CHAPTER SIX: PRESS THESIS

CHAPTER VI:  TEACHING THE SOURCES OF STYLE

At this point the thesis becomes more difficult to simply condense.  The focus is that “Krause’s most significant contribution to the theatre lies in her teaching a systematic way of approaching a role so that acting style springs from circumstances integral to the play.”  But what she does is not very systematic.  I would describe it as “principled,” that is, it is not a check list but a response to what is there.  The work is cumulative: she is always building on what was done before but earlier work that has been “realized” is meant to be internalized, so that it doesn’t have to be repeated or extended.  And it is “emergent” meaning that it comes from the dynamics of the elements, not something imposed.  But I’m imposing this on Press.

This part of the thesis attempts to compare the Krause “method” with the Stanislavsky “method” more than earlier chapters.  There are questions of definition and procedure.  Of course, no one involved had ever seen Stanislavsky direct actors.  His books are translations.  (Press’ advisor was a playwright, which might account for some of the curiosity about structure of plot.)

Krause wants the meaning of the play to emerge through the developing of the actor’s sense of the author’s intent and the style to come from what is pared away from the reality in order to make the point. Thus she would devise challenges, improvs, gimmicks, to get actors to feel what was necessary for the play to work.  

She speaks of finding ways of calling out the gifts of quite different actors, and suggests Dick Benjamin and Paula Prentiss as examples of VERY different people who had to be treated in quite different ways, though they were and continue to be lifelong partners.  (I witnessed her working with them and what she says is true.)

Rehearsal of a specific play had four phases.

I.  Forming ideas about the play and their roles in it.  This is in conformity to the director and is very much the sort of work described in “Literature as Experience” by Breen and Bacon.  (AK assumes that her students have this kind of background -- that they are literate.  This is, after all, a university!)

II.  Scenes are performed, analyzed, experimented with while the characters “gel.”  AK wants the understanding to come from within the actors, while staying in the parameters the director has set.

III.  This is the moment to moment interaction of characters in which a “space forms between them” -- relationships.  To use the concept of liminality -- a virtual reality forms.

IV.  Now this virtual reality can be extended to the audience and the actors can vary their performances to include audience participation without losing their own grasp of the stage world.  Meaning can be nonverbal, but it will emerge now.

I’ve reworded this somewhat.  It seems to me that some of these concepts were only just forming and being named in the academic world:  centering (Gendlin), flow (Csikszentmihalyi), liminality (Turner), structuralism (Piaget), felt concepts (Langer).  They’ve been greatly extended now through counseling, brain function study, and clever experiments.  I feel as though going into these ideas too much would not do justice to what Press was attempting, since he didn’t have this knowledge.  Nothing he says contradicts these ideas, AK becomes very elusive at this point, hard to pin down.  She sees what’s on the stage, she responds to it, and then it works.

From from being confined to modern psychological realism, AK is particularly fond of Shakespeare, Chekhov and the Greeks.  She is eloquent on the subject of their cultures as she conceives of them and tells how she finds the right “style” of presenting the plays, always justifying the sources in the play, esp the language.  Part of the reason she enjoys these eras is because she feels they are strongly physical.  Acting, she insists, is in the muscles -- not in the head.  She recognizes genres like tragedy, melodrama, farce, comedy of wit, but sees them as coming out of the playwright’s understanding of the particular era and subject matter.  She is close to religion when she talks about “the nature of man.”

There is a passage on clowning but it is very short.  Her demonstrations of clowning in class were memorable -- not Clarabelle but the porter in “Macbeth” or often Irish self-contradicting drunks.  I wish she had talked about  putting “a spider in Mr. Applebaum’s tea,” an intention expressed by a nice little old lady.  Much of AK’s success as a teacher and director was the charm and energy of her self.

