Theatre, Dance and Performance Training Alba Emoting

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Alba Emoting and emotional melody: surfing the
emotional wave in Cachagua, Chile
Jessica M. Beck
Published online: 21 Sep 2010.
To cite this article: Jessica M. Beck (2010) Alba Emoting and emotional melody: surfing the emotional wave in Cachagua,
Chile, Theatre, Dance and Performance Training, 1:2, 141-156, DOI: 10.1080/19443927.2010.504998
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Theatre, Dance and Performance Training,
Vol. 1(2), 2010, 141–156
Alba Emoting and emotional melody:
surfing the emotional wave in Cachagua,
Chile
Downloaded by [5.70.210.191] at 04:22 27 August 2014
Jessica M. Beck
Alba Emoting is a tool for actors to summon emotion at will through respiratory-facialpostural actions that trigger the physiological components of emotion, developed by
neuroscientist Susana Bloch. This article briefly explains the history of Alba Emoting, its
development, and recent shifts in practice, as well as a consideration of some criticisms of
Alba Emoting. The latter half of the article focuses on my personal investigation of Alba
Emoting through practice, primarily centring on a workshop held in Cachagua, Chile in
December 2008. The workshop had the specific purpose of using Alba Emoting as the basis
of rehearsing excerpts of Federico Garcı́a Lorca’s play The House of Bernarda Alba. Included in
this is Bloch’s more recent development of ‘emotional melody’, a technique of scoring a play
using the Alba patterns as the basis for rehearsal. Finally, there is a discussion of the potential
uses of Alba Emoting and its integration with other techniques, from the perspective of a
director.
Keywords: Alba Emoting, emotional melody, emotion, breathing, Garcı́a Lorca
Breathing and emotion
In a dimly lit studio, in the small seaside town of Cachagua, I was lying on a
couch curled up in a ball sobbing. Tears were streaming down my cheeks and
the muscles in my lower abdomen were shaking. I hadn’t felt this level of
sadness so profoundly in a long time. A soft voice instructed me to change my
breathing. When I did, my tears cleared immediately, the feeling of despair
lifted and I was calm. Then the voice instructed me to change my breathing
again, which this time sent me into fits of laughter. Why had I been crying? Or
laughing? Nothing had been upsetting, and nothing had struck me as funny.
Theatre, Dance and Performance Training ISSN 1944-3927 print/ISSN 1944-3919 online
Ó 2010 Taylor & Francis http://www.informaworld.com
DOI: 10.1080/19443927.2010.504998
142
J.M. Beck
Figure 1 An afternoon in Cachagua, Chile, the home of Susana Bloch. December 2008. Photo
by Jessica M. Beck.
I was in the studio of Susana Bloch, the Chilean neuroscientist whose life’s work
has involved identifying and understanding the physiological aspects of human
emotion and developing a tool for actors to be able to summon emotions at
will. Later that night I was back in the same studio, this time conducting an
interview with Bloch about her research and her passion for theatre.
‘This is Alba Emoting’, she began, ‘A story of a love affair between breathing and
emotion.’ (Bloch, personal interview, 21 December 2008)
Although the connection between breathing and emotion is nothing new,
Bloch and her research team are among the first to explore this relationship
in the context of Western science, articulating phenomena that many
performers have been intuitively embodying for centuries. In Acting
(Re)Considered, Phillip Zarrilli maintains:
The description by Bloch and her associates of the psychophysiological
process of breath control and muscular contractions basic to inducing each
effector pattern is strikingly similar to that of the interior psychophysiological processes of some traditional Asian actors and to Artaud’s ideas.
(Zarrilli 1995, p. 98)
As this article will be focused on the views of emotion in Western
performance, let us refer to Antonin Artaud. In The Theatre and its Double,
Artaud (1958, p. 134) is adamant that ‘for every feeling, every mental action,
every leap of human emotion there is a corresponding breath which is
appropriate to it’. The findings of Bloch and her research team, outlined in
the following section, coincide with Artaud’s assertion.
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An overview of Alba Emoting
1. The BOS Method, named
for its founders Bloch,
Orthous, and SantibañezH., is the system of using
the activation of the
breath, facial expression
and postural attitude to
physiologically induce a
specific emotional
effector pattern.
