A Deep Conversation About All Things Chekhov

Scott Fielding and Lenka Pichlikova

LENKA PICHLIKOVA (LPB): How did your use of Chekhov develop; how did you make it your own? That is, how do you make sure it functions as you make the Chekhov system yours as an actor, director, and teacher?

SCOTT FIELDING: I met with the work in 1986. First as an audience member, when I saw a very early and modest production of the Actors’ Ensemble, who were devoted to the practice, research and application of Chekhov’s method. After that, I right away went to the library and I found a book, “Lessons to the Professional Actor.” I lived with that book for a time like a bible. And then I found out that somebody named Mala Powers was teaching in Los Angeles, where I was living. So, I began to study with Mala. I think it was just a once a week class that I took. After about a year, I left for New York, to the original Michael Chekhov Studio. I had the good fortune at that time not only to study with Ted, who was already teaching, and Fern, who are both today Emeritus here, but also with Beatrice Straight. As well as with Deirdre, who really wasn’t a teacher, though she taught a [bit]. And all the old, grey-haired ladies of Chekhov -- Felicity and the others. I had the great fortune to spend a couple of years there. 

Now in using the technique, I acquired it as a student first. That’s what you have to do. My route was really a long route. But I think it's anybody’s route. I don’t think there are any short cuts to this work. There are maybe some people with more of a refined instrument at their start, so maybe it moves along more quickly for them, or there are people who perhaps are just simply more talented, I don’t know, but it was really a long process beginning with “Lessons” and with Mala, of getting a kind of overview of this field called the Chekhov work, and then as I got to New York I really dug in with devotion. Yeah, it was just work for me and experience naturally informs how I teach my students today.

Chekhov said there is one principle in our school – and I said it in class yesterday – it’s really the leading perspective for my work as a teacher – the principle is: work, work and more work. That’s been my guiding light; just work, just the hard kind of “suffering” that is hard work, yeah. More than once, Chekhov said the actor’s profession is 99% suffering and 1% joy.

LPB:  I don’t know about that one; it sounds like what Guy de Maupassant said, "I have coveted everything and taken pleasure in nothing."

Fielding: You must understand, the kind of suffering that Chekhov speaks about there doesn’t preclude the experience of joy. So it is a paradox. But the discipline of training hard is work; its hard work, it’s not fun and games. There is fun to be had -- there is pleasure to be had! You're training hard. There is a pleasure to be had. The athletes know that. And I think musicians know that and dancers know that. That was a primary point for me, because I needed to work hard, because if I didn’t work I wasn’t going to get anywhere. Because I wasn’t just going forth with talent, you know.

So I worked hard, I worked a lot, trying to master the technique. That’s now more than thirty years. That’s long ago – from 1986. Then we did a project through the NY studio. At the end of the three months Intensive, I was on stage, trying to apply it. I can’t say if it was successful or not but we tried. Over the next years, there was more work in New York, training, more projects and plays. But my personal story is that after about three years of that work -- three, four years -- there was something missing in my grasp of the actor’s technique. I felt something was missing. I had already started studying seriously with a very good teacher a couple of years before “meeting” Chekhov. And I had always been in acting or performing, directing from the time I was a child actually. But I knew there was something missing. One of the actors from the Actors’ Ensemble, Charles Harper, who is now passed on, recommended to me to study Meisner, because he had. And I took his advice. The best guy in the country that teaches Meisner is Bill Esper. For three years I studied Meisner with devotion and commitment. It turned out really to be the missing link for me. (In Boston I teach a two-year Meisner program, alongside a master-level Chekhov training program.)

LPB: What filled it in? What was it that Meisner had?

Fielding:  It’s going to sound strange, because Chekhov talks again and again about the most important thing that Meisner was after: the TRUTH.

LPB:  I knew you are going to say that.

Fielding: You knew? How did you know? 

LPB:  Maybe it was on your mind and I picked it up. But that’s what I found missing exactly when I was taught in Prague, Stanislavsky’s method. I moved to States, and Brad Douriff was teaching Meisner technique to us at Columbia. I knew that that is what I wanted, because I did not have it. I was studying also in HB Studio with Uta Hagen, that was more towards Stanislavsky -- you know what I am saying -- and her teaching gave you tools like Six Steps and so on. So it was a bit more organized for me, but I know exactly what you are saying.

Fielding:  Well, but it is ironic though because as I just said, you know it’s all through Chekhov. There's probably nothing that he said more often, you know. He spoke again and again about the sense of TRUTH. But I think it’s a long and only generally articulated path to develop the sense of truth purely through Chekhov. Nonetheless, it is incredibly essential. Chekhov knew it and he stressed it time and again.

Maybe related to what we’re talking about, for a lot of years, Chekhov technique did have a bad name. Did you know that?

LPB: But now it is getting popular.

Fielding: In no small part thanks to the work that goes on here, with MICHA. And also to others, to private teachers.

[LPB note, from Jessica Cerullo: MICHA is located in New York. The founders of MICHA were Joanna Merlin, Ted Pugh, Lenard Petit and Sarah Kane. Joanna Merlin was the one who officially founded it in NYC in 1999. Deirdre Hurst du Prey was on the advisory board. Beatrice Straight was not involved. In fact she wasn't well at that point in time and so was not involved with MICHA in any formal way.]

LPB: What do you think the bad name was about? Was it [also] because of the spirituality of it?