Instead of trying to condense the rest of the chapter, I think it would be more helpful to speak of what is hidden just under it.  If I were writing this, I would set it up as a comparison between the psychological realism that the sophisticated Manhattan Jewish intellectual community had promoted as Stanislavsky’s “Method”, rather in the spirit of Freud’s rules and assumptions, and which had acquired much mystique and orthodoxy  -- as opposed to AK’s “method” which came out of the American midwest Chatauqua tradition of public speaking, both political and expressive, which had roots in England, especially working class England.  The media has been over-impressed with the stars AK produced (though she despised the star system) and not even aware of the directors who grasped this way of working.  Often they were tent-makers, organizing small repertory and ensemble theatres like those that were such proving grounds for actors in Britain.

Press’ final paragraph is worth repeating:   “Krause conceived of acting as a ‘poetic’ art.  Through acting one could go beyond the pedestrian communication of plot and theme or idea behind a play.  Acting had to create the ‘dramatic experience’ which lies for her in the audience’s sharing the electricity of a play; and acting had to create an experience of the play as a poem, arousing connotational meanings that cannot be fully articulated.  Acting becomes poetically connotational when it has its roots in the vision of the world within which the playwright created.”

CHAPTER FIVE: PRESS THESIS

CHAPTER FIVE:  BASIC PRINCIPLES: IMAGINATION

This chapter moves towards the integration of what has been learned so far.  The actor “creates from images.”  They come from remembered experiences, experiencing art, reading, filling oneself full of observations of humans and information about humans in other times and places: philosophy, sociology, history, psychology, art -- whatever would “develop an awareness of living.”  Her key word was “imagination,” and she identified four basic elements:

1.  the power to re-experience remembered perceptions, including observations of others.

2.  the power to imaginatively reshape images from the past

3.  the power to reshape current perceptions -- imagine something is other than it is

4.  the power to invent fantasy

(By now --2012 -- there are standard and familiar exercises for therapists.  But several books of the Fifties -- notably Boleslavsky and Viola Spolin supplied patterns and ideas for training actors.)

Press emphasizes that AK is looking for IMAGINATION and control rather than emotion.

EXPLORING THE POWERS OF IMAGINATION

Metaphor is the main tool.  Emphasis is not on just standing frozen while thinking of being some object, but rather expressing that object in action, gesture.  Do not analyze in words.  This is where AK runs athwart the “word and analysis” culture of a thesis.

THE VICARIOUS EXPERIENCE

Using fiction or history, try to become another person by summoning up all the influences on them and their desires.  Try them out in improvisations.  Concepts investigated include:

1.  Thought between lines (subtext)

2.  multi-level awareness and response

3.  interplay

4.  transfer of thought and emotion

5.  playing from moment to moment

6.  realization

Stanislavky concepts included are:

1.  basic drive (S. called it super-objective.)

2.  conflicts

3.  inevitability of behavior

4.  sequence

5.  character objective

6.  dramatic objective

_______________________________________________

I suggest and will try to expand later in a longer piece that AK partly became paralyzed over how to explain what she was doing here because it was very much part of her personal transition from being a teacher of interpretation to being a teacher of acting.  She wanted to be able to assume that the actor had all the wonderful humanities background that Bacon & Breen describe in “Literature as Experience” but then with the ADDITION of action, movement.  What outsiders seem to think is that her Interpretation of Literature background was lesser or not necessary, but for AK it was a vital safeguard against both the kind of emotional excess that leads to “Black Swan” ideas about fucking the ballerina to make her more like an evil swan on the one hand (Hollywood) and on the other hand performing theatrical stunts like having the ballerina dance en pointe on the head of the prince (China).  Both extremes lose the physical and spiritual metaphorical content of a large white bird that glides in water and across the sky, full of mystery and unknown destination.