Alba Emoting is a psychophysiological method for training actors developed
by neuroscientist Susana Bloch, derived from the BOS Method1 originated by
scientists Bloch and Guy Santibañez-H. and theatre director Pedro Orthous.
The BOS Method later evolved into Alba Emoting, a technique that is
intended to serve as a tool for actors to effectively induce the physiological
changes that occur with an emotion, and is based on extensive scientific
research. The research team, based in Chile in the 1970s, set out to examine
the physiological changes that occur during the expression of human
emotion by monitoring respiratory movements, heart rate, arterial pressure
and changes in muscular tonus in subjects (a combination of patients, drama
students and psychology students) who were reliving emotional experiences
from their lives under hypnosis (see Santibañez-H. and Bloch 1986). The
research suggested ‘the existence of a unique association between particular
bodily changes and a corresponding subjective experience’ (Bloch 1991, p.
32), which led Bloch to identify six effector patterns that she considers to be
‘basic emotions’ – anger, tenderness, fear, eroticism (also referred to as
sexual love), sadness and joy. Each emotion evidenced a distinct pattern of
physiological changes. Bloch and her colleagues noted that while many of the
changes that occurred were controlled by involuntary mechanisms, others
were not. Those responses that could be controlled voluntarily included
breath, facial musculature and postural attitude. The research revealed that if
one can learn to activate the voluntary aspects of the pattern together at the
same time – breath, facial expression, and postural attitude – one can
physiologically activate that emotion. Figure 2 is a brief breakdown of the
Alba Emoting effector patterns. (For a more detailed description of the
individuals patterns see Bloch et al. 1987, Bloch 2006.)
As Elaine Fox (2008, p. 24), a professor of experimental psychology at the
University of Essex, asserts in her book Emotion Science, ‘there is no general
agreement in emotion science on how emotion should be defined’, nor is
there an agreement on ‘basic emotions’, a term Fox encourages us not to
take ‘too literally’ (ibid., p. 84). In Bloch’s case, she and her team define
emotion as:
A complex and dynamic functional state of the entire organism, triggered by an
external or internal stimulus, integrated in the central nervous and
neuroendocrine systems, involving simultaneously a particular group of effector
organs (visceral, humoral, neuromuscular) and a subjective experience. (Bloch
and Lemeignan 1992, p. 32)
Bloch considers the six patterns to be basic emotions because ‘they
correspond to universal invariants of behavior – in a Darwinian sense – and
are present in the animal and in the human infant either as innate behaviors
or apparent at the very early stages of post-natal development’ (ibid.).
The scientists continued their research until the Pinochet revolution in
1973, at which time Bloch left Chile to teach at the Université Pierre et
Marie Curie in Paris. From her position in France, Bloch was able to continue
developing the BOS Method with theatre director Horacio Muñoz Orellana
and actors from Teater Klanen in Denmark (see Bloch et al. 1991, Lemeignan
J.M. Beck
144
Figure 2 The Alba Emoting effector patterns.
et al. 1992). It was during this period of research that Bloch developed her
system of teaching the BOS Method in collaboration with Pedro Sandor,
which she christened Alba Emoting (partly for ‘alba’ meaning ‘dawn’ in
Spanish, and partly in tribute to a production of Garcı́a Lorca’s The House of
Bernarda Alba [1999] with Teater Klanen) (Rix 2001, p. 209). After the
respiratory-postural-facial configurations of the six emotions were identified,
a ‘step-out’ technique was intentionally created so as not to have any
characteristics in common with any of the patterns, thus neutralising the six
patterns. The step-out technique consists of ‘at least three slow, regular, and
deep full breathing cycles followed by a total relaxation of the facial muscles
2. According to Plonka ‘the
Feldenkrais Method of
Somatic Education
teaches awareness
through movement.
[Moshe] Feldenkrais
observed that at every
moment four things are
going on—thinking,
feeling (emotion), sensing,
and movement’ (Plonka
2007, p. 36). The method
is named after its founder
Dr. Moshe Feldenkrais
(1904–1984).
3. Soma is defined as ‘the
term used in this field to
identify the living body as
experienced from within’
(Joly 2008, pp. 33–34, my
translation) and was
coined by Thomas Hanna
in 1976. Using the term
soma rather than ‘body’ is
seen in somatic education
‘as an opportunity to
resolve the gap or mindbrain conceptual thinking
and present an authentic
holistic perspective of the
person’ (ibid., pp. 33–34).