Fielding: Well, that’s what’s said, but I don’t think that is the reason. No, personally I suspect it is because “Chekhov acting” was equated with BAD acting, NOT truthful acting. I think that with any technique there is this potential for the technique to fail to serve the actor. In the opening quote for his book, Chekhov quotes Josef Jasser (maybe you remember) that in the hands of a lesser artist, technique is apt to dampen the talent, but in the hands of a great artist, it fires it up, and free the actor up. There was never a time when there was a lot of Chekhov out there, but insofar as there was Chekhov out there, maybe it was not perceived so well. [LPB note: “The technique of any art is sometimes apt to dampen, as it were, the spark of inspiration in a mediocre artist; but the same technique in the hands of a master can fan that spark into an unquenchable flame.” -- Josef Jasser, from Chekhov, Michael, To The Actor on the Technique of Acting, 1953 ed.]

LPB: You think it was because of acting in front of the camera in the USA – I am going to use the word industry – or he was more like a stage actor, and then it became that it has something to do with the artistic truth on stage?

Fielding: No, I think it has something to do with how it was taught. I think people maybe did these exercises, but did it without bringing this so important sense of truth to their work. You can just see the potential in any Chekhov class. You can see the potential for a lot of bad acting. And we understand that classes are developmental ground. It is not a performance in class. You don’t judge studio work as if it were a performance. That’s a terrible mistake, of course. But there is a danger there that practice of exercises doesn’t transcend the exercise. So instead of really coming in contact with creative inspiration and performing -- acting out of a sense of truth under given circumstances -- there could be this kind of bad acting. So, yeah, I think Chekhov suffered from that reputation. That was an aspect -- it is not the whole story. By no means is it the whole story. But I feel very much that that’s a piece of the story. Well, so you see, Meisner gave me something invaluable.

What I was saying was that you understand perfectly well as a teacher that there is an exercise work which has the aim of developing the instrument or developing craft, skills – developing talent -- all that stuff. And that’s like, over here; and we don’t confuse that with what a performance is.

Here is an interesting note about Chekhov. He said we must put our exercises on stage. And one could ask what did he mean by that? So, if I answer that question: one thing he wanted – as he said in the opening of To the Actor, “This book is the result of prying behind the curtain of the Creative Process – prying that began many years ago in Russia at the Moscow Art Theater, with which I was associated for sixteen years.” I think he was interested in saying to the public – here is the actor’s work, so let’s do staccato, legato in front of the audience. Let’s show them, here is what we do. He was way ahead of his time, but today it is pretty much, it’s not like a big deal; people go to open rehearsals, etc. People like to see the stages. Today, often, the modern theatre isn’t shy to show itself as exactly what is is: a stage, a platform for the performance. You see the plumbing and the wires and so forth very often, right? It’s almost a cliché now, but in 1936 or 1942 or 1932 or whatever it was, that was not the situation!

Fielding: Historically, the artist’s process in modern art is very much about letting the viewer into the process: not finishing the painting, rather inviting the viewer to complete the painting. Chekhov – the modernist -- was on point in the arts of theatre and acting. On one side he said: let’s put our exercises on the stage. (And in his school, they did so!) On the other side: let’s incorporate the exercises as creative means or rather as means to enter creative state, out of which we can then -- filled with inspiration -- play, we can perform.

The problem I was speaking about earlier is that we sometimes see actors doing Chekhov technique in performance. And that just tends to look like bad acting. Instead of having mastered and incorporated or assimilated the exercises -- the value of the exercises I should say. This is the danger with Chekhov. With any technique for that matter, but somehow I think maybe more so in Chekhov than elsewhere.... I say that quietly because I don’t know if it is true.... it’s kind of always been my question.... You can’t learn the technique in a hurry... it’s not an “overnight” thing... and then step onstage to play. I’m not being very articulate I’m afraid, right now....

LPB: Which exercises do you like to use with your students to arrive at truth? Some exercises are maybe not going to work; maybe practicing atmosphere is difficult at the beginning. What really amazed me was when you gave us the exercise – I remember that there was a prop and I think that was maybe the juggling ball and you said that is the last thing – it was your little child’s toy. It is the last thing, your last connection with your child because the child is lost. Remember?

Fielding: Oh, I remember.

LPB: In two seconds, I was weeping to the point that hasn’t happen to me in a long time, so that I lost my control over my body at that moment. I was already down on my knees and my head collapsed to the floor and I hit my head on the floor and I had a bump on my forehead after like a three year old coming back from kindergarten.

Fielding: Oh, no! (laughs)

LPB: That hadn’t happened to me for a long time, to be so opened, unleashed. Also when I was working with your colleague, John McManus, here at MICHA -- when we did lightness and staccato -- I was remembering, “I lived in that kind of body once, when I performed in Čapek’s The Insect Play.” I was Iris, a butterfly. And as we were doing the exercise at MICHA, suddenly that thing came back to me and I felt that I had been in a body like that before. And I was like, “Yes, that’s Iris” (the name of the character I was playing years ago). Maybe that is how Chekhov worked with different characters he could play. I remember Chekhov saying that when he worked on Khlestakov he worked with the qualities of a butterfly for the character, who never stayed still. Chekhov could play Strindberg’s Erik IV in the evening and Khlestakov in The Inspector General in the afternoon. He had this character he visualized and he just jumped into the skin of the character -- the movements, the rhythm, speech -- he had it all and just became the character. How he did it? He was a genius. But it was very interesting what happened to me emotionally in your class completely, and so quickly, so raw and strong. What was it? What do you do to unleash that?

Fielding:  I know how I work. I know the principles I work on. I don’t know in that moment -- we did whatever we did.

LPB:  Are you using the five guiding principles?

