had been silent, but now, I opened my mouth. Voice was terrifying and seductive at the same time. I was off on a new course. Voice led to language, language to content and feeling. I was speaking and sounding, not just moving. Throughout these years, I was so dedi­cated to the discovery process that I isolated myself from my dance and theater colleagues, not peeking outside of my laboratory, not wanting to see what others were doing. It occurred to me that maybe I was rein­venting the wheel. But I was on fire and it didn't matter.

I've spent the past thirty years investigating what I call Action The­ater: the state of, and tactics for, body-based improvisational theater. I've done this by practicing, performing improvisationally and teaching stu­dents in my own classes, at theater, dance or art institutes in the United States and Europe, in psychological and spiritual centers. No matter who I work with, the situation is always the same. We all share a common and simple impediment: our judging minds. Regardless of our intentions in any situation, we haul around the past and future. To relax our attention into the present moment is extraordinarily simple, but, for most of us, it demands a lifetime of practice.

Action Theater: The Improvisation of Presence presents a month-long training, twenty work days of Action Theater. Each chapter reflects a single five-hour session of the training. The exercises for the day appear at the beginning of each chapter and are ordered developmentally. I pro­vide instructions for every exercise and discuss their applications and implications. Occasionally, I add a story, anecdote, or metaphor. Like the practice, the writing of this book was in itself an improvisation. I began with the exercises and let them direct my thoughts. The chapters spun themselves out.

This book comprises an Action Theater awareness and performance training. It's a model, not just for performance but for life. It offers a way to proceed. Who we are, how we perceive our world, and how we respond to those perceptions are the same regardless of the surround­ings. In the studio, we improvise within forms that are relevant to the­ater, but the lessons we learn effect our daily lives. The training is comprised of exercises and ideas that expand awareness, stimulate imag­ination, strengthen the capacity for feeling, and develop skills of expres­sion. The rules defining the exercises are constraints that isolate components of human behavior. These rules open pathways that lead into unexplored territories where the mind and body rejoin, where there's no disparity between action and being.

The Action Theater exercises don't set up life-like "scenes." Instead, life-like and non-life-like situations arise through physical explorations within forms and frameworks. The forms are open, content-less, and address how we organize specific aspects of behavior or experience. They invite us to inhabit our bodies, deconstruct our normal behavior and, then, notice the details of what we've got. This process frees us from habitual perceptions and behaviors. We become more conscious of our moment to moment thoughts, sensations, emotions, feelings, and fan­tasies, in addition to the outer world we inhabit.

This practice turns the mind inside out. Because we place the activ­ity of the mind into action, we can observe its ways, examine who we are and how we operate. We can consciously redirect our functioning.

This text offers an example of one twenty-day training of what I consider the basic work. When I teach my class the format follows no sin­gle tradition, neither dance nor theater. All of the participants are simul­taneously active throughout each session. I rarely demonstrate anything. I watch, occasionally interrupting them to mention something I've noticed, or suggest they try a different approach. Usually, at the end of the ses­sion, small groups perform for the rest of the students.

I begin every session sitting in a circle with the participants. I sense the mood, the energy present and respond with the first exercise. Each class builds from what I see is happening or not happening, combined with the basic work that I intend to cover. The order is haphazard and immediate. I make up new exercises, veer off on tangents if need be. I watch the students and observe details. They teach me what to teach. Since every exercise has within it many teachings, what comes up each day and why it comes up, is dependent on what was occurring at that time. Every class is ideal, whether it's progressively arranged or scat­tered. Understanding the work comes with doing the exercises, regard­less of what order they're done in. I purposefully say the same things over and over. I've done so in the book as well. As one progresses through the training, concepts understood early on ripen into deeper knowing. We learn through repetition. No matter how different the exercises look from each other, they're all about the same thing: presence.

The length of time students improvise on an exercise or score is vari­able. Usually, newer students have a shorter capacity to stay with an investigation. Their interest wanes due to the lack of skills. More expe­rienced improvisers may stay with one exploration for hours. In class, I judge whether inaction or dullness is due to fear, boredom, laziness, dis­traction or lack of skill.

Some students arrive expecting to learn techniques that will turn them into charismatic performers, lawyers, teachers or parents. Soon, they learn that techniques bear limited fruit. At some point, we must look inward for our education. We must notice what inhibits our free­dom, be willing to give up all preconceptions, be truthful, and relax in order to act from lively emptiness.

You need not be in a class, or even a member of a group, to benefit from the material in this book. Many of the exercises can be done alone or with a friend. No matter how they're practiced, they lead to the free expression of our constantly changing inner realities. They help us develop the ability to speak and be seen in all our aspects, to play and to connect with others.

Contradiction is inherent in the documenting or prescribing of impro­vised work. This book should be considered as a path of stones which lead in many directions, or a set of arrows that point to varied possible paths. You will undoubtedly take the precise path which you need to fol­low. That path will bring you home.

Day One

Form/Content

1A. On/Off Clothes

IB. Walk/Run/Freeze in Same Scene

1C. Move Same Time/Freeze Same Time

ID. Move at Different Times

IE. Performance Score: Autobiographies

The space is a large and sunny dance studio with a sprung wood floor. Mirrors run along one wall covered with white sheeting. Twenty students of varying ages and nationalities arrive. They change into their movement clothes and come out onto the floor. We sit in a circle, exchanging names, where each of us lives and a little information about what brought us to this training. I talk about our schedule, outlining our class times and discussion times. I tell them that they'll have fifteen minutes between the time they arrive and the time we form our opening circle to be on the floor, to stretch, sound, move or whatever it takes to relax.

I tell them that I will be telling them what to do for the next five hours. I tell them that most of the time they will be impro­vising on the floor rather than talking about improvising. I say that we will devote ourselves to the exploration of the phenome­non we call awareness. They will practice techniques to increase their skills of perception. We'll aware together.