The daily dedication required for sense memory work may be daunting, but some actors find the payoff to be the only true life in art.
To create reality on the stage or screen‹not just an imitation or indication of life‹we're selling our talents short if we rely on our heads to somehow "think" us there. We need a specific technique that will make us so alive that although our rational minds know we're on a raked wooden stage under hot lights (or in front of a blue screen), our knees will tremble as though we were actually teetering on the edge of a cliff, or our arms will get goosebumps as though it were actually snowing.
Sense memory is that technique. By first learning how to use our five senses deeply and thoroughly, we learn how to make the stage/screen world real in a visceral way; we learn how to live and react in the moment and in our bodies, not in our heads. Activating our senses also expands and deepens our range of onstage behavior as the various sensorial stimuli evoke spontaneous feelings. Our acting becomes specific, grounded, and believable.
Sense memory work is not easy. It's slow and methodical and can feel like sheer drudgery at times. Teachers recommend that you practice sense memory exercises every single day, the way a pianist practices scales. That's because most of us are not in the habit of using all our senses in such a detailed way: A blind person can identify a friend by smell or touch, but most sighted people can't. Yet with steady work, we're all capable of it.
Remember what happened to French writer Marcel Proust when he nibbled a petit madeleine? Remember what happened to you the last time you, say, caught a whiff of the exact same aftershave your high school boyfriend used? Even without half trying, we respond emotionally to certain sensory stimuli such as smells and tastes. Your senses are there, fully loaded, just waiting to enhance your performance in surprising ways.
Coffee Breakthrough
Sense memory work, when it's preceded by relaxation techniques, also teaches you how to concentrate. When you're seriously trying to drink a cup of hot coffee without the cup or the coffee, you're focusing hard enough on a specific task to understand what true concentration is. That cup of coffee exercise was one of Method master Lee Strasberg's sense memory exercises of choice. We'll use it here as an example of the detail, the specificity, that is required for sense memory work.
First, do a relaxation exercise. Then spend 15 minutes drinking a cup of coffee and exploring your process as you do it. Take each sense in turn (sight, sound, touch, taste, smell) and let your mind ask your senses the most detailed questions imaginable: What color is the cup? Is it chipped on the rim? Does the coffee make a particular sloshing sound when the cup is full? What about when it's half empty? What is the temperature of the handle? Is the cup's glaze smooth or rough? What is the sensation on the tip of the tongue with that first sip as compared to the last dregs on the bottom? What is the aroma? Throughout, stay focused on what your senses perceive.
Do this every day until you feel ready to proceed. Then do the same exercise, but without the cup. Repeat as often as necessary until your five senses feel truly awake. You can practice with/without all sorts of objects.
You're not to mime nor to "remember" intellectually the experience of drinking the cup of coffee, nor to work for emotion of any kind. The idea is to relax and trust that your newly sharpened senses will do the work for you. Of course, your senses will probably fade in and out like a shaky radio signal. Concentrating on the exercise is what's crucial.
The biggest problem for beginners, said Cathleen Leslie, who teaches the Method at Los Angeles' Lee Strasberg Institute, is they have a hard time learning to use senses other than the sense of sight. But, she told Back Stage West/Drama-Logue, "It's not magic. We all have the ability."
Another problem, she said, is the tendency to go for results: "The confusion at the beginning is in being simple, trusting the work, not visualizing."
Leslie's approach is measured. "A good teacher won't allow a student to move on to [personally meaningful objects] until the student is ready," she said. "It could take two or four months. [For example], you start off with three simple fabrics and eventually you can move on to your wedding dress, or the dress you wore when your father died." After studying with Lee Strasberg for 10 years, Leslie now says that her senses are aware of everything‹"I feel like I'm in a museum every day of my life."
"Sense memory teaches actors how to work for themselves, how to discover their own truth," said Shelley Mitchell, who was also trained by Strasberg and teaches in the Bay Area. "Lee would say to hold a lemon wedge and pretend you're putting it in your mouth. What happens to your salivary glands? They go off. Anybody can be triggered; it works instantly." Mitchell challenges actors to take sense memory work further, to dig into their own life experiences‹in collaboration, she said, with the playwright.
And that's an important point. When you move from classroom exercises to a production, you want to be sure the emotions that you might activate through any particular sense memory will fulfill the demands of the text. Practicing regularly in order to limber up your senses and familiarize yourself with your own palette will allow you to pick and choose appropriately.
Where's the Sense?
Similarly, in his book No Acting Please (reprinted in 1995 by Ermor Enterprises), Los Angeles acting teacher Eric Morris emphasizes the importance of using sense memory to create realities that "you personally respond to and that change your life to match the character's life on stage" [italics added].
Film actor/director Robert Townsend was able to choose just the right sense memories for his characters in two recent films. Coached by Cathleen Leslie in a Showtime film to air in March, Love Songs, in which he plays a boxer whose boss doesn't believe in him, he worked to conjure up the smells and sights and sounds of a hated job from his past: a hamburger joint in Chicago.
"Sure enough, it brought back all these memories," he told BSW/D-L. "Instead of being on a set in Toronto, I was accessing all these emotions without having to act." Later, to feel uncomfortable for a scene, he chose to hear chalk on a blackboard: "Right away I can hear it and it makes me queasy. If I didn't have that to tap into, I'd have to work at being uneasy rather than hitting a button and all of a sudden it just flows."
Morris' book offers sense memory exercises that are well worth trying out. "Everything we've ever experienced has found its path into our consciousness through our senses and has stimulated some kind of behavior," he writes, "so it's only common sense to return to your senses to stimulate your behavior on stage." Uta Hagen's Respect for Acting also provides good sense memory exercises.
If the minute detail required for the coffee cup and other such exercises seems tedious, consider Judith Weston's take. In Directing Actors (Michael Wiese Productions, 1996), she writes, "Sense memory exercises can be very freeing... They return us to a child's sense of concentration on very simple things, such as the color of the inside of a seashell or the texture of a rose petal or the temperature of a cup of tea as it cools in our hands."
Weston also explains how sense memory can enhance an actual prop or set piece: An actor who wants to re-create for himself a particularly cozy feeling might turn the set decorator's kitchen table into the kitchen table from his childhood home by conjuring up "its color, its scratches, the chewing gum his sister left under it..." Once again: Don't remember the scratches, the color, the gum‹work to see and feel them.
So you see how sense memory can solve two important acting challenges: You can create an object where none exists (Macbeth's dagger), and you can infuse an existing stage set or object with personally meaningful sensorial properties that stimulate character-appropriate emotions (Mom's old kitchen table might make you feel safe; your wedding dress might make you feel happy... or sad, or both; like Robert Townsend, the smell of greasy burgers might make you bitter). "If actors do not root their imaginative preparation... in sensory life, their work may become intellectualized and stagy," cautioned Weston. Yes, or boringly generalized.
"You're not a director writing a storyboard," noted Cathleen Leslie. "You have to work through the senses." When you're doing a sense memory exercise, she told BSW-D-L, it's important that "if an emotion or memory comes, don't stay with the memory, stay with the five senses. Don't get lost." It's this kind of rigorous discipline in your preparation that will keep your performance focused, clear, fresh, and real. BSW/D-L