145
and a change in posture’ (Bloch 1993, p. 128). The aim of Bloch’s system is to
teach actors to physiologically trigger emotions, but equally to give them a
tool to deactivate the emotion by way of the step-out technique, to prevent
what Alba Emoting instructors refer to as an ‘emotional hangover’.
Despite various publications, Alba Emoting is still in the process of
becoming more widely known and practised. Bloch and her team began
publishing articles about their research in scientific journals (see Bloch et al.
1987, Bloch et al. 1991), and eventually in theatre journals (see Bloch 1993,
Rix 1993). Bloch began speaking at theatre conferences and it was at one of
these lectures that Roxanne Rix, currently a professor at Kutztown
University in Pennsylvania, first heard of Alba Emoting. In an article entitled
‘Alba Emoting: A Preliminary Experiment with Emotional Effector Patterns’
(1993), Rix reports on a self-conducted experiment with MFA acting
students using only the breathing patterns (rather than the facial and postural
components), the results of which convinced her that Alba Emoting was
worthy of further investigation. Rix was among the first group of Americans
to travel to Chile to work with Bloch and is now the highest level Alba
Emoting instructor in the United States. Bloch recently published a book in
English, The Alba of Emotions: Managing Emotions through Breathing (2006) and
a translation of her newest book Surfeando al Ola Emocional: Reconozca las
emociones básicas y comprenda sus emociones mixtas (2008) (Surfing the
Emotional Wave: Recognize basic emotions and understand your mixed emotions)
will become available next year.
Until recently, Alba Emoting workshops have been few and far between.
The pioneering instructors in the United States – including Roxanne Rix,
Nancy Loitz, Hyrum Conrad, Laura Facciponti and Rocco Dal Vera – took
years to acquire the number of hours necessary to become qualified to teach
Alba Emoting. Alba Emoting has a certification system based on skill and
accumulated hours of training, ranging from Certification Level (CL) one to
six (a CL4 is necessary to fully teach Alba Emoting). Currently nine fully
certified Alba Emoting instructors teach in the United States. The small
number of instructors and lack of training workshops has contributed to the
technique’s relative obscurity (outside of South America), but this is
beginning to change. In 2007 four Alba Emoting intensive trainings took place
outside of Chile – in Puerto Morelos, Mexico, in London, United Kingdom
and two in the United States (Asheville, NC and Cincinnati, OH).
Laura Facciponti, a CL4 and professor at the University of North Carolina,
Asheville, has been conducting training workshops that combine learning
Alba Emoting with the Feldenkrais Method.2 The first workshop of this kind
was co-run with Lavina Plonka in Mexico in 2007, and subsequently more
intensives of this nature have taken place in Montréal, Canada in 2008 and
2009 in conjunction with another Feldenkrais practitioner (and Alba Emoting
CL3) Odette Guimond. This pairing of Alba Emoting and the Feldenkrais
Method is significant. Yvan Joly (2008, p. 33), an internationally renowned
Feldenkrais trainer and psychologist, defines somatic education as ‘the field
of practice and knowledge belonging to a variety of methods that are
interested in learning an awareness of the living body (the soma3) moving in the
environment’ (original emphasis, my translation). After participating in two of
the Montréal workshops, Joly considers Alba Emoting to be a form of
somatic education. In a testimonial about the workshops Joly states:
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J.M. Beck
Figure 3 Participants in an Alba Emoting/Feldenkrais workshop engaging with the ‘joy’ pattern.
Montréal, Canada June 2009. Photo by Bernard Dubois.
For movement, The Feldenkrais Method promotes ideas like reversibility,
awareness, intentionality, degrees of freedom, availability to move in any
direction, availability to change the direction without preparation, finding
neutral . . . Alba Emoting proposes exactly the same ideas specifically applied to
the realm of emotional movements. (Joly, personal communication [email],
15 June 2009)
The combination of these two methods is attracting a variety of participants
in addition to actors, such as Feldenkrais practitioners, psychologists and
ontological coaches. In South America, however, Alba Emoting is a popular
tool in itself, being utilised in different fields such as education, family therapy,
psychotherapy, management and communication (Bloch, personal communication [email], 5 December 2009).