CHAPTER FOUR: PRESS THESIS

CHAPTER IV:  BASIC PREPARATION: RESPONSIVENESS

This chapter deals with the basic steps of first year acting class, called B43 at NU.  In terms of the quarter system, the fall quarter deals with increasing sensory awareness, the winter quarter concentrates on developing imagination, and the third quarter is about putting those abilities to work by developing a role with which the student strongly identifies.  [These steps are very much in accord with recent brain theory which posts that all thinking is based on the senses, then upon opening up the ability to perceive on many levels at once, and finally to intensifying empathy with others.]

EXPERIENCE PRECEDES UNDERSTANDING

This is one of the places that misunderstanding the “Method” can go wrong.  It is not necessary to walk the streets in order to play a prostitute nor to do surgery in order to play a doctor.  Just pay attention and use your senses.

IMPORTANCE OF “SIDE-COMMENTS” AND “SIDE-ACTIVITIES”

Exercises might be designed to increase awareness of the character’s inner life and motives, or they might be meant to tap into the actor’s past.  [ Here are two examples not in the thesis.   When I was giving a shallow and wooden version of the messenger who brings Medea an account of the poisoned gown that sets the rival princess on fire, I was asked to imagine that I was reporting about a forest fire.  In labs taught by the assistant, Larry Smith, asked us to play “What’s your price?” to consider in advance what might make us ditch a rehearsal on a blizzard night.  A cup of hot coffee?  A lover?]

The task at hand is always to embody the playwright’s intentions.  AK was eloquent about this.  Van Meter took notes in class as a teacher/observer and provided them to Dave Press.  They are the main content of this chapter.

OTHER TOPICS INTRODUCED IN THE FIRST YEAR COURSE

Van Meter’s list included:  views on acting and the theatre, training of the actor’s senses including kinethesia, the nature of responses in human beings, training in observation, sense memory, memory for experience, insights into the reasons for human behavior, insights into the nature of what Krause believes is properly “dramatic” and “theatrical,” the use of the body and voice in acting, improvisational techniques, discipline and ethics required of theatre workers, insights into play construction, the feeling of truth in acting, the influence of the environment on people, artistic reality as opposed to reality, communication or communion with audiences, “control of one’s work”, how to analyze a role so it leads into action, theatre and acting terminology.

Another list from the winter quarter included:  sub-text, multi-level awareness and response, interplay, transfer of thought and emotion, playing from moment to moment, recognizing climaxes or the moment of transfer or change, realizations, the use of metaphors in acting.  

In the spring quarter students chose exercises from “Modern Acting: A Manual” or enacted a character from a novel or biography. The section included an intro to playing comedy, about “created” worlds, and about conventions demanded by the nature of theatre.

CRITICISMS -- ORGANIZATION AND ORIGINALITY

Criticisms arise because AK’s methods do not necessarily conform to the conventions of the academic context.  For instance, she does not use lesson plans because the content of the day’s work arises from the situation of the specific student and interactions necessary to address them.  Contradictorily, she is criticized for using the exercises in “Modern Acting: a Manual” and therefore not being original.  

Most of the criticism arises from trying to understand “sense memories”, mostly because some insist on going for a specific emotion they presume the character must feel, while AK put emphasis on the ACTION of the character and thought the sense memory should be one that accounted for the action.

Van Meter’s notes record her as saying:  “If the stimulus is real (i.e. if you respond to the right thing in the stage situation with your senses and make the appropriate associations out of what you know about your character and about life) the emotion you want will follow automatically.  You can’t create emotion -- it follows by itself on the heels of the stimulus.”

AK is reacting to the cultural confusion of intense emotion with acting.  This stirs up much reaction, both positive and negative.

FEELING AN EMOTION

Emotion is circular to some extent: that is, if one imitates the action of an emotion (anger or fear, for instance) one will begin to feel it.  Emotional discovery should be done in rehearsal and through exercises.  Then during the play it can be recreated, possibly just by imitating moves.

