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‘The actor imagines with his body’ – Michael

Chekhov: An examination of the
phenomenon
David Zinder
Published online: 31 Jan 2007.

To cite this article: David Zinder (2007) ‘The actor imagines with his body’ – Michael
Chekhov: An examination of the phenomenon, Contemporary Theatre Review, 17:1, 7-14, DOI:
10.1080/10486800601095966

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 Contemporary Theatre Review, Vol. 17(1), 2007, 7 – 14

‘The Actor Imagines with his Body’ – Michael

Chekhov: An Examination of the Phenomenon
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David Zinder

‘It’s a mystery’, says the theatre owner (Geoffrey

Rush) in Shakespeare in Love whenever he is asked to
explain something totally improbable. Shrugging his
shoulders and giving a weak, apologetic smile he
easily explains the inexplicable, totally confounding
his interlocutors. Michael Chekhov’s somewhat
enigmatic