Fielding: Not consciously, no, not generally; I just mean the principles, the basics, and that kind of idea, what we talked about that I was so fully trying to find my way to this. Nobody wants to see an actor do technique!   Nobody wants to see an actor do Chekhov work on the stage in performance. Again: the exercise, showing the exercise, that is one thing. But now we are playing onstage. I can tell you who speaks about it, who was very keen about it, was Shdanoff.

[LPB note:  George Shdanoff was born in Russian on 5 December 1905 and died in Los Angeles 14 August 1998. Later, he and Chekhov became co-directors of the Chekhov Theater Studio, which was formed in England and subsequently moved to New York. “An Evening of Anton Chekhov’s One-Act Plays and Sketches,” one of their many productions, was performed by Chekhov and Shdanoff. After the Chekhov Theater dissolved, Shdanoff became a director and teacher at the Actor’s Lab in Los Angeles, as well as an important acting coach, along with his wife, Else. He also went on to work as a special consultant on numerous film, television, and play scripts.]

Fielding: I was not a student of Shdanoff and don’t know much about exactly what he said or taught, but I remember somewhere along the way reading something that he spoke about this; he said: people get Chekhov wrong! And this is really what I am talking about -- this is not from Shdanoff; this is from my own experience. I agree with him that we don’t want to do technique in performance; we want to use technique to get inspired and then we want to play freely and that’s what happened with you. You got inspired. I led you, let’s say, through some process that brought you to this threshold of what Chekhov again and again calls Creative Inspiration. And once there, because you had an instrument that was functioning well, where the parts were in harmony with one another, then you could just have that huge experience. And that big expressive experience -- you were not doing technique at that point. The technique is what led, what opened, what brought you to that threshold, and then you crossed that threshold and then what happened? But of course the great thing about the technique is that so you can repeat it! It wasn’t just – I can get anybody – most anybody – to some point where one goes off, gets really inspired. They can have a big experience; they can be mesmerizing. I’ve seen that many, many times. But if they don’t have technique, if they are just following me through the process, then they can’t repeat it on their own.

LPB: If I remember that moment, the emotional moment after I crossed the threshold, I see an IMAGE: a woman on her knees. And I feel my tears are starting to come to my eyes. It is the haunting image of Niobe.

[LPB note: Niobe was the daughter of king Tantalus and a goddess. Her pride caused her tragedy.  When, as queen of Thebes, she expressed her pride that she, with seven sons and seven daughters, was better than Latona, the mother of the gods Apollo and Artemis (who only had two children), the two gods came and killed all but one of her children with poisoned arrows. Their father, King Amphion of Thebes, once he saw his dead sons, either killed himself or was killed by Apollo. There is an outcropping of rock on Mount Sipylus near Manisa in Turkey called the Weeping Rock, which was associated with Niobe's legend. Niobe’s disaster was often depicted in ancient and European art.]

Fielding: So, the actor trains and practices techniques in order that they can lead themselves, or repeat once they have been led to some experience, again and again. Whether it’s multiple takes on camera or whether it’s night after night in the theatre. And the bad acting is again, you know, when “I am doing” my Center:  I have a Center in my chest and I am full of my Center in my chest. But nobody cares about that. That’s not interesting; it’s not really alive. What’s alive is when I can put that Center in my chest and forget about it and let do it it’s job, and now all my attention is (like a good Meisner actor) on you my partner or on the object that I am dealing with in the moment, or on the inner object which is my image, my picture. I am not doing my Imaginary Body, I am not doing my Center, or doing my Gesture, whatever, this that or the other thing. There MAY BE moments when I may want to right there on stage, do my technique. Moments, right? But basically, you know how they say Chekhov could play Chlestakov in the afternoon and Erik at night; it’s like saying, you know, how Yo-Yo Ma can play his Shostakovich in the afternoon performance and at night do Appalachian music that he plays. Of course he can! He’s a musician. He can play his instrument. It is not such a big deal in a way, you know? Maybe it’s exhausting, I don’t know, but he has that flexibility. Chekhov said the process of training, may be a long, long one, but once we’ve done that work then we can make Hamlet in a week! Or then we can -- he did not say this but he might very well have -- then we can play Hamlet in the morning and Erik at night.

LPB: Yes, he was talking more of also the flexibility of being comedian – comical as Chlestakov, you know, satire – and then playing tragic roles/drama. He wanted the actor to play it all. He wanted the actress/ actor to be versatile.

Fielding: Yes.

LPB:  How would you say – what is a Psychological Gesture?  What is sensation versus emotions/feelings, and how does this relate to creating Psychological Gesture?

Fielding:  I mean there are many answers for these questions. But maybe getting to them is not so simple. Sensation is always – sensation lives in the space between the body and psychology. No body, no sensation. You understand? No consciousness, no sensation. To have a sensation, I need my body. I need my body for feelings and for emotions also.

LPB: How is it different?

Fielding:  In the first place – and this isn’t a cop out – in the first place it doesn’t matter. And if you go back to your philosophies and to your psychologies and to your neuro-researchers and all that, they are still fighting over those definitions. They really are. I thought about them over years. They are still finding out and nobody who has definitely defined what is an emotion and what is a feeling. You are not going to get a satisfactory answer. The important answer for the actor is that IT IS ABOUT EXPERIENCE, right?