Emotional controversy
In The Player’s Passion, Joseph R. Roach traces the complex relationship
between science and acting theory throughout history:
The nature of the body, its structure, its outer dynamics, and its relationship to
the larger world that it inhabits have been the subject of diverse speculation
and debate. At the center of this ongoing controversy stands the question of
emotion. (Roach 1993, p. 11)
4. Written in 1773,
published in 1830.
Just as neuroscientists disagree on definitions and approaches to emotion, so
do theatre practitioners. Denis Diderot’s (1713–1784) famous Paradoxe sur le
Comedien (17734) raises the following question: ‘If the actor were feeling
[rather than merely playing] the part, wouldn’t it be virtually impossible for
147
Figure 4 Yvan Joly and Johnnie Lyne-Pirkis engaging in the ‘anger’ pattern while Laura
Facciponti instructs. Montréal, Canada June 2009. Photo by: Bernard Dubois.
him to act the same part twice in a row with the same passion and the same
success?’ (Diderot in Gray 2007, p. 250; Gray’s emphasis, Gray’s translation).
Diderot concludes it is ‘the absolute lack of sensitivity that makes for
the best, truly sublime actors’ (ibid., p. 254). His thesis calls for the
corroboration of the much-respected English actor David Garrick (1717–
1779), as Diderot was convinced that his own work was ‘totally and
irrefutably exemplified by Garrick’s acting’ (ibid., p. 245). Despite several
requests for feedback there is no indication that Garrick ever formally
acknowledged his contemporary’s viewpoint. In the introductory chapter of
the 1888 survey of actors called Masks or Faces?, William Archer (1856–
1924) complains of Diderot’s use of ‘false logic’ and ‘empty paradoxmongering’ (Archer 1888, p. 4) and dishes out scathing criticism of the
philosopher for his lack of practical professional experience.
Theatre practitioners throughout the years have interpreted Diderot’s
paradox to support their own views. Diderot’s champion was the actor
Benoı̂t-Constant Coquelin (1841–1909), a believer in the school of
representational acting who regarded the paradox as a ‘literal truth’
(Coquelin 1915, p. 56), to the great annoyance of Konstantin Stanislavsky
(1863–1938). Stanislavsky felt that Diderot ‘was not understood’
(Stanislavsky in Whyman 2008, p. 46) and dismissed Coquelin’s style
claiming, ‘when it comes to the expression of deep passions, it is either too
showy or too superficial’ (Stanislavski 2008, p. 26). Jerzy Grotowski (1933–
1999), although admiring the work of Stanislavsky and emerging from his
lineage, insists that Stanislavsky is ‘mistaken’ in his belief that ‘emotions are
subject to our will’ (Grotowski 2008, p. 33). Lee Strasberg (1901–1982),
while attempting to be ‘respectful’ of Grotowski’s work, defends
Stanislavsky’s technique of emotional recall as ‘valuable and useful because
of its precision’ rather than relying on ‘some hypothetical ‘‘collective
unconscious’’’ (Strasberg 1987, p. 179) and even goes on to suggest that
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J.M. Beck
the Laboratory Theatre initiates actors ‘into what amounts to a religious
order or cult’ (ibid.). Strasberg’s method is rife with criticism, including
Richard Hornby (1992, p. 182) equating Strasberg’s reinterpretation of
Stanislavsky’s use of affected memory with ‘the decline of the American
theatre’. Playwright and actor David Mamet (1994, p. 12) goes on to
condemn all attempts at eliciting emotion through technique, including
Stanislavsky’s, as ‘a lot of hogwash’.
The disagreements – and in some cases, outright bickering – are endless.
Alba Emoting has also been subject to criticism. Elly Konijn (2000, p. 107),
a Dutch psychologist, maintains Bloch’s research ‘failed to consider that
physiological phenomena measured in actors might be related to things
other than the presumed arousal of character related emotions’ which
Konijn considers to be essential in her own theory of task-based emotions.
