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.
Descartes’ fellow 17th century philosopher, John Locke, took a different view. In Locke’s Essay concerning Human Understanding he describes knowledge of the world as beginning in sense perception, and knowledge of ourselves as based on introspection and reflection. For Locke, sense experience and reflection were the only sources of knowledge. Moreover, for him any assertion of truth was fundamentally probabilistic. The assertion can be based on direct observation, or testimony of others, but can also include things beyond direct experience of our senses.
Strasberg’s discussion of feeling and imagination is consistent with Locke’s principles. “Perception is the basis for all real experience and empirical knowledge,” Strasberg writes.
He goes on to define “consciousness” as the point of contact between perception and “thinking awareness.” “Contact” is a key term in Strasberg’s teaching. If an actor loses contact between perception and thinking, the result can be distorted, he writes, as when, for example, an actor “ignores feelings and sensations they can’t explain,” which can result in a cold, unfeeling portrayal.
Something similar to this use of “contact” appears in Locke’s writing, as well. In the first chapter of his essay on understanding, Locke writes that the “object of understanding when a man thinks” is the mental act of making perceptual contact with an object in the external world.
How does this relate to acting? In a fundamental way, that, in fact, is part of any successful creative process. The actor must make and maintain contact with his/her perceptions of reality, without ignoring what he/she doesn’t understand. “All life is interconnected,” Strasberg writes, “so that working from the deepest core will organically create movement and expression that is based on whatever reality one is considering.”