So, that’s the key thing. It is about the actor having the experience. And I experience whether we call it: I experience sensation, or I experience the feeling, or I experience the emotion. It really doesn’t matter. You understand? I can tell you that the sensation is in this middle place between the body and the psychology and that’s okay and I’ll stand by that, but it doesn’t really matter. What matter is this is how the actor knows: through sensations and feelings. In fact, Chekhov mixes up the terms. He is not definite about that. That’s why we have questions, because he mixes up the terms. Understandably, maybe even rightly so.

LPB: I understand it that sensation is like a big box and that’s a box called – the label is “sadness” – you open the box and there is maybe “distress”, or “frustration,” like different qualities, or different type of sadness. The sadness is the “whole,” but then you choose the right feeling you need to use for the character. Use your imagination rather than your own experience necessary even though it could be mixed out.

Fielding:  This is one of the images he uses in one of the lectures. That is where you heard that. And now you are bringing up a question about using it. So, that is a different question. One thing is to try to define it or characterize it, and another thing is a method for creating a character, creating it and using it, so just to be clear they are two different two related different things, right?

Again – it is about experience! It is absolutely about experience. Whether we call it a sensation or feeling or emotion, you know it because you experience it. We typically say, “I feel,” but you can as well say, “I sense.”  If you blow on the vulnerable soft skin, do you say I have a sensation of wind on my arm or do you say I feel a wind on my arm? Does it matter which one you say? It doesn’t matter what you say, but you have some experience, something is happening.  I know it because I feel it, I sense it. Why quibble about those words, you know? Where I think the sensation is important is to understand the relationship of sensations and qualities of movements, and that gets to your technique question. So that we know that if I move with a quality, I experience this sensation, and sensation is the experience because it becomes the movement, which is about the body, and the sensation is just the layer that comes between my body and my soul life. So, if I move sharply [slams the table], I experience this sensation of maybe “anger,” maybe “aggression” – I don’t know, whatever it is. The urgency. Whatever it is. I experience it as a sensation. If you want to use the word feeling go ahead use the word feeling, why not? 

LPB: So where does the Psychological Gesture come into this. What is it? Do you train it?

Fielding:  Of course you train it. How do you not train it?  Nobody is considered a Chekhov teacher if he or she doesn’t train it.  So yeah.  Because it is – everything is Psychological Gesture for Chekhov!  Right? You’ve read that. So, you can’t say, “I don’t teach Psychological Gesture,” and say you are Chekhov teacher. You can’t say, “I use Chekhov method,” and not use the gesture. It is all Psychological Gesture. Gesture is a movement. Form in motion. Psychological has to do with psyche, with the soul. That means the inner life of a human being, of any conscious being. It has to do with what’s inside. So, the Psychological Gesture has to do with an inner movement. The movement has form of course, it must have a form. We make the form conscious when we use PG as a technique, but it’s implicit in the movement. Of course there’s form in the movement. And that form, that inner moving form of the Psychological Gesture, has some kind of intention: it wants something. So, the PG relates to all three fundamental parts of the human being. There’s a will element: what I want, what I am doing. What I am doing has a purpose, so that it implies what I want. The PG is an image or thought, a thought-image. That has to do with the thinking part of myself as a human being. And lastly, the PG is about  sensations or feelings and emotions, some combination -- they are all related --, and that has to do with the middle part of myself as a human being. The part of me that’s about feeling and sensing.

You can’t come to a true grasp of Psychological Gesture if you don’t have a wholly sensitive, functioning instrument. That’s why Chekhov said, for example, we’ll take up the work on the Psychological Gesture – whenever it was, 1938 or 1939 – we’ll do it later. We’ll get to Psychological Gesture. As a technique, I mean. Because you can’t really start with Psychological Gesture unless the actor is bringing an instrument which is already supple and healthy and holistic – unless he is bringing that to the table. If you are training, you’ve got to train the instrument before you can really begin to grapple with this Psychological Gesture. But there is always psychological gesture. There is always gesture -- there is right now, right here!

[LPB note: Michael Chekhov mentioned Psychological Gesture (officially) on November 23, 1936 in Dartington, England. On that day his students studied the Psychological Gesture as part of larger session including critiques of previous lessons, incorporation of Images, and Form related to ‘What” and ”How.” He also gave examples of work by Stanislavsky, Prince Sergei Volkonsky, and Delsarte. He applied the idea of the Psychological Gesture to work the students were doing on what was probably a folk-tale inspired play written in 1909 by the Latvian poet Janis Rainis, who called it a "winter solstice tale in five acts." According to Chekhov, “In The Golden Steed we must develop the line of the two evil brothers in gesture. The more we work the more you will understand what I mean by gesture. It is not only a movement with the body. It is movement and feeling, and will impulses, and interpretation, and atmosphere as well. This kind of movement must be used in our theatre. It is not movement which was used before. It must be a new kind of psychological gesture, or interpretative gesture, or what you want to call it. This is the kind of movement we need to have underneath our play, and rehearsing with this kind of gesture is what I want. Therefore, when I say don’t act but find the gesture, I mean by this that by trying to find this kind of gesture the actor will be forced to go deeper into the play and his part than he would otherwise do. ... Next term we will have a special kind of movement and speech work, then you will understand better what we mean by this special kind of gesture.” (Lesson of 23 November 1936, in Deirdre Hurst du Prey Archives, Adelphi University. Also copied in the Dartington Hall Archives, Devon.)]

LPB: In his 1942 manuscript of what would become To the Actor, Chekhov was giving an example of the scene from Hamlet between Horatio and the Ghost, remember? So there was with every little piece of text a gesture that he talked about.

Fielding:  Yes.

LPB: Do you see changes occurring in the Chekhov methods today?  Are you maybe not using the exercises he would teach his students?  Has his method changed over the years?

