The last of John Strasberg’s Nine Natural Laws of Creativity is the Law of Love. Gifted artists, he writes, are driven by love of what they do to communicate deep personal truth in what they create.
At the very end of his presentation Strasberg invokes Aristotle....
The Law of Determined Movement is eighth of John Strasberg’s Nine Natural Laws of Creativity. “This law could be listed first or last,” Strasberg writes, although he has listed it next-to-last. Possibly at one point in his writing it was last, and the Law of Love was added later as a kind of coda.
In any case, the Law of Determined Movement is so important, Strasberg writes, that “without it no amount of talent, imagination, organic thinking, intentional dreaming, spontaneous inspiration, truth, or transformative capacity will suffice,” ticking through his preceding seven laws. The acting out of thoughts and feelings is movement; the following through on ideas and impulses is movement.
The seventh of John Strasberg’s Nine Natural Laws of Creativity is the Law of Transformation. The word transform is from Latin trans – across, over, beyond – and forma – form or shape. Form may be related to Greek morphe – form, beauty, outward appearance, which in turn is related to Morpheus, son of sleep and god of dreams in Ovid.
Acting, Strasberg writes, involves the transformation of – or we might say “dreaming beyond” – one’s human reality.
The transformation, he says, applies both to one’s circumstances of life – “where one lives, where one works, one’s acquaintances, etc.” – and in who one is. He further distinguishes the latter into working from the ”outside in” and from the “inside out.”
The sixth of John Strasberg’s Nine Natural Laws of Creativity is the Law of the Sense of Truth. In his discussion of this law Strasberg highlights the distinction between acting that expresses feeling and acting that expresses truth. “Art and artists express what they feel,” he writes, “but in a deeper sense than just expressing emotion. They express … what they understand about life.” The focus can’t be a mechanical process or an expression of emotion for its own sake, but rather a truthful expression of a perception.
John Strasberg calls the fifth of his Nine Natural Laws of Creativity the Law of Spontaneous Inspiration. It is perhaps not accidental that spontaneity is in the center of the nine laws. Having worked and studied with Strasberg for more than a decade, I can testify that spontaneity is at the heart of his teaching and artistic “way.”
Training to achieve spontaneity may sound like an oxymoron. How can one consciously pursue a state in which the key aspect is allowing impulses to emerge without conscious effort?
There is a quality of “refraining” – such as refraining from the kind of mechanistic thinking we’ve discussed in earlier posts – that can help create the state in which spontaneous inspiration occurs. Poet John Keats wrote about “negative capability.” Keats apparently used the term first to describe a quality of writers such as Shakespeare, whose work followed an artistic vision rather than mechanistic thinking. “Negative Capability,” Keats wrote, “that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”
It’s a problem has arisen and been addressed across a range of human cultures. Strasberg mentions yoga and tai chi among techniques that “integrate rather than mechanically split our perception of who we are.”
Some Zen meditation, as well, seeks to open us to inspiration....
The fourth of John Strasberg's Nine Natural Laws of Creativity brings together the first three laws -- talent, functional thinking, and imagination -- in what Strasberg calls "intentional dreaming." "In Intentional Dreaming," he writes, "we project ourselves into a world we want to explore, know, and understand." This combines two categories of imagination from our previous post: Currie and Ravenscroft's "recreative" imagination, which is experiencing the world from a perspective different from one's default, and Williams' imagining "from the inside," in which one adopts the perspective of a character. Strasberg compares an actor's intentional dreaming of the character and his/her world to the dreaming that an architect does in imagining a structure, or an athlete in imagining a competition.
Preparation, which Strasberg calls an "ongoing state of being," enables inspiration from intentional dreaming to find expression "in form and action." In contrast to a technical actor who focuses on how to consciously execute what he/she imagines after reading the play, Strasberg suggests, to an artist the process is less conscious. Strasberg's father Lee is sometimes credited with having said "... [A]cting is responding to imaginary stimuli...." This brings to mind Wilhelm Reich’s description of the relationship between stimuli, sensation, and emotion, which we touched on in the previous post. “We recognize the capacity for sensation in living organisms by their response to stimuli. This response is inseparably connected with an EMOTION.... Emotional stimulus response is functionally identical with sensation....” (Ether, God and Devil, p 86).