Rhonda Blair, an actor and academic researching the relationship between
acting and cognitive neuroscience, criticises Konijn’s study for not
addressing ‘the psychophysiology of emotions’ or ‘neurocognitive processes
out of which feelings and actions arise’ (Blair 2008, p. 49). Paul Ekman, the
psychologist who specialises in facial expressions, agrees in general with
Bloch’s findings, and his own unpublished research found that ‘when
subjects make facial expressions respiration falls into place’ (Ekman in
Bloch et al. 1988, p. 202). But he does have disagreements ‘in regard to
their [Bloch et al.’s] choice of emotions and the specification of the
particular facial expressions which characterize each emotion’ (ibid.). Other
common criticisms include objection to the commercial trademark on Alba
Emoting, the existence of a self-monitored certification process, and the
use of ‘real’ emotions in performance. While Bloch’s research focused on
the physiological changes that occur in everyday human emotion, she
makes a clear distinction between emotion in life and emotion in
performance. Bloch defines acting behaviour as ‘behavior produced at will
by an actor in order to transmit gnostic and emotional information to an
audience by word, gesture and posture within an artistic framework’ (Bloch
et al. 1987, p. 1). Emotion in performance shares similarities with everyday
emotion in its physiological components and effects on an observer, but
crucial differences exist in the stimulus that triggers them and the
accompanying subjective cognitive processes. For these reasons, Bloch
(ibid., p. 15) believes that ‘to appear ‘natural’ or ‘true’ on the stage, actors
do not need to ‘feel’ the emotion they are playing but must produce the
correct effector-expressive output of the emotional behavior’, which is
consequently in keeping with Diderot’s conclusion. Blair states:
The idea that emotions can exist apart from conscious content might be
difficult for actors to grasp at first, but this is fundamental to understanding the
current science, which defines emotions as body states, while feelings are
consciously registered ‘interpretations’ of these body states. (Blair 2008, p. 47)
This clear distinction between ‘feeling’ and ‘emotion’ is potentially useful
when working with actors. As a theatre director, my research focuses on
exploring different techniques to enable me to begin to specifically address
and interrogate the question of emotion in performance. The historical and
current disputes about emotion in acting theory prompted my own
149
investigation of Alba Emoting. However, while the foundations of Alba
Emoting are grounded in concrete scientific research, using the technique in
practice (in direct application to a rehearsal process or indeed to a theatrical
text) is more subjective and open to interpretation. The following section of
the article will detail my personal (and inherently subjective) experiences of
learning Alba Emoting.
Investigating Alba Emoting
To use Alba Emoting as a director, one must experience the technique by
first learning the patterns. There are three stages that one can expect to
go through when learning Alba Emoting; the first phase is considered to be
‘robotic’. In this initial learning period, the subjects are encouraged to
explore activating the breath, facial expressions and postural attitude in a
non-subtle way, so as to begin to identify, control and feel the voluntary
components of the effector patterns. The second stage is ‘induction’ which
is the time when all elements of the effector pattern are activated together
causing one’s own emotional ‘feeling’. The final stage is ‘integration’, which
occurs after a subject has learnt the patterns to a high standard and they
can be activated in a very subtle way appropriate for performance (Rix
2001, p. 212). In the first year of learning Alba Emoting, I discovered a few
significant uses of the tool that include: 1) awareness, 2) creating a
common vocabulary in the rehearsal room, and 3) freeing emotions in
everyday life.
The first training I attended was a combination Alba Emoting/Feldenkrais
workshop in Mexico with Facciponti and Plonka. With 36 hours divided
between the two methods, there was only enough time to learn the basic
Alba Emoting patterns. This initial workshop enabled me to begin to
differentiate between the physiological components of the emotional
effector patterns in myself and widened my awareness. I discovered that I
was unintentionally mixing in elements of the ‘sadness’ pattern in my
everyday life by engaging a furrowed brow. Simply by identifying the tendency
with part of the facial expression for ‘sadness’, that habitual expression has
cleared, unconsciously, from my everyday life.
Further trainings in Cincinnati and London were focused more on the
practical applications in theatre. In the Cincinnati workshop, led by Rix,
Loitz and Dal Vera, each participant had prepared a monologue, which was
filmed at the beginning and again at the end of the 10-day workshop. The
first time the monologue was performed as prepared by the actor and
the second time the monologue was performed using three specific
Alba Emoting patterns. This was not a before/after exercise to show
improvement; however, viewing both versions of the monologues, back-toback, illustrated the clarity that the patterns can bring to a performance.
One could see clearly that in the previous take, there were unintentional
emotion mixes occurring from our personal habitual patterns (such as
my furrowed brow). In the second take the emotional effector patterns
were perfectly clear. At this point in the training we now had a specific
vocabulary referring to the physiological patterns, rather than the
subjective abstract concept of an emotion.