Fielding:  I was teaching at the conference in 1994; I was teaching maybe the year before, 1993.  I mean there were not so many teachers, period! I moved across the country to the Chekhov Studio.  There was Mala in Los Angeles, and it was not her fulltime work. She taught a class once a week. And there was the NY Studio which opened in 1980. There was work being taught there, of course. And there was also Shdanoff teaching in LA, but I actually never had contact with Shdanoff, so I can’t speak about him or his wife. Basically that was it when I was getting started. Jack Colvin was teaching later. Jack began teaching in LA at some point after I left, but when I started he wasn’t teaching. As far as I know. He had a television career going, and sometime movie career I guess, so I don’t really think he was teaching much at that time if at all.

[LPB note: Jack Colvin (1934-2005) was an an actor and director principally in television, who taught acting classes at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts (LA), at the Central School of Cinematography in Rome, at California State Northridge, and (as artistic director) at The Michael Chekhov Studio in Los Angeles.]

Maybe somebody would know better than me. But I don’t believe there were any other significant teachers on either coast or anywhere in America. And elsewhere? He wasn’t taught in Russia, we know that. But now he is taught in many many places.

LPB: Why did he become so popular, do you feel?

Fielding: The seed was really Beatrice and the folks around that time in 1979 I guess. He died in 1955, and around 1979 they were contemplating opening the Studio. [LPB: That is, the Studio was opened 25 years after his death.] And with that opening of that Studio in New York, kind of anybody, most anybody else who was still alive – they were either in New York or in LA -- they were somewhat connected with the Studio which graduated only a few people: you know, Ted; Lenard was one of the last graduates from that studio. And then, I think, the work of Ted and Fern, they carry those seeds forward, as far as I am concerned, in the most important way as anybody anywhere, because they were really interested in going deep down, unafraid. And I got that from them. I always challenge people and the actors in my classes really work – you know that from yesterday. Or today! I don’t stay on the surface much. Those seeds got planted.

[LPB note:  In 1936, Straight worked with Michael Chekhov to establish the Chekhov Theatre Studio at Dartington in England. The studio trained actors according to Chekhov's techniques. Straight continued to work with the company when it relocated to Ridgefield, Connecticut in 1939. In 1980, Straight, in collaboration with Michael Cole, established the Michael Chekhov Studio in New York City to continue the teaching work of the original Chekhov Theatre Studio. Deirdre Hurst du Prey, Eleanor Faison, and served on the faculty later as well.]

Fielding: And then MICHA came along some years later, and MICHA is training, little by little, these people who are going out into all these colleges. And I think you’ve got to give a credit to Beatrice and all these people around with her, and also Mala of course on the West coast. But I don’t know how important is Mala in that part of the story, really. You might want to ask Lisa. Lisa might say she was very important – certainly in getting the earlier book published in terms of kind of really disseminating the work. And the tapes absolutely! You’ll see if you come again, the teachers, there are some people who are kind of really, so to speak, creative, and others are more kind of fundamentalists.

Did it change? Chekhov is really such a living thing. It is based on principles, not on technique. It is based on principles. So, I wouldn’t say it changed at all, anyone who is really doing it. There are no iterations; there is a little creative twist here with this teacher, there is a little different task there with that teacher, but the heart is the heart, the essence is the essence. It simply takes on some different forms.

LPB:  Do you feel that with John, coming from Australia, or maybe Joerg from Germany, that there a difference in teaching approach because they come from a different part of the world? Can you tell? Is there a difference between the way Europeans, Americans, and Australians, for example, approach it? 

Fielding: There is a different vibe with the Europeans, but even in Europe and the German approach, they are really connected to what America did too. Joerg and Jobst can talk to you about that. They also had the Ted and Fern connection early on, right? So, that’s why their impulse was broadly as well as deeply influential. John was a eurythmist first, and later he studied with an important eurhythmy teacher. Chekhov’s work bears a strong connection to eurhythmy and the impulse behind eurhythmy which is anthroposophy if you know about that, and so anybody who is seriously drawn to Chekhov’s waters ...

LPB: David Zinder in Israel?

Fielding: David is maybe something else again; I wouldn’t know quite how to characterize that. David tells the story that he has been connected since 1967 because his teacher in school was somebody who studied with Chekhov. David and I met in England in 1994. He has said that he was doing Chekhov before he knew it was Chekhov.

LPB: Are there people who are not connected with MICHA who are teaching Chekhov technique well?

Fielding: Almost everybody who is teaching, even internationally, today has been trained or spent some time under the influence of some of us teaching. This is going to be 20 years of MICHA and before MICHA there was the Chekhov Studio and there was basically nobody before then. The Chekhov legacy, and MICHA specifically, owes its existence, everything, to the people who founded and centered around the old Chekhov Studio. I should add, I remember from the big conference that was at Emerson in England in 1994 there were a couple of Russians, very impressive, one or two, but not directly connected with MICHA. There was Andrei A. Kirillov. He is a researcher. I don’t know about him as a teacher, but we are going back 20 years. He certainly knows his Chekhov, absolutely, as far as I would say.

LPB: Was it the first international conference?

Fielding: Yes, it was the first big one, really serious one. There was a thing in Germany, you probably talked to Joerg about that. That was the first one, the first gathering, in 1991 I think.

LPB: I think it was 1993, the one in Philadelphia. You were not in Philadelphia? Lisa was mentioning it and David Zinder was giving a workshop there in 1993. (Critical Stages) Lisa said that it was the first meeting in US as far as she knows. Maybe I will find out otherwise.