EXERCISES USING PRIMARILY THE VISUAL SENSE

These included close examination of small objects, remembering them, maybe imagining something about them later.  Or the assignment might be to follow a person, watch them, and imagine why they moved and interacted the way they did.   The student might be asked to imitate the person as they saw them and then maybe to invent a different setting and see how they might act there.  The next step would be to account for these behaviors by considering class, education, income, ethnicity, and so on.

Much of this formed the content of the journals which AK read and annotated weekly.  The journal was in part a way of handling class sizes of forty or more.  Sometimes she would post a message to the whole class at once, addressing something the journals were pointing at.

EXERCISES USING PRIMARILY THE AUDITORY SENSE

These exercises included awareness of voice and music.  Pretending to be blind helped focus and so did pretended to be deaf and imagining what impact it would have on character if that person were deaf.  How do different people listen in different ways?

EXERCISES USING PRIMARILY TASTE, SMELL

AK considered these to be relatively dull, though they include food!  She doesn’t address evocative smells in isolation.  In fact, she rarely encourages accurate memory of some specific stimulus, always wanting them to be related to action and situation.

EXERCISES USING PRIMARILY THE KINESTHETIC SENSE

This is major, not least because it is almost always a response to something.  She uses much metaphor and the exercises include imitating animals.  Famously, we were assigned to visit Malvina Hoffman’s Hall of Man to assume the postures of the portraits in order to discover how the model’s lives had affected their bodies.

CHAPTER THREE: PRESS THESIS

This chapter seems to deal with matters that are very deeply rooted (18th century studies in elocution, 19th century Romancism, the group of “Stanislavskian methods” and an approach that owed a great deal to Dean Dennis: the idea that each student should be taught as an individual, while searching for the means to bring them “alive” and competent.  Personal values, near-religious convictions, passion for life achievement were taught parallel to the discovery of theatre literature and technical presentation.  A reaction to this approach was forming (Grotowski) but did not interest her.  She felt acting was done by a whole person and enriching the person was the way to create a better actor and ultimately a better world.

CHAPTER THREE:  KRAUSE’S TEACHING: AN OVERVIEW

NO HEADING

AK used lectures and extemporaneous comments, journals when students were beginning, individual conferences. and a steady stream of notes.  Other people, John Van Meter and Robert Schneideman used what seemed to be the same or similar methods, but because the interaction was rooted in the person, they didn’t have the same effect with a different instructor or even with a different student.  (It was nearly like psychotherapy, though Press never mentions that.)

In spite of the uniqueness of this interaction, when it came to the actual script, AK was almost tyrannical (she used the word) in insisting on what she believed to be the core donnée of the playwright. The “framing” (Goffman) of the playwright’s mind, the assumptions of the times, and the message of the play were the goal.  The rest was simply preparation and means.

It is important that AK included the AUDIENCE in the work of understanding and engaging with a play.

PROBLEMS IN ACHIEVING MULTI-LEVEL UNDERSTANDING

One important consideration was style.  For instance, in a tragedy like “Long Day’s Journey into Night” the audience must feel the suffering, but in a light farce, the suffering is that of Wily E. Coyote -- easily shrugged off.

SOLVING PROBLEMS OF ACHIEVING MULTI-LEVEL MEANING

Developing an “author’s sense,” which is necessary for actors, means understanding the structure, the language (sounds, rhythms, imagery and line length) whether or not the rhetoric is meant to be prose or poetry.  Symbolism, irony, sequence, and so on must be mastered to properly convey the meaning of the play.  This is literary but also connotative.  (Press does not suggest that it comes from her background in literary interpretation.)

ONLY ONE CORRECT INTERPRETATION

Collisions happened between the Krause interpretation of a play and the student actors’ desire to experiment or even a sincere belief that she was wrong.  Her position was that she was glad they questioned or even rebelled but that she was the boss or she would not bother to direct the play.  The counter-argument was that this attitude was not appropriate for a teacher.

