Writing As Performance

RIP Kelly Kimball

Dear Friends,

I’m sharing a post about acting and writing. This is more schematic than what I normally like to share here but became more relevant with some sad news I got this week.

Best,

Sam

WRITING AS PERFORMANCE

The way I think about writing, and art, is influenced, even more I probably realize, by a couple of charismatic acting teachers I’ve had. 

The teachers had different approaches but there were a few underlying points in common: 

• The bare stage was something to really be respected and understood — it was important not to try to crowd it with sets, props, etc, what audiences were looking for at the end of the day was the presence of a human being, and they would make their evaluations based on that. 

• What mattered most was the desire of the actor to be on the stage. One acting teacher counseled her class to look at the actor’s feet as they entered — you could always tell a person’s desire from their feet.

  

  Geoffrey Rush slightly overdoing the feet thing in The King’s Speech

• It was important to be aware of the audience and, as it were, to breathe with them. One of the teachers, after considerable preliminary work, eventually brought the class to what she considered to be the pivotal exercise — in which each actor walked out onto the stage, stood center stage, and, one by one, with honesty and expression, took in the members of the acting class sitting in the audience. 

• The great question in acting was why should a person look at you. One of the teachers had an exercise in which everybody strolled around a space, connecting with their own breath and their own movements, and, when they were ready, shouted out “Hey look at me” and tried to genuinely hold the attention of everybody around them for as long as they could. 

• As it turned out, the best way to hold the attention of an audience was through storytelling. Audiences were fundamentally on your side — they wanted to be entertained, they wanted you to succeed, but they deeply didn’t want to be lied to or manipulated. What they were after, fundamentally, was a good story, simply told, with heart in it. Showmanship, and even craft, were, at the end of the day, boring. What never got old was heartfelt presence and a genuine childlike curiosity about what it means to be alive. 

• In the exploration of what it means to be alive, there are really no limits. Within the enclosed space of a theater — which has its own ethics; but ethics that are very different from society-at-large — we detest anyone who holds back, anyone who ‘phones it in,’ who makes ‘safe choices.’ On the other hand, we are willing to forgive and love the most outrageous, villainous behavior so long as the actor is honestly, boldly exploring it. 

• The experience of performance is nerve-wracking. Almost anyone will do anything to avoid being exposed, and judged, by a roomful of strangers — this was the point of the stand-on-stage-and-make-eye-contact-with-everyone-in-the-audience exercise. There is little point in pretending to be brave about it. Much better is to acknowledge one’s own nerves and to let them be part of the performance and of the earning-of-trust of the audience. 

There are ways in which writing and live performance are very different. In writing, the physical presence of the performer is not there. Time works differently — in writing, the performance isn’t contained within a single charged moment. (Readers are reading a work in very different settings, at very different rates, maybe in different countries and at different times.) 

But, I think that they are more connected than most writers realize. Writing is meant to create a spell, during which — in the enchanted time of reading — the reader is in the presence of a performer and of the story that they are weaving. In writing, as it’s currently taught and understood, there tends to be an emphasis on craft, on the one hand, and on literary pyrotechnics on the other. Both are — from the perspective of raw, honest, live performance — off-putting and showman-y. In acting, we don’t want an actor to hide (even to hide completely in their character) and we don’t want an actor to hog the stage. We want an actor to take in the audience, at the same time to be completely confident in what they are doing on the stage, and to be courageous — to be willing always to push a little further in the direction of discomfort or of difficult emotion. Writing is the same thing. What matters is courage, curiosity, honesty. Everything else is window-dressing. 

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I wrote this piece on Saturday and learned, later the same day, that one of the teachers I was writing about, Kelly Kimball, had just passed from a rare form of cancer. Kelly was tough, cool, smart, classy — a deeply beloved acting teacher. Here are a few things that I took from Kelly:

• A technique that (as far as I know) she created for minute-long monologues, with which she opened every class. An actor was encouraged to think of somebody from their real life and, given an opening line, to express how they really felt to that person. I’ve written here about the startling ways in which that opened actors up. A procession of these at the start of a class felt like watching a high-octane, intensely-varied show of New York City life.

• A technique she created called Ballistics in which actors, with a handful of prompts, improvise a scene — but aiming to be emotionally truthful as opposed to funny. “It’s designed to put you on your feet and get you acting and in those moments let your creative talents surprise you,” she said. “You have to work in the moment. You have to trust an impulse and the impulses get stronger and get better and smarter.”

• A really brilliant insight of dividing people into ‘red’ and ‘blue’ — the reds who handled stress by pushing their energy outward; the blues who handled stress by diving in — and working on expanding range by getting actors to counteract their own defense mechanisms.

• A belief in ‘writing on your feet’ — it really was amazing how verbally dextrous and emotionally rich actors could be when they trusted themselves and created whole scenes through improvisation.

The feeling was that creativity was vast; was accessible to anyone; but that mastery was an unending pursuit. She was so self-assured, so respected, so inspiring. RIP.