Fielding: This is the first thing I ever heard about Philadelphia meeting.

[LPB note: in 1993, Wil Kilroy, who was a member of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE), invited Mala Powers and Lisa Dalton to join him in presenting a workshop in Philadelphia, just before Lisa and Mala traveled to Russia for the Second International Michael Chekhov Workshop. See http://www.chekhov.net/nmcahistory.html

LPB: Lisa was talking about the same Zinder story, but set in Philadelphia in 1993. Was Mala Powers there in England?

Fielding:  No, I don’t recall so.

LPB: Do you care to characterize the differences between your approach and that of other American teachers?

Fielding:  You are perhaps in a better position to say. You mentioned that I was working deeply in my classes here at [the MICHA conference.] I might say that there probably is something to that. You know, I’ve been criticized for taking too long, for spending too long in the getting-into process with people. But that is my process. I do, and I spend time, and I like to think that I am very thorough and try to penetrate to something. This thing on the bad acting that we started off with – you know, my approach is not just to skim quickly over the surface things because I don’t think there is a lot of value in that, not in training. So I guess that’s what I’d say.

You know, I haven’t been to Australia. John came to Chekhov through Eurhythmy, and Eurhythmy is very special, and that gives him a certain unique foundation, a special training as a teacher and as a practitioner.

LPB: When you are working, do you work with sounds or language or lines from a play, or do you energize the body first without any kind of sounds. I seem to remember from a video, that Fern was saying at first they were training with lots of movement, and then they realized it was a mistake and that they need to incorporate sound – not that it needs to be Eurhythmy necessarily. I am finding out that while practicing yoga my throat, my instrument opens up, and through this openness, I create a much stronger sound/voice when I need it in performance. It feels easier to move without making sounds. But I am just wondering if you are incorporating the sound right from the beginning or if it is a step two?

Fielding:  I think I would say the answer is probably no. I came to this foremostly from years of work with Ted and Fern. I went through a lot of early experience with them when we did so much practice without speaking. And so I know first-hand about that. I am not a speech person.

LPB: No? You’ve got such a gorgeous voice.

Fielding:  Thank you. I am not a speech teacher, but of course I incorporate speech into our practice. You must! Even today, I taught a Fundamentals of Acting class recently -- what would be an equivalent of 101 class – not in Chekhov, just a one-off, 6 weeks session. And we worked with sound and movement from the very first thing, right off the bat. If you study Joe Chaikin, sound and movement was his thing. That was my earliest training before Chekhov.

LPB: In a 1999 interview on why he was compelled to start Open Theater, Chaikin responded, "I’m not crazy about naturalism on stage. An actor is an interpretive artist. They can take their talent further. I wanted them to stretch, be creative.” [See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Chaikin]

My colleague from SUNY Purchase Christopher McCann was a member of Chaikin’s experimental workshop company called The Winter Project in 1977, in which Chaikin proposed and participated in explorations of the boundary between life and death, with the actor as storyteller, with listening, found dialogue and more].

Fielding: The voice is it essential, but for my approach with Chekhov there is much more work with the body than it is with voice.

LPB: Do you think that the cultural climate today makes the spiritual aspects of Chekhov’s ideas more acceptable than they were in 1953?

Fielding: I mean it is a theoretical question. My impulse for an immediate answer will be “yes” of course, because we passed from 1953, jumped to 1960, 1968, the summer of love and America and the new age movement that followed out of that into the 70’s. I mean it’s a spiritually very different world, since the 60’s even never mind in 2019. I mean the answer has to be yes, I think. You know when Chekhov started to teach about psychophysical work, nobody was speaking about this kind of thing as far as I know, back in his day. Never mind 1953, go back to the way he is teaching about psychophysical development, about the relationship and the body and psychology, back in the 30’s and 20’s even, I suppose. Nobody was speaking about that to my knowledge. And today everything is “body, mind, and soul”; it is on PBS every weekend, this person, that person – the “body-mind code.” The bookstores are filled with books talking about body and mind. So I think it’s much more current.

[LPB note:  Dr. Mario Martinez, The Mind-Body Code.  See https://soundstrue.com/store/the-mind-body-code-191.html]

LPB: Do you talk about it in class?  Soul?  Spirit?

Fielding: I do. I mean, not to excess, not even with any regularity, but yes, I will for sure absolutely. I speak about the human being and the nature of human beings, and the exoteric as well as esoteric nature of the human being. And I think the actor has to understand that. That’s the instrument. It’s not so weird today as it was 20, 30, 40, 50 years ago. What hasn’t changed is that the whole movement of consciousness is towards ever deeper levels of materialism, ever deeper levels of materialistic thinking. Chekhov was talking about this from early on and that has not changed. It’s only more and more materialistic all the time. And yet there is a counter movement at the same time that we’re also – you know, people are more and more open, or some number of people is more and more open to the spirit. You can speak about these things and some actors will just close off immediately, and others will be very open to engage with you in that way and be inspired.

Fielding: Chekhov did talk about it, in the lectures. Steiner and Eurhythmy are in On the Art of Acting, 1991, I don’t think he said it in 1953. Or rather, the editors cut it out.

LPB: It is not there in 1953. [The 1991 edition went back to the 1942 manuscript.]

Fielding: And in the [1955] lectures.

LPB: He was not recruiting anybody.

Fielding: No, absolutely not. Only if someone was interested.

LPB: He would open the door – just like for Mala Powers.

Fielding: Sure.

