Lineage

ANTONIO FAVA IN HIS WORKSHOP WITH HIS MASKS.

In 2006, I had the great good fortune to study with a master of the commedia dell’arte Antonio Fava. For two weeks I was in a group of Philadelphia theatre professionals, making fools of ourselves under Fava’s smiling countenance. It’s hard to express the impact those those two weeks had on me, not only for the fascination and awe I developed for the extraordinary genre he was teaching, but also in what I learned from him about being a teacher of acting and improvising. On that latter point, if I could distill it down, it would come to this: the master teacher loves his students, especially when they fail.

VYACHESLAV (SLAVA) DOLGACHEV

A couple of years earlier, I studied with another master. Slava Dolgachev is the Director of the New Drama Theatre in Moscow. His own acting teacher had been a student of Contantine Stanislavsky. For a person steeped in the process of rehearsing, performing and teaching realistic acting, I felt like I was two degrees away from the legend who invented it all. But what I got from Slava was not at all what I expected. Rather than lectures on performance theory, he put us (a group of acting teachers) through a series of drills and exercises on our feet that were entirely experiential. In one, we had to move around he room with a partner, maintaining the distance of an imaginary stick between our outstretched hands. In another, we attempted to stop a blindfolded partner from moving away from us by jerking our head up and focusing on their back. The number of times this actually worked made the hair on my neck stand and tingle. I asked him about Stanislavsky’s interest in spiritual energy. He paused and said, through his interpreter, “Acting is not for ‘smart people’, acting is for people of faith, who dive in, who are a little crazy.”

Both of these men practice and teach their art from a distinct and acknowledged lineage. I remember Fava telling us that his own father (or uncle?) was a commedia performer. And Dolgachev worked on the plays of Chekhov, the playwright who was in essence Stanislavsky’s partner in realism. And so I am led to ask . . .

What is my lineage? What is yours?

The word obviously comes from the root “line”. The suggestion is we can draw a line from who we are (creatively, familiarly, politically) to a person or persons who came before us. In the arts, this is usually a teacher or other mentor figure, who we feel has imparted to us foundational ideas about art and creativity. And if we name ourselves in that person’s lineage, then we are saying that who we are and what perform and teach has been deeply affected - almost formed - by that person in our past.

MOM PERFORMING WITH DOUGLAS DUNN IN THE GRAND UNION

All of this came to the fore for me when I participated in an online conversation last weekend with my mother, the dancer, teacher and choreographer Barbara Dilley. Called Talking Improvisation and moderated by my friend and colleague Amy Smith, this was a fundraiser for Bright Invention attended by members of both my mom’s and my own art tribes. It has been source of curiosity to me that many of my creative undertakings and approaches to teaching have been deeply influenced by my mom, even though I never had anything like an apprenticeship with her, never studied with her, and in fact, have had to navigate an occasionally fractured relationship with her.

Mom was discussing her work with the Grand Union, the seminal dance/theatre group she was part of in the early 70s, that improvised all its shows. She came to that work out of a tightly choreographed experience with Merce Cunningham. I came to long form improvisation from the scripted work of stage acting, and this parallel we share - from scripted/choreographed work to improvisation - was a subject of our discussion. My mom has developed an exercise called “Lineage tree” - you can read about it in her book!

ME PRACTICING LONG FORM WITH ENSEMBLE MEMBERS AIMEE GOLDSTEIN AND OWEN COREY

Mom calls Merce and his partner John Cage her “art fathers” and Yvonne Rainer and the Grand Union her “art mothers.” Its a beautiful way to honor both approaches to dance without choosing one over the other. As she spoke I longed for such a neat lineage, but the truth is mine is blurrier, at least for now. Perhpas Bobbi Block, who introduced me to long form, is one of my art mothers. But so is Virginia Ness Ray, my voice teacher at the Yale School of Drama, who taught the work of Kristin Linklater. And speaking of Yale, Earle Gister, my first year acting teacher there, is certainly one of my art fathers. But so are Slava and Fava, even in the brevity of my time with them. I know I carry some of them into my creative work to this day. It feels as if I don’t have a lineage as much as I have a kaleidoscope, a great mandala of teachers who are significant pieces of the ongoing design which is me.

In some communities, your lineage is biological, and for the most part you can’t choose it. This has given rise to generations of oppression, as “chosen” lineages oppress others in order to preserve and consolidate their power. Think of Indian castes. Think of English peerage. Think of white supremacy.

But also think of your own parents. Perhpas the clearest lineage I have creatively is to both my mother and my father, Lewis Lloyd, who was professionally an administrator and producer of performance. My dad was a stage manager, company manager for the Cunningham Company, managing director of the Brooklyn Academy of Music, leader for the New York State Council on the Arts, public television manager at WGBH. As Executive Director of Bright Invention and also improvisor and artistic director of the ensemble I am somehow, almost comically, a perfect combination of my mother and father.

