WHAT IS
Hesiod wrote “The Theogony” after an economic dispute with his brother. Proust touches and evokes universal feelings of nostalgia and belonging just by tasting a madeleine. To go far, to reach out towards the unknown and allow our imagination to breathe, we must start from something small, something that belongs to us, something we know. That’s how creativity works: it starts from something we already know.
A BRIDGE BETWEEN THE CHARACTER AND THE SELF
If a character enters the stage it is because they are moved by something they lack, by a need for something. Their life will be full of desperate, creative attempts to satisfy that need. And what are films or plays or stories, if not a distilled version of life? So also an actor is called to explore their own shortcomings and desires through the characters they interpret, to discover what inevitably unites them, and to lend their own experience in the cause to aid the other. Actor and character hold onto each other in a dangerous and unpredictable flight towards the summit: to try to reach this common objective together.
FROM FEAR TO ACTION
Actors have always suffered from performance anxiety, they feel inadequate, too small to fill out the stage or to be believable on set. The Chubbuck Technique teaches us to use our own fragility and inner ghosts on the stage itself, using them to achieve the objective that the character needs to reach. The sense of inadequacy, the fear that something terrible will happen to us again, the need to be redeemed, will no longer be unwelcome guests in the heart of the actor, but the wave to ride, the strength to put into play in order to find the treasure. The story to tell becomes the very scene of the showdown. And if the actor lives out the process of resolution, if the actor really allows something personal to happen, the audience and the whole world will fight along with them and will change along with them.
A CONCRETE ANALYSIS
This emotional work and personal involvement must rest itself on a concrete, solid base. Ivana Chubbuck applies a structure of the scientific analysis of text and specific rules to highlight the real forces that motivate characters in order to illuminate the path that the actor can follow in concrete terms. The analysis of the scene is not only always deep-rooted and coherent (and focuses the actors on concrete objectives) but is set up in a constructive way, so with the intention to create a narrative flow that always leads to the conquest of something. The character will never come out defeated: Othello by killing himself, Blanche Du Bois by being put away in a lunatic asylum, Laura by living in the company of her glass zoo… all of them will meet their destiny with something more than that which they started out with, even if they are not aware of it.
The journey is unpredictable, but they always return home with a treasure.