the timboucher experience

I recently finished Scott McRedie’s “Balance: In Search of the Lost Sense,” a smart analysis of something most people take for granted in their bodies, the vestibular system. (Also just saw the movie Vertigo, coincidentally, though I didn’t make it all the way to the end…) Among many highly relevant and interesting themes in the book, the one which caught my attention and imagination most fervently relates to sensory illusions in aviation:

Because human senses are adapted for use on the ground, navigating by sensory input alone during flight can be dangerous: sensory input does not always accurately reflect the movement of the aircraft, causing sensory illusions. These illusions can be extremely dangerous for pilots.

In other words, you can end up piloting a plane in less-than-ideal conditions: darkness, fog, cloud - and think everything’s cool, but suddenly discover that your orientation relative to the horizon has inverted. You’ve flipped upside-down completely, or you’re angling off in a direction which will take you into a perilous downward spiral - all the while your internal mechanisms have been telling you everything is A-OK, peachy-keen, hunky-dory.

In Air Force training, evidently, they use something called the Bárány chair to actively teach prospective pilots that they simply can’t always trust their senses while in the air, because their senses were not designed to function in such an environment. For example, you might be spun about rapidly in the magic chair with your eyes closed, and then halted and asked what direction you’re spinning in: at which point your brain is likely to register, based on the functionality inherent within the vestibular apparatus, that you’re rotating now in the opposite direction when in fact you’re entirely still.

In this way, a pilot is trained to rely on sensory data inputs from his or her flight instruments (for which pilots need to attain a separate instrument rating in addition to their license) - but it is allegedly very hard to get pilots to trust something which runs counter to what their organic sensory organs are telling them to do. This is where things like the Sperry Gyro-compass and the autopilot function which such instruments allows come into play.

It occurs to me that the situation described vis-a-vis the vestibular system of an individual versus the information coming in from an “objective” instrument is somehow akin to a lot of what happens in regular life - nevermind just when you’re up in the air fooling around in an aeroplane. You spend so much time getting good at trusting your instincts and your intuition only to be lead into situations where your internal instruments may not be adequately built to handle the load. How do you know you’re in one of these situations, experiencing the mundane equivalent of an aviation sensory illusion, about to spin to your doom? If the analogy hold, you simply don’t. You need the outside objective information from some other source to tell you that you’re about to crash. And then it’s a matter of being able to trust those instruments - in whatever form they come - to give you accurate readings when you need them the most.

Experimenting a little here and there lately with meditation. Nothing strenuous, nothing very disciplined. But it occurs to me, that maybe there is some extra-ordinary sense one might be able to develop internally, something which bridges the gaps and failures we butt up against in our instincts, intuitions and prior experiences, something which can be created as an internal or supra-personal mechanism to offer accurate readings in those situations when we need it the most. But it’s a matter of, first of all, building or tuning into that mechanism, and then secondly learning to actively trust it when its signal conflicts utterly with what our “gut” or whatever else we’ve been relying on to navigate tells us.

This is something I’ve heard people in the theatre business talk about backstage, but don’t have a fully-developed understanding of myself yet. Which is exactly why I wanted to capture it here as a talking point for further development.

The rehearsal process begins with a read-through, “table work” I’ve heard it called. The full cast, director and whoever else is working on the show (stage manager(s), designers, etc) sits down as a group and ritually invokes the space of the play for the first time as an entity unto itself in real-time. Everyone reads from the script. Over the course of the next few days (and I’ve only sat through this entire process once at one theatre, mind you), table-work continues with subsequent read-throughs of the play, but this time stopping to explore various points in the play: character conflicts, sub-plots, motivations - things like that. Table-work involves an extraordinarily close textual examination of the script and, depending how you do it, is a powerful group exercise in determining the exact space the group is heading to vis-a-vis the director’s interpretation of the playwright’s script.