[LPB note: From the 1955 lectures.  Chekhov: “We tried to introduce in our method that which we might call the spiritual element.  We introduced it so far in a very modest, limited way. Well, that’s enough for the beginning.  What is this Spirit, as we understand it, in the frame of our professional work? What its influence is? What its practical value is? Every time when we mention in our discussions our so-called higher self, higher ego, our better self, we have already in mind our spirit, or rather sparks from it  ... rays coming from this shining higher self. Remember for instance two of our discussions where we spoke about the attitude of ourselves to the type of people we are performing on the stage with or about the love which permeates our entire profession.  In both cases we had in mind the spirit and its practical influence upon our work, and its strong influence in developing our talents. With our soul, we live in the closest connection to our environment. Our soul, using its senses, accumulates a number of life experiences, it accumulates them and it gives them over to the spirit. The spirit unites them, draws the conclusions, creates principles, which the soul cannot do. The soul is only accumulating so and so many experiences and that is a limit of its abilities. What we called previously called our hidden unconscious laboratory that is where our spirit works where he alters, summarizes, amalgamates, draws the conclusion for all the experiences our soul was able to accumulate. There in this hidden laboratory sits a wise scientist who is our spirit.”]

LPB: Does the system ask today for corrections?  Does it speak methodologically in the same way or must one make adjustments in order to use it today?

Fielding:  Well, corrections... I don’t think corrections. No. Because the method, the whole of Chekhov’s work is based on principle. It’s not just “here are some techniques I came up with.” It’s all based on principles, and the principles are absolutely sound. If that’s true, then what is there to correct? How do you correct something that is based on a fundamental principle? So I would think no. I would not say a definite no, because I have not thought it through, but I suspect not. I don’t have any experience where one would say Chekhov was wrong and he should be corrected.

Methodologically, are there adjustments? Probably there, are but what? That’s a big question, I think. Chekhov wanted everybody to, you know he thought that everybody must find their own way to this work. Everybody had to put kind of their individual stamp on it. Everybody who teaches it has to find their own kind of approach, their own way, within the general approach. Everybody has to teach and speak out of themselves. I can’t teach I like Joanna, you know? I can’t teach it like the next guy. I’ve got to teach it as it speaks to me. 

The problem today is that people want to learn quickly -- more so than ever. Not to mention, they want to learn cheaply. QUICK AND CHEAP. But there is no instant development with Chekhov. There is a kind of instant acting which is, if you develop – already I said it earlier – if you develop the instrument and you have mastered the techniques, then you can work very, very quickly. But if you in the first place don’t even have the instrument, a healthy instrument, holistic, and with all the qualities the actor needs – if you don’t have it, how can you make use of any of this? I don’t know how you can make use of any of it, or much of it anyway. And that just takes time. If you want build a Stradivari: Stradivari only made how many Stradivari’s? I don’t know, but he didn’t make 1000 of them, I don’t suppose. Why not? Because it took time, it takes time to go out and look through the forest to find the right tree, you know, and then it takes time to craft the damn thing, and it’s the same with our instrument, isn’t it? It just takes time. And that’s really counter to the cultural trend of our time, everything is quick, quick, quick, fast and cheap, and I try – I’ve insisted since I’ve been in Boston – I teach this Chekhov technique over a year’s time. Minimum! We meet twice a week, and people have studied with me for years, some people. And year by year they get – those that really do that, I mean I see it with my eyes – they really develop. But I’ve also taught Chekhov once a week. I do Chekhov classes once a week, too. And you can give them knowledge once a week and some of them, especially if they are experienced and have a certain facility, they’ll begin making use of that. But you don’t develop an instrument working once a week, no! And even working twice a week for a year you only make so much progress and that’s my point of view on that, and somebody else might have another. The key actually is time, persistent effort over time! Methodologically, there are things that are for me more important than other things. I mean I would say that there are some things more important to teach than other things. But whatever we are teaching, if you are interested in really developing an instrument, the key to the whole story: it takes time! People don’t necessary like that, but that’s the truth of it, as far as I am concerned.

LPB:  Do you have a set of exercises for them to work on, or they remember the exercises in class and make a routine out of them? Do they practice outside of the class?

Fielding:  I am evangelizing them about that from a day one. You want to learn this work? You got to practice it. And you don’t have to set aside a special time to practice it, although it is nice if you can. You’ve got to practice it wherever you are, whenever you are. You practice it when you are standing in line in the grocery. You practice it sitting on a train. You practice it walking to work in the morning. That’s the beauty of much of Chekhov work -- not all of it, but so much of it – is you really can practice it at any time. It requires will, you know, and enthusiasm, but you really can. And if you are serious about not being a bad Chekhov actor (to bring up that terrible story again), but actually being a master of Chekhov, somebody who can really employ it as a professional, then you have to make time on a regular, daily basis to practice. And you can! You can practice here sitting down and drinking coffee. Right, I can drink coffee with a quality of ease. And then I can become attentive to the sensation of ease that I awaken in myself, and then I can speak with ease. I can speak to you from this or that center. I can produce an inner gesture when I am talking to you even if I am not making a big outer-scaffolded Psychological Gesture. I can imagine a different atmosphere. It’s just: will I do it? I can work on objectives with you sitting around drinking coffee. There is very much to do without designating, you know, this is my practice time. Wonderful if you can -- and I think you should – have what Stanislavsky called a toilette – a practice. But the right point of view I think is to see my life and practice as one whole. In other words: it’s always practice time. Chekhov said: “If you are an actor you are an actor 24/7” -- however he said that. It means if we are actors, then we are always actors. Artists. You know, to stay awake and attentive to life is to practice, is it not?

