Lenard Petit - The Michael Chekhov Handbook

LENARD PETIT. Is a director /actor who resides in New York City. He has been working in the theater for thirty years collaborating with other artists to create original works for the stage, cinema, and television. He has directed plays and performance pieces on and off Broadway and in as well as out of the United States. As an actor he has performed in some works of such notable directors as Julie Taymor, Meredith Monk, Richard Foreman, Ping Chong, and many others. Mr. Petit is the Artistic Director of The Michael Chekhov Acting Studio. As one of a handful of teacher students trained by the original members of Michael Chekhovs Theater School his knowledge of the technique coupled with his gifts have brought him to be recognized as one of the foremost teachers of this technique in the world.

As a member of the international Michael Chekhov Association, he has been invited to teach Master classes at the Moscow Art Theater, The International School for Film and Television in Munich, Helsinki University, as well as acting workshops in Denmark, Amsterdam, Madrid, Berlin, Zurich, London, Riga, and Irkutsk Siberia. For the past 14 years he has been teaching Chekhov Technique in the MFA Acting program at Rutgers University.

This book is dedicated to the

two sustaining loves of my life,

Meg and Luke Pantera/Petit

Lenard Petit, 2010

Retoque de cubierta: Titivillus

Editor digital: Titivillus

ePub base r2.0

Petits words go right to the heart of Chekhovs technique Anyone looking for a key to understanding more about Michael Chekhovs technique will devour it. Jessica Cerullo, Michael Chekhov Association, NYC

The Michael Chekhov technique is today seen as one of the most influential and inspiring methods of actor training in existence. In The Michael Chekhov Handbook, Lenard Petit draws on twenty years of teaching experience to unlock and illuminate this often complex technique for those studying, working with or encountering it for the first time.

Petit uses four sections to help readers approach the technique:

• the aims of the technique outlining the real aims of the actor
• the principles acting with energy, imagination and creative power
• the tools the actors use of the body and sensation
• the application bringing the technique into practice.

The Michael Chekhov Handbooks explanations and exercises will provide readers with the essential tools they need to put the rewarding principles of this technique into use.

Lenard Petit is the Artistic Director of The Michael Chekhov Acting Studio in New York City. He teaches Chekhov technique in the MFA and BFA Acting programmes at Rutgers University. He was a contributor and co-creator of the DVD Master Classes in the Michael Chekhov Technique, published by Routledge.

Lenard Petit

For the Actor

ePub r1.2

Titivillus 09.02.2019

I would like to thank Talia Rodgers and Ben Piggot at Routledge for taking this book idea seriously and guiding me through the process of its acceptance and release.

I would like to thank all my teachers who pointed me in the directions I have gone in. This book could not have happened without them. None of them are still with us, so Ill keep their names in my heart.

Thanks to PAJ Books for permission to include some words of Michael Chekhov from their publication, Lessons for the Professional Actor.

I am very grateful to Rutgers University for giving me the playground to develop this material over a number of years; with great support from Carol Thompson, Barbara Marchant, Kevin Kittle, Deborah Hedwall and Heather Rasche. I should also like to thank Maggie Flanigan and the actors at her studio in New York City for allowing me to include their responses in this book.

A special thanks is reserved for Bethany Caputo and Judith Bradshaw for transcribing numerous workshops and including invaluable observations about the results of teaching this work. Also to James Luse, Janet Morrison and Mel Shrawder for reading the manuscript and assisting me in its presentation. To Edward Marritz for his photographic eye.

I need to thank my colleagues at MICHA: Joanna Merlin, Jessica Cerullo, Marjolein Baars, Ted Pugh, Fern Sloan, David Zinder, Sarah Kane and Ragnar Freidank for their confidence and enthusiasm for my ideas and work.

I also want to thank my students, actors who continually inspire me to create new things for them to play with, but especially Scott Miller, Sal Cacciato, Jessie Greene, Tyree Giroux, Ben Bauman, John Rawlinson, Brian Parrish, Jonathan Day, Bryan Cohen, Jessica Savage, Glenn Cruz, Caron Levis, Oliver Martin and Juliette Bennett, for showing up all the time and digging into the work.

The biggest and most profound thanks goes to Michael Chekhov, whose genius continues to vibrate all around me.

If I could have, I would have asked Michael Chekhov: What do you believe is the most important factor in your method? Instead, I asked my teacher, Deirdre Hurst du Prey, Chekhovs student and secretary for 20 years. That would be Truth, she answered. This is a big idea, but simple enough. The difficulty is in keeping it simple. Once it gets complicated the truth becomes more and more elusive. I want to speak from this place of simplicity, where I found my own truth, because useful acting techniques can only be about ones own truth, the truth one is experiencing in the moment.

The Michael Chekhov technique is a very free way to work as an actor. The material we encounter is immediately provocative and rewarding. I have been a practitioner of this approach for 30 years. I have been a teacher for nearly 20 years. I know most of the Chekhov teachers professing this work throughout the world today. It is not such a large community, and I am very happy to be a part of it. One striking thing about this group of teachers is that we are individual in how we see things and how we do things, yet the essence of the work shines in all of us. We stress the elements of the technique in different ways. We have all found what we believe to be the essential elements for our own work. We each go our own way in the technique. Chekhovs methods are actually limited in scope. His intention is to lead the actor to an inspired performance. The ways in which we can bring ourselves to inspiration are limited. This is actually a good thing because we can choose exactly how we will work and in what manner we will approach the role; and we will expect not to flounder.

I am now presenting an approach to this method, and I want to make it clear from the start that what you will find here is how the technique has come to me, how it speaks to me, and how I have made it my own. I quote Chekhov in these pages, but I choose the words that have caused a stirring in me. I do not believe there is one orthodox way of teaching or using this technique. I have seen some extraordinary teaching and it was new to me, things I had never seen nor considered before, but I recognized how Chekhov these new things were. It is easy to know when it is Chekhov, and also easy to know when it is not. The purpose of the technique is to inspire, to find a creative state that is both pleasing to be in, and also full of the power of expressing oneself. Through the principles he offered to us, Chekhov expected each actor to find his own technique, his own way of working.