STIMULATING AUDIENCE PARTICIPATION

She feels that the actor reaches a balance between the art and craft of acting on a stage and the true human experience of the character so that one serves the other.  This should be in the context of the playwright’s and character’s world.

One of her key mantra’s was “acting is responding.”  [The best explanation of this that I know is the thesis called “The Space Between Us”  by Kenty/Carroll  I blogged about it on www.prairiemary.blogspot.com on Oct 24, 2012.]  An actor who is able to create that “space between us” -- not only with other actors but also with the audience -- has charisma, showmanship.  [This is being explored in terms of “spindle cells” or “mirror cells” among the brain neurotheorists.]  The actors responding to each other with attention to timing, tension, release and so on, create a kind of liminal space (Turner) that the audience can enter in the way they might “enter” music.

ENCOURAGING SPONTANEOUS RESPONSES IN THE AUDIENCE’S PRESENCE

In the beginning she was surprised by the assignment to teach acting and didn’t know how to proceed until she hit on the idea of improvisations.  Her first success with this technique was in directing Chekhov, which has remained her reference point.  It is the PLAYWRIGHT that is the key, not any acting technique from a book.  “. . . Finally and wonderfully the thing I had been searching for: the orchestrations, the music, the phrasings, the playing of theme against theme -- I was almost beside myself when I discovered this.”  There is an element -- to continue the music image -- that is almost like jazz in letting the “inevitable happen.”

EXPERIENTIAL KNOWLEDGE

The actor should experience in some form any experiences pertinent to understanding a role.  Knowing the ethos of the time, wearing period underwear, remembering one’s own life -- all resources.  She included the kind of stage, as in Greek or Elizabethan times.

In this section Press mentions AK’s ability to persuade, creating word images and music.  Someone claimed she had delivered a speech on Shakespeare in iambic pentameter.

PHYSICAL AND PSYCHOLOGICAL APPROACHES TO ACTING

AK used a number of exercises to raise the consciousness of the actors.  Press lists:

1.  The actors play their parts as written, but paraphrase the dialogue in their own words.

2.  The actors mix their own language with what is scripted.

3.  One or more of the actors speaks his or her subtext aloud though no one acknowledges that they hear it.

4.  Actors act out scenes from their character’s early lives, not idly but to realize the impact on that character.

5.  A scene that is analogical to the scene in the play but different -- the structure is preserved, but not the specifics.

6.  The actor plays the character’s part as though it were the real-life actor who was the character.

Press interrupts to say that sometimes AK would invent a character for herself and introduce some surprise element into the scene.

7.  Improvise the character as an animal or an object.

8.  Play a scene in character but using a totally contrasting style, particularly when an actor seemed only able to play realism.

9.  Play the scene in grunts and groans, an invented language, or as though a deaf-mute.

10.  Find a symbolic gesture or pose.

11.  Devise an outside-of-rehearsal improvisation that emphasizes the relationship of characters.  Press describes Anya teaching Trofimov to dance.

12,  Acting out metaphorical improvisations like ones often used in counseling, like arranging people in “sculptures” of family relationships.  She used thrown balls or jabs with fingers or squirt guns to get concepts into muscle understanding.

The above list would do you no good at all.  It is the skill and appropriateness of the devices that makes them effective, and that depends upon one’s sensitivity, skill and experience.

CHAPTER TWO: Press Thesis

This is the chapter that really explains Alvina Krause as a person, as a teacher, and as an actor/director.  She believes to her very core that theatre is the most human of activities, not as much therapeutic for the individual as crucial for human culture.  Many times she sounds more like a religious minister than a university teacher in a cynical time.  I would guess her to be very similar in her thought to Spinoza or to the secular humanism of the rural Midwest, but she doesn’t address religion per se.  

CHAPTER TWO:  PHILOSOPHY OF THEATRE

THEATRE’S POTENTIAL TO SERVE

Press transcribes wonderfully evocative statements from AK, including her reaction to the assassination of JFK.  She affirms a belief in art as vital to life, saying technology is less important.  She praises laughter but not trivial fluff and says that every community needs a theatre of its own.