LPB:  What is your idea of the relationship between the 1953 publication of Chekhov’s system, edited by Charles Leonard, and the 1991 version, based on the 1942 manuscript, that Mel Gordon and Mala Powers published?  (I know that the 1991 version left out much of the analysis of King Lear in “The Composition of the Performance.”)   Do you give either of the books to your students?

Fielding:  I don’t give the books to people, I don’t tell go out of my way to tell students you should read the books. I don’t tell them not to read the books, and I reference the books. I mean I don’t say don’t read the books. There are people who can work with the books, and there are people that can’t work with the books. Not everyone is a book person. People that come to me want to learn from me. From me. Most of my students wind up getting one or another of the books and spending some time with it.  Of course they do. But you know, Ted likes to tell the story he had the book I forget for how many years and could not make heads and tails out of it until he had some firsthand experience of the work from Eddie, his teacher. So I certainly don’t tell people to read the book. What I will tell people, particularly people who call me with an interest in training but haven’t any idea about Chekhov, I will very often say: You know what you might do is pick up Chekhov’s book and just read a little bit. Dip into it. And I say, if something in it resonates -- because you see there is a spirit in there – then let’s talk further. There is something like a bell that goes off or doesn’t go off for people when they encounter that book. So I say, if something resonates with you, then it’s a pretty good sign that this might be something to look into. And if something doesn’t, it does not necessarily mean the work is not for you, but that’s also maybe something informative. So I don’t promote or push the books. But neither do I tell people not to read the books.

About the versions I mean – Lenard and I used to have a thing years ago, where I was the To the Actor guy, because that was my go-to book, and he was the On the Technique guy, because that was somehow more his book, years ago anyway. But I can show you my books, copies they are completely falling apart and frayed. I always go back and dip into both of them because there is something about the 1942 that I like as well. There are passages that there are not in the 1953 book and I like those passages. But my bible was To the Actor. There is no difference between 1953 and 1991 – the only difference is Andrei has he added this lost chapter on Psychological Gesture and that is like an addition that is nice. But other than that and the foreword it’s exactly the same book, there is no other difference. In terms of Mala’s book that you mentioned, that little workbook, that’s mainly just her notes on the taped lectures, along with a nice intro and another section on her experience working with Chekhov including some interesting points about preparing the film role and working on the film set.

LPB:  And Lisa Dalton is teaching using an expanded version of the chart that Chekhov gave to Mala Powers. She recently published and explained it recently in Critical Stages. [http://www.critical-stages.org/15/the-art-of-michael-chekhovs-chart-a-training-sequence-for-contemporary-practice-in-professional-studios-and-academia/]. A circle that when you start somewhere – wherever you start – it will trigger other element on the chart.

Fielding:  Chekhov called it his chart for inspired acting.

LPB:   Yes.    

Fielding: She somehow really works with that, I don’t do that in the way that I believe Lisa does, I don’t call attention to it, I don’t photocopy that and give it to the students, but once in a while I bring in a book and show it to the students. But we work with all those elements, and the basic understanding of that chart or that sphere whatever you call it -- which gives the understanding of the whole method – is that everything relates. People ask me about Meisner/Chekhov and I always say, Meisner is extremely systematic, fundamentally the first year, particularly, but the whole training is very systematic. It starts at point A, B, C, D up to, it goes up to, not Z but some of the way. You can think of it as a linear approach, a training approach. Chekhov is an ORGANIC approach. It is an organic approach, and organic means that everything is contained in everything, the whole is contained in the smallest parts. The flower is in the seed. That’s Goethe. So, in the Psychological Gesture you find, basically, a relationship to everything else. So the whole is always there in all the parts. So whatever I am working on, the other thing in a way comes to meet it. He [Chekhov] gives the picture of light bulbs around a circle – the elements, think of them as light bulbs. If I turn on one, two, three light bulbs – I can light up this bulb and that and the other bulb, and the circuit kinds of completes and everything kind of lights up. That’s the picture that he gives. And that’s of course right, and that’s called coming back to the beginning.

That’s what you experienced, I would say, when you talk about your experience with me over the summer. It is that we worked on whatever we worked on – it was probably ease that we worked on. We worked on some gesture, I don’t remember. Maybe there was some image. And there was the object, the ball. And then at some point, because we worked thoroughly, we really turned on this bulb and the other bulb. And then suddenly the circuit completed. Just suddenly, from the periphery of that circle, you were suddenly in the center of the circle, and the center of that circle is this state of creative inspiration that we are always trying to get to. And then everything flows: I am emotional. Lively images appear and speak. Now I have the will to do something -- I want something. The body is engaged, the voice is connected, everything is just, you know, cooking, effortless...

LPB: ... and of course the atmosphere when there is the team of people working together. It lifts you -- the ensemble creation as well, and that energy inspires you. I remember Bruce, was it, when he broke down when he found out that his child was alive and found.

Fielding:  Oh, I remember.

LPB: Interesting things were happening.

Fielding: Yes, of course, that’s the power of ensemble.

LPB: What about the CDs, the lectures? Interesting, yes?

Fielding:  Of course interesting! Endlessly interesting! I’ll tell you, I still listen to those often, I do and I have through all these years. I have them on my phone. I don’t listen every day, no, but I go back and listen. I do. Because he always inspires me. The tapes. The books. The lectures. His voice. His vision. Michael Chekhov was truly a pioneer. He forged the trail. Believe me, he was far out in front. And today, all of us, we’re merely followers in his wake.

LPB:  Right. Thank you so much!!!