“Imagination is the act or power of forming mental images of that which is absent,” writes John Strasberg in the discussion of the third of his Nine Natural Laws of Creativity.
In general usage the word “imagination” takes on a wide variety of meanings. Imagining can be spontaneous, or deliberate. It can occupy your attention or not.
Philosophers Gregory Currie and Ian Ravenscroft distinguish between “creative” imagination, which involves making new combinations of ideas or objects, “sensory” imagination, which produces something like perception, but in absence of the usual stimuli, and “recreative” imagination, which is an ability to experience the world from a perspective that is different from one’s actual experience.
Bernard Williams distinguishes between imagining “from the inside” and “from the outside.”
Applying Williams’ categories to acting, imagining from the outside that I am a character would involve imagining a scenario in which I am the character. Imagining from the inside that I am the character adds the condition that I adopt the perspective of the character.
The second of John Strasberg’s Nine Natural Laws of Creativity is the Law of Organic (Functional) Thinking. Strasberg acknowledges that his “organic” thinking derives from Wilhelm Reich’s “functional thinking.”
Reich was a close associate of Sigmund Freud – a fellow member of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, and Freud’s first clinical assistant at his Psychoanalytic Polyclinic. A controversial figure, Reich was in many ways ahead of his time. A 2015 biography titled “Wilhelm Reich, Biologist” – the first to appear after 2007 when Reich’s personal archives were made available to researchers after a 50-year embargo – suggests that Reich’s controversial work with “bions” – possible precursors to living organisms – may have prefigured recent studies of entities such as nanoparticles, prions, and cancer viruses.
Consistent with his interest in biology, Reich faulted Freud for focusing too much on the mind, and not adequately considering the observable behavior of the body. Reich believed that the split between body and mind was the cause of much human suffering, including interpersonal conflict, war, and the environmental destruction of the planet. His therapy included work on the body (“somatic energy”), as well as psychotherapy. The Alexander Technique, a frequent component of acting programs, derives from Reich’s theory of “muscular armoring” – basically somatic embodiment of suppressed feelings and emotions.
In an early essay (1929) Reich discusses the origins of his functional thinking in the philosophical approach known as dialectical materialism. In thinking about the world this way, Reich writes, the observer...
John Strasberg defines talent in three parts: (1) exceptional “capacity to perceive and sense reality”, (2) exceptional “capacity to focus intentionally on specific realities,” and (3) express them in the present moment. A definition of talent is necessary, he observes, or it can’t be “consciously trained.” But before diving in to an examination of his definition of talent, Strasberg notes that the distinction between a technician and an artist resists analysis. “Even an accomplished artist may not be able to explain exactly why one of his works has succeeded while another hasn’t.”
Feeling is at the core of the Organic Creative Process. Strasberg notes the tendency in popular thinking to devalue feeling, to consider it something unreliable. Some scholars trace that tendency to the work of 17th century mathematician and philosopher, Rene Descartes, whose famous “Cogito ergo sum” (“I think therefore I am”) and Baruch Spinoza’s variant “Ego sum cogitans,” (“I am a thinking being”) had a profound influence western culture. It’s ironic that the key insight around which Descartes built his rational analysis of the universe came to him in a dream.
A while ago when we first launched ActingIsReality I wrote a series of blogposts based on Brecht’s essay “What among other things can be learned from Stanislavsky,” which functions as a kind of outline for one of our courses. As we note throughout the site, the other principal influence on our work is our long association with John Strasberg. In the last chapter of Strasberg’s 1996 memoir, Accidentally on Purpose, he details “The Nine Natural Laws of Creativity,” that make up what he calls the “Organic Creative Process.” This is quite a feat, because one of Strasberg’s core principles is that a “list of rules and exercises … limit[s] rather than expand[s] an actor’s natural capacity for expression.” By going beyond specific techniques and exercises to define a set of “laws” that are present in creative processes, Strasberg creates a tangible list that promotes the development of a consistent way of working, but without rote techniques that, while sometimes effective, tend toward the artificial and mechanical. Strasberg’s approach, rather than limiting the actor based on how well he or she can use a technical exercise, puts the whole person of the actor at the service of his/her art. Today we begin a series of posts, each focusing on one of John Strasberg’s “nine natural laws.”
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