So I invite you to create your own lineage. Think of it as a thought exercise - not a destiny or edict. The great thing about this exercise is you get to notice what parts of your art mothers and fathers you hold on to and what parts you’ve left behind. In this way, you are “purifying” what made them so powerful, distilling them to their essence in your own work and play, keeping the best parts of them alive. It’s a way to do something I think we don’t do enough of these days: honor our elders, their love, their wisdom, their experience. Who knows. Maybe someday you will be in someone else’s lineage . . . and may they honor you when they put you there.

To access a video of Talking Improvisation with me, mom and Amy click here, then use the passcode: #*b3xY5B 

Here’s a silent video of me and mom improvising together in 1968 . . .

The Commedia Connection.

Recently, in preparing our show we are calling Improvasushi!, I began to understand that what I am interested in doing is a 21st century version of the Renaissance Italian theater known as commedia dell’arte. And the more I explored this connection, the more excited I became. I studied commedia for two extraordinary weeks in 2006 with the acknowledged master of the form, Antonio Fava. I was entranced, not only by Fava’s energetic and elaborate teaching style, but by the boldness and creativity of commedia itself. You can read about this experience more fully in my personal blog here. For Fava, commedia the performance style cannot be understood without understanding commedia the economic entity. “Commedia dell arte means ‘professional theatre!’” Fava would bellow. And he explained that these companies (and they called themselves companies) were the first western example of professional actors.

A COMMEDIA COMPANY ARRIVES

I left that experience regarding the commedia actor as heroic: perfecting the performance of stock characters within unscripted plots - the shows were enormous structured improvisations - and at the same time, being occasionally persecuted by prelates and nobility, suspicious of these actors with bawdy senses of humor, and smarting from the satire they put on display. The shows, Fava explained, were not only un-scripted, they were calibrated and adapted to the specific audiences they were being performed for. They were breathtakingly immediate and personal to the people watching on that day (always in the day of course - no electricity.) I found myself moved and inspired.

Our ensemble Bright Invention practices and performs long form improvisation. What’s that, you ask? Well, good luck finding a succinct definition, and if you do please let me know. Here’s a short Medium article about long form improv which also has some useful links. And here’s my little snapshot:

A COMMEDIA COMPANY ARRIVES

With this post I launch “Letters from Ben”, the replacement for the monthly newsletter we used to generate. At the beginning of each month I will post a rumination of sorts about the work Bright Invention is doing some area. My goal is to create a personal connection to you through writing. I hope you like it. Feel free to comment and ask questions!

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As some of you know, Bright Invention is an extension of a strange collision of concerns of mine. On the one hand, a concern for the extraordinary genius of the actor; how we are descended from a lineage of celebrities, vagabonds, eccentrics and seers beginning with tribal shamen, who were healers as well as performers. On the other hand, an interest in the economic pressures on the modern American performing artist; how commercial forces dehumanize this most human of all artists, turning us into things which are bought and sold, and capitalizing on our ambition and vulnerability for profit.

ANTONIO FAVA

Short form improv is what most people think of when you say “improv”: short, absurd and silly scenes and sketches based on audience suggestions.

• If short form uses clever ideas to generate laughs, long form explores deep relationships to reveal shared humanity. Long form is based in realism, short form is not.

• Long form is often funny, but it doesn’t have to be. Once improvisation is freed from the requirement to be funny, entire galaxies of experience open up.

• Long form is “long” because the relationships between characters developed in shows continue through the entire show. This is seldom the case in short form.

• Short form is often a means to an end, the end being scripted sketch comedy based on improv. Long form is the end itself.

But our ensemble is also dedicated to “expanding the genre” and it is in this vein that we will begin to merge our work with some of the traditions and approaches of the commedia companies. We will begin to include rehearsed performance in our improvised long form shows. As with the commedia companies our shows will begin and end with rehearsed music and song. And we will soon begin to develop lazzi - rehearsed, solo set pieces sometimes comic, sometimes not, performed by individual members of the ensemble, and inserted into our shows. What these little solos are, and how they appear in our shows remains to be seen. But what I am sure of is that they will showcase the remarkable range of talent in our ensemble, from music and singing, to spoken word poetry, to dance and circus performance, to clown and physical comedy.

OME OF US, EXHAUSTED, AFTER THE IMPROVATHON!

What we won’t borrow from commedia are the masks and precisely organized performances of stock characters. But we do strive to have the same sense of immediate and personal audience connection that commedia companies thrived on. And, as with these extraordinary Renaissance ensembles, we are determined to explore new paradigms to support the economic needs of the modern American actor through our corporate training work.

Stay tuned!