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J.M. Beck
In the London intensive, led by Facciponti, we used Alba Emoting to
rehearse a speech or scene, assigning specific patterns or mixes of patterns
to particular lines of text or thought-only to let the work go and notice
how rehearsing in that way made a difference, especially in the actor’s
clarity and focus. For those of us at Certification Level 2, we began to
purposely mix the patterns together. The ‘joy’ pattern causes involuntary
muscles in the abdomen to trigger laughter. This was also a difficult pattern
for me in the beginning, and though I was eventually able to trigger genuine
laughter even if it was nothing like my natural laugh in everyday life.
But when asked to try a specific combination of ‘joy’ and ‘sadness’, I
immediately recognised my own laugh. In the three years since beginning
my training in Alba Emoting, my natural laugh is shifting towards the
pure ‘joy’ pattern. I also laugh and cry in everyday life more easily than
previously. Perhaps engaging the physiological elements of the pattern
correctly has counteracted muscle tensions or other habits that prevent
me from fully expressing emotion in life.
After attending three intensive training sessions in Alba Emoting, I had a
confident grasp on each of the six patterns and could even begin to
deliberately mix the patterns. I could see and understand the benefit in
having this skill as a performer, but how could I incorporate Alba Emoting
into my directing work? The trainings had only provided a little exploration
into the possibilities of using Alba Emoting with text for performance.
Luckily, Trina Fischer (CL4), who I had met at the Cincinnati training, invited
me to participate in a private workshop in Chile in December 2008. Fischer
is an actor and director with years of experience applying Alba Emoting to a
rehearsal process with her own theatre company Looking for Lilith, now
based in Louisville, KY. The purpose of this workshop was to apply Alba
Emoting as a rehearsal technique on scenes from Garcı́a Lorca’s The House of
Bernarda Alba (1999), using ‘emotional melody’. Emotional melody is the
name Bloch (2008, p. 87) gives to ‘the sequence, alternation, and mixture
of the different basic emotions, with their various intensities, durations,
silences’ found within a dramatic text (my translation). This would be an
opportunity to experience using Alba Emoting as part of a rehearsal process
and in addition to that, an opportunity to meet and work with Susana Bloch.
Emotional melody and The House of Bernarda Alba
The Cachagua workshop was led by Trina Fischer, who started working with
Bloch more than 10 years ago when she was studying on a Fulbright
Scholarship in Santiago. Her husband, Juan Pablo Kalawski, a psychologist also
trained in Alba Emoting, accompanied the group and joined in on a few of the
sessions. The participants in the workshop included Morgan Rosse, an actor
living in New York and a CL2; Alison Vodnoy, a CL1 and recent graduate of
the theatre department at the University of Cincinnati; and Angélica Aitken,
a Chilean actor who is currently working with Bloch in a group called Alba
Nova.
When we met Bloch, she spoke more candidly about her experiences as a
scientist and academic, including her passion for theatre and fascination with
actors and acting. As a young woman Bloch had been offered a place at the
151
theatre school in Santiago. She turned it down. Vivien Leigh was one of
Bloch’s favourite actors:
[Leigh] was so fragile and so beautiful, and so great an actress . . . but so
involved in her acting life and her personal life that she became crazy. And I got
scared. I said, my god, with the temperament I have, maybe this is too much.
I will get so involved. The truth is I got scared. I freaked, and went away and I
started studying psychology. (Bloch, personal interview, 18 December 2008)
Bloch studied psychology but never lost her passion for theatre, writing a
thesis on Social Realism in American Drama analysing Arthur Miller’s Death
of a Salesman, and later working on a production of Before Breakfast by
Eugene O’Neill while simultaneously studying the behaviour of decorticated
rats. Her scientific career took her to the top of her field in the study of
pigeon vision (an important research area for cognitive neuroscience), but
would ultimately lead her back to theatre through the study of emotion.