Once table work has concluded, the cast gets on their feet and begins blocking. Blocking is the physical determination of who goes where at what time during the course of the performance. To some degree, it is an extension of the close textual analysis of the script: you interpret the stage directions or “squigglies”, which explain - according to the playwright - the appearance of character’s actions onstage. However, you have to adapt those actions to the physical realities of the scenic design, rehearsal space and actors with whom you’re working.

During the blocking process, actors tend to stay “on-book”, which means that while they are learning the physicality of the performance, they have a hard-copy of the script in their hand which they will read from as needed. Each actor has their own style, their own pace and their own system of learning and memorization of a script. A few actors - and I’ve heard that some theatres will demand this of all actors by day one of rehearsal across the board - will be off-book before rehearsal ever begins: that is, they have their lines completely memorized from jump.

While this can be a tremendous boon during the rehearsal process, since you’re able to focus more fully sooner on what you’re doing without having to be propped up by the script at all times, I’ve heard people say that there is a danger in going off-book too soon. While I’m not an actor myself, I’ll try to interpret from what I’ve pieced together what that danger is. It has something to do with solidifying the interpretation of your character too early on, before the group has really gelled and before the whole performance has meshed together. It’s like, each character doesn’t exist on their own onstage, but in relation only to the other characters with whom they are playing. Maybe getting off-book too early freezes something in the development of this group-consciousness…

One of my jobs as assistant stage manager - towards the end of the rehearsal process - was to give line notes. I’m not sure if there’s a formal cut-off date traditionally for when all actors are supposed to be off-book. I’m guessing at least by dress-rehearsal, though I myself would require it sooner were I directing. But even during dress-rehearsal, I’ve heard it said that occasionally an actor will call out “Line!” while onstage, and the stage manager or ASM will feed them their next few words or line. [See also: prompter] Calling out “Line!” during regular rehearsals is not quite as big of a deal as it is during dress, since normal rehearsals don’t have audiences. But anyway, giving line notes is a strange process in itself. As actors are trying to get off-book, they will typically flub certain difficult textual passages, inverting words, paraphrasing, dropping or inserting items in their speech. The ASM has to track these mistakes and hand them after each rehearsal little slips of paper with what line they screwed it up, and how they screwed it up. It’s then the actor’s responsibility to go back through and correct the mistake.

But it seems like there’s a delicate balance to when the proper time for actors to be able to actually re-learn their mistaken lines is. Too late in the game and line notes, though they may be earnestly studied backstage, end up making no impact. Or, an actor may have absorbed and corrected their mistaken lines, but when they get back on stage in the heat and stress of the moment, they will spontaneously revert to mistakes two or three iterations back, completely forgetting any corrections made since.

It’s a bit of a mystery to me how this process works, especially since the faculties of mind for each actor are obviously different. But there’s obviously a strong recurring element in memorization of complex passages of text across the board: repetition. Hundreds and hundreds of times. But if you’ve learned and programmed your mind, body and mouth to say the wrong lines hundreds and hundreds of times, is there any hope to actually going back and over-writing and correcting one small segment? I guess that’s part of what separates a decent actor from a really good actor, is that they have developed the technical tool-kit to overcome and adapt to things like this!

Finally had a chance to see Terry Gilliam’s latest, and the late Heath Ledger’s final screen performance, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus. The storyline centers around a traveling theatre troupe headed by a mystical immortal - so needless to say the themes really hit home for me. It’s kind of a love-poem - and I’ve heard autobiographical piece on Gilliam’s life - to “old time theatre B.S.” as I have taken to calling it. Its a layered historical symbolist rendering of the essence of these old old performance traditions (mummers, commedia, etc) struggling to find some ground in a modern world which doesn’t seem to give a shit about such things. I liked it a lot, but if you’re not a fan of that sort of sentimentality and subject matter or you don’t like weird tripped out Gilliam-esque adventures, you probably won’t care too much about it. Haven’t seen Munchausen in quite a while, but lots of elements of this movie reminded me of the Fisher King, which I loved…

Oh, and apparently Mount Parnassus is sacred to Dionysus and the home of the Muses, which is central to understanding some of the coded references in the movie. Enjoy!