A SENSE OF THE COMMONALITY OF HUMAN EXPERIENCE

She identifies the Olivier production of “Oedipus” as her benchmark:  not a play that gives answers but one that unites us in aesthetic response.  She uses her most intense word:  “astonishment.”  She says,  “The bedrock of drama is human experience.”  She claims that achieving “truth” will bring even the uneducated into the experience of theatre.

Press keeps trying to get an evaluation of “discursive” knowledge -- what we might call today “discourse” or “analysis” or “theory”, which was a movement just barely beginning at the time.  She discounts it every time.  Not to exclude it, but to emphasize the evocative, the depth understanding that underlies words.  Her examples are from Eages Mere where the patrons were not part of an elite intellectual crowd as at NU but rather are ordinary citizens who really “got it” because they saw around them the forces illustrated in the play. 
She expresses no resentment of the cultured elitists; given her origins, she may have felt it.

SIMILARITIES WITH OTHER ARTS

AK gave a very high value to music in particular.  She says,  “The picture itself, the sculpture itself, has an intangible meaning” that finally can’t be pulled out by analysis.  She says that the high value of theatre rests on “the living actor” who offers access to the vicarious and empathetic.

Press returns to the question from other angles but get increasingly impatient versions of the same answer:  “I am talking about connotation, implication, a total something that happens to you, a TOTAL something, not just with your head.”  And yet,  “The more deeply the director and actor come to understand how other arts operate and what they do, the better their directing and acting will be.”

They shift to talking about movement and again AK emphasizes the WHOLE BODY and recommends a book that was crucial for her:  “The Thinking Body”

by Mabel Todd, a system still in use and not only available on Amazon but also on YouTube.   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8nG1DdSkF4o

AK asserts what most of us know if we think about it:  as you watch other human beings do something, your body subtly registers the same movement.

ETHICAL APPROACH TO THEATRE

AK says, “The beauty is in the truth of human character, in the revelation, the illumination of meaning.  In art only lies are ugly -- the passion for truth is the basis of good acting.”  She uses the word ‘revelation.”

IRRELEVANT TO OUR LIVES

Krause feels that (Press’ words) “Our commercial theatre in effect discourages relevant playwrighting and meaningful acting.”  She feels it is appealing only to a certain set of people who value stars and being “in.”  There is a long transcribed dialogue as Press tries to understand the limits of what she means.  There’s a tendency to think that “serious” means grim and gloomy, but AK says, “I don’t want to crowd out anything that is sheer joy in the theatre.”

RESPECT FOR THE PLAYWRIGHT

The two anchors of truthful theatre are the living actor and the meaningful script, which she feels is rooted in the era when it was written.  She feels nothing worthwhile has been written recently.  Press asks whether actors might simply improvise a script.  She says yes and then is silent.

The breakup of the USSR is just beginning and she points out how relevant Antigone is to that struggle.  Press wants to know whether farce can be “truthful” and meaningful.  Her answer is yes, with “timing, pointing, just the right touches of characterization, and no more.”  “That’s not Stanislavsky!” protests Press.  (Maybe it is.)

Press moves on to experimental theatre.  She accepts the necessity of experiments but claims that most of them are not theatre.  Surprisingly, she admits some early fascination with German Expressionism and “early O’Neill” but says it was mostly good because “it was an awakening.  Actually it was a crystallization.”  But then she goes back to Antigone as contemporary.

PHILOSOPHY OF EDUCATION

“Acting is not a lecture course, acting is not teaching of a subject, not the teaching of a class, but the teaching of individuals to become artist-actors. . . As I discovered a need, I directed study to supply that need.”  “Each student might need to have a different awareness kindled.”  (She expresses something like what religious educators call “formation.”)