Out of the six-day workshop, the first two days were devoted to pattern
review, while the rest utilised the technique of scoring text with Alba
Emoting called emotional melody. Fischer integrated pattern work with
her own influences as a director, primarily incorporating Anne Bogart’s
Viewpoints and other impulse and awareness exercises. We also began
exploring the possibilities of Alba Improvisation, moving freely through
different patterns at will in response to the other actors and our impulses. In
a group session with Bloch, she brought us right back to the basis of the
patterns – the breath. Aligned in a row we were told to stand straight and
still, as moais – the statues on Rapa Nui (Easter Island). Bloch instructed us to
activate only the breathing component of the patterns, which proved to be
difficult, as we had been learning how to integrate all the physiological
elements simultaneously. The exercise was very useful, however, and
improved our pattern work overall. Bloch used the exercise to remind us of
the importance of the breath – without it, she maintains, ‘emotion is not
alive’. The remainder of the workshop focused on using Alba Emoting to
rehearse the scenes. I was working primarily on a scene between the
characters of Poncia and Adela, with fellow participant Angélica Aitken, using
an amalgamation of both an English translation and Garcı́a Lorca’s (2007)
original Spanish version of the scene.
Emotional melody begins with both scene partners ‘scoring’ their scripts.
Whether this scoring happens pre-rehearsal or in the midst of rehearsals
depends upon the individual director (in this case, we scored the text after
our first read-through). Bloch (1993, p. 130) considers the scoring of her
emotion-based text analysis to be ‘a form of notation comparable to the
Laban system of movement notation’. When notating the emotional melody
of the scene, one begins by scoring the scene with the desired emotional
effector patterns, combinations of those patterns, and numbers to denote
intensity. (Though the patterns themselves are straightforward and based in
scientific research, scoring a text with the patterns is ultimately subjective,
and open to interpretation by the actors and director working on a
particular script.) Levels in Alba Emoting are usually on a scale of 1–5, but
they are very personal to the individual on that particular day. Nancy Loitz
compares the scale to an accordion placing oneself at the midpoint of the
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J.M. Beck
bellows. Depending on the given day, one can stretch to a higher 5, or a
more subtle 1. (See Figure 5 for an excerpt of my emotional score.)
To begin the process of using emotional melody, Aitken and I scored our
scripts and ran our lines, but we did not engage with the patterns until we
were working with Fischer and Bloch. We were asked to stand facing
outwards and run through our emotional melodies. In effect, the observers
could watch the scores before we did. We then ran the scene, without text,
simply using our scores. We repeated this a few times and it was in these
moments that we could see and adjust the score accordingly. Then we began
to run the scene with the text. Though following the same emotional score
each time, the scene was always subtly different, as the breath would
influence the words uniquely in each moment.
Personally, I was sceptical about the use of emotional melody from the
beginning. As a director, I work with actors in a more intuitive and organic
process (in more than five years of working with professional actors, only
one actively used a form of actioning or scoring in rehearsal). But working
with emotional melody in practice yielded some fascinating results. The first
of which was how rapidly the patterns connected us to the text. We spent
four of the workshop days working directly on the scenes and our emotional
melodies before performing for a small invited audience. In my initial
Figure 5 Emotional Melody score for the character of Adela (excerpt from Lorca’s House of
Bernarda Alba).
153
scepticism I had presumed that by following the score of the patterns I would
be ‘thinking too much’. But, in fact, the experience itself was very freeing, and
yet had a structure I could rely upon. Perhaps this was because I was at a
point in my Alba Emoting training where I did not have to consciously think
about bringing all the elements of the patterns together – the patterns had
become integrated into my soma. My participation in and observation of this
process led me to the conclusion that using the Alba Emoting patterns
allowed for a unified psychophysical connection within myself, and in relation
to the text.
Conclusion: using Alba Emoting as a director
Alba Emoting has many different applications in the rehearsal process, and
emotional melody is just one example. Emotional melody can be very
effective but requires the actors to be trained in Alba Emoting, preferably at
a CL2 standard or higher, at a stage where the individual patterns are fully
integrated and the actors can consciously mix them. However, if a director is
familiar with the patterns, Alba Emoting can still be a very useful tool for
developing awareness, creating a common vocabulary, and integration with
other techniques.
Awareness
Being able to observe what is happening to an actor physiologically is
invaluable. In 2009 I was asked to consult on a production of Orwell: A
Celebration at London’s Trafalgar Studios, working specifically on an excerpt
of Orwell’s 1984, the Ministry of Love torture scene. Every time the
character of O’Brien raised his hand, the character of Winston would have
to wince in intense pain until the torture was over. With my knowledge of
Alba Emoting, I was able to suggest to the actor playing Winston different
breathing patterns and postural attitudes to assist his portrayal. The actor
playing Winston thus gained a physical and reliable tool to achieve the
Figure 6 Alan Cox and Ben Porter in Orwell: A Celebration at Trafalgar Studios. London, 2009.