Press says,  “She used two main approaches to teaching  through trial and error.  One was meant to prove, the second was meant to lead to discovery.”

First she designed a challenge assignment that would give the actor an occasion of struggle to understand and achieve.  Second she would work through the problems that were revealed to see what would fix them.  She called it “directing a search.”  She said, “I taught individuals, expecting all to discover basic principles, but to leave the course as individual artists.”

This approach had been very much encouraged by her beloved (and formative) Dean Dennis who wanted every teacher to find out what every student was about and to address it.  Press remarks that some people felt that this was invasive.  (This was a time that was emphasizing individuality, self-determination, and the freedom to do whatever, without rules and supervision.)   Her defense is that she is educating the whole person and therefore everything is on point.

The next issue Press raises is whether AK is unreasonably requiring professional standards from students.  Her response comes down to the belief that all theatre is professional theatre and that even the commercial professional theatre requires directors to teach.  She suggests that anything less would be treating actors like robots, which is unethical.

ETHICAL RESPONSIBILITIES OF THE ACTOR

This section is almost entirely a dramatic and (to my memory) accurate reconstruction of AK’s usual lecture on the first day of B43 acting.  “All art is difficult, and it takes time.  but I will not tolerate stupidity and laziness.”  And, “Each of us has his own special problems.  If we are to work freely we must not be afraid; there will be no room here for jealousy, back-biting, and intrigue -- three things the theatre abounds in.”  (Also, academic departments of theatre.)

Weaver says,  “She talked on: didactic, visionary, sometimes unreasonable, but demanding, demanding, demanding.  Her effect was hypnotic.  For a group of young men and women of whom perhaps little had been required save tolerable manners and good grades in school, she presented a challenge that was irresistible.”

SUMMARY

Press suggests that “Her contribution has not been of new ideas.  Part of her contribution to the hundreds who have studied with her has been that she has been able to stimulate commitment to these same [classic] values.”

SYNOPSIS OF CHAPTER ONE OF PRESS' THESIS ABOUT AK

As I look closely at this thesis and explore the MUCH larger context, a lot of ideas come to mind -- some of which might be fantasies.  Therefore, I will stick to the most obvious condensation of what is on the pages.  

CHAPTER ONE:  INTRODUCTION

JUSTIFICATION FOR THIS STUDY

Most of this part comes from testimony of alumni hoping to reverse AK’s forced retirement, which Press says NU was forced to do because of her age of 68. (Much politics around this, but none is addressed.)  

There are quotes from stellar students testifying to AK’s effectiveness.  256 alumns signed a telegram.  The Christian Science Monitor ran a long story.  Others quoted include Neal Weaver (now theatre reviewer and blogger at the LAWeekly), Stuart Hagmann, David Pressman, Gerald Freedman, Charlton Heston.  Louis Hetler wrote a doctoral study of Stanislavsky’s influence on teaching and identified AK as among the “most prominent.”  In 1968 during a casual conversation Press was told by Dean McBurney that AK was worthy of doctoral study.  (Throughout her career he had opposed her.)

NEED TO PRESERVE A RECORD OF HER TEACHINGS

NU, Yale and Carnegie-Mellon are identified as primary educators.  AK herself has not written and does not intend to detail her methods.

Though Louis Hetler “proved” that Stanislavsky’s methods -- one way or another -- hugely influenced college acting teachers, no specifics were pursued.  Press asserts that though AK used “Method” concepts, they were only part of her pre-existing and parallel strategies.

PURPOSE AND SCOPE

1.  Discover the consistent philosophy of theatre underlying AK’s teaching.

2.  Codify her most recent theories about actor training

3.  Record representative curriculum and teaching practices.

The time-frame was 1950 - 1968.  Both the NU classes and the Eagles Mere productions were included.  “Visual” (set design, costumes) and “managerial” (advertising, tickets) were not addressed.  Press had wanted to do “library” work, but it became clear that transcriptions of interviews were the main option.  

AK resisted the whole process, feeling it was all too much like obituary and declaring that she just did what “had to be” without analysis.  Grudgingly, she said, reacting to a draft of Chapter Three,  “Well, I read it.  It’s all true -- I think.”

Two main sources of material were John Van Meter and Weldon Bleiler, both dead now.

BACKGROUND OF INTERVIEWS WITH KRAUSE

Press had been AK’s student.  In the first interview he asked whether she considered herself to have a taught “a variant of the ‘Method,” to have been a “Stanislavsky Method director.”   She was quite definite in saying,  “No, I do not.  . . If I am anything like Stanisslavsky it’s that he was always seeking, and I think I’ve always been seeking and still am, for what is this thing called acting.”

PROCEDURES

Press used a tape recorder, but it was not always running.  If AK said something that seemed important while it was off, she was asked to say it again.  Once he asked her to prepare a demonstration but doesn’t report the result.  Most of the time he asked questions as they came to mind, but also John Van Meter helped him to prepare questions.  Press valued narrative answers.  

AK wanted to revise what she had said, to take some things back, to restate and so on, but Press sometimes resisted.  She was NOT used to pressure.  But Press concludes:  “Van Meter was sure that an integrated, consistent philosophy of theatre lay behind Krause’s teaching, and that her answers would reveal that philosophy.  He was proved to be correct.”

NOTE:  The post on www.DavidGoingOn.blogspot.com today (10-28-12) is highly relevant.

PRESS THESIS: a foreword

Now I’m going to begin to record a brief overview of David Press’ thesis, called “The Acting Teaching of Alvina Krause: Theory and Practise.” (1971)

Let me begin by quoting Press in a recent communication after I explained what I was going to do: take the thesis apart and react without consulting him.

“As for my dissertation, I am grateful for your interest and that you are seriously examining it.  I was just in contact with a friend who earned a doctorate at another university who commented that he doesn't think anyone ever read his dissertation besides his committee.

“I won't be offended by your distancing yourself from me as you parse it. In my own correspondence with Miss Krause. if you remember, I express my own dissatisfaction with what I had accomplished, encouraging her to consider building upon it once it was done and approved by my committee. I was aware that I had approached Miss Krause with the proposal that we could work together to record her teaching methods.  Instead, my committee was forcing me to not just record, but to evaluate and look for sources and influences. That departure from the collaboration we had both hoped for in the beginning had led her to distrust where I was going and limited her willingness to cooperate.

Perhaps the many detailed and urging letters AK wrote to David Downs (see www.DavidGoingOn.blogspot.com) while he launched his teaching career at NU should be seen as a continuation of the information in the thesis after calm reflection and in a less critical context.

My personal experience of thesis writing gave me a suspicion of the process per se.  Once intended to demonstrate a grasp of a body of academic material, a thesis has come to be a sort of polarization between an earnest student trying to create something worthy of publication (and entry into a professional vocation) and a small panel of mentors trying to maintain the integrity of their own work.  The slang is hoop-jumping.  Gate-keeping.  The percentage of grad students who achieve all but their thesis is high.  So many abandon the effort (I did) that it's called an ABT --"All But Thesis." A thesis may turn out to be a lifework.

The outline of David Press‘ thesis is in six chapters.

CHAPTER ONE:  INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER TWO:  PHILOSOPHY OF THEATRE

CHAPTER THREE:  KRAUSE’S TEACHING: AN OVERVIEW

CHAPTER FOUR:  BASIC PREPARATION:  RESPONSIVENESS

CHAPTER FIVE:  BASIC PRINCIPLES:  IMAGINATION

CHAPTER SIX:  TEACHING THE SOURCES OF STYLE

I’ll discuss at least one a day, so that will take a week or so.  Some chapters might be worth two days of discussion.  Feel free to interact, question, make corrections or whatever.  I see us as a community.