Photo by Dawn Cruttenden.
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J.M. Beck
heightened state required of the play, night after night. Similarly, when
teaching at drama school I was working with a young actor who had to
become very angry in a scene. Every time he attempted the scene he was
unintentionally mixing in elements of sadness (when inadvertent mixing of
the emotions occurs in Alba Emoting it is called an ‘entanglement’). I simply
asked him to release the tension in his brow, and his performance
immediately improved. Neither of these actors had any knowledge of Alba
Emoting, nor did they need to.
Vocabulary
In a recent practical research project, I was attempting to determine
whether using Alba Emoting could help create a common understanding of
emotion among a cast. I began by introducing the Alba patterns first for two
reasons: 1) the patterns are specific and have a basis in physiology, rather
than psychology; and 2) perhaps through them we could create a common
vocabulary. In this instance, I used a number/letter system for the Alba
Emoting patterns created by Laura Facciponti (see Figure 7). Wanting to
separate our subjective notions of emotion from the Alba Emoting effector
patterns, Facciponti developed the number/letter system to eliminate the
tendency for actors to strive immediately for results. The 1’s are nosebreathing patterns, the 2’s are mouth-breathing patterns, and the 3’s are
nose-and-mouth combination patterns. Of course, the actors are aware of
what the emotion is, but it does help separate the abstract concept of the
emotion from the precise patterns. In my research project, once the actors
had the basic awareness of the patterns and could differentiate between the
physiological components, Alba Emoting became a very useful vocabulary
even without using the patterns directly. I could say to an actor, ‘you have
some 3b (sadness) in the speech, is that intentional?’ If it was not, they now
had the ability to change it.
Figure 7 The number/letter system of pattern organisation developed by Laura Facciponti.
Integration with other methods
Alba Emoting, while a useful tool, is not a rehearsal process in itself. In the
workshop in Cachagua, Trina Fischer was combining Alba Emoting with
Viewpoints. Pamela D. Chabora, a CL4 and professor at North Dakota
155
State University, writes about integrating Alba Emoting with Lee
Strasberg’s method in a chapter included in Method Acting Reconsidered
(Krasner 2000). Hyrum Conrad, a CL5 and professor at Brigham Young
University, Idaho, has developed what he calls ArcWork, which combines
Rasabox exercises with Alba Emoting (Baker 2008, p. 105). Elizabeth
Townsend, a recent MFA graduate of Kent State University, writes about
using Alba Emoting with the work of Michael Chekhov: ‘Alba Emoting stirs
the desired emotion through the combination of breathing patterns, facial
expressions, and postures, all of which come into play while using a
Psychological Gesture’ (Townsend 2009, p. 35). In my own work I have
found Alba Emoting to be effective when using it in conjunction with
physical exercises from a Grotowskian tradition as well as the work of
South African theatre practitioner Brian Astbury. These examples illustrate
the versatility of Alba Emoting as a tool.
The wider debate about emotion in acting theory is ongoing and likely to
have no resolution. However, I do believe that Alba Emoting is a means of
exploring Roach’s (1993, p. 11) ‘question of emotion’ in that it offers a
physiological deconstruction of emotional states that can be utilised – by the
actor at will – to achieve the embodiment of these emotional states for the
purpose of performance. What Alba Emoting cannot do (and nor should it
be expected to) is offer a deconstruction of the entirety of the actor’s task in
performance (including phenomena such as presence, pre-expressivity, and
dual-consciousness). Alba Emoting is also not a substitute for an actor’s
ability. Bloch et al. (1987, p. 18) states: ‘by no means does such a method
pretend to replace the actor’s intuition, creativity and imagination’.Towards
the beginning of Stephen Wangh’s An Acrobat of the Heart (2000, p. 6) he
mentions that his book ‘should be about opening new doors, not about
closing old ones’. That is how I perceive Alba Emoting. No matter what
other methods or techniques one may use, developing the awareness and
ability to differentiate between the physiological elements of emotion is an
invaluable tool for actors and directors alike.
References
Archer, W., 1888. Masks or Faces? A Study in the Psychology of Acting. London: Longmans,
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Theatre, Dance and Performance Training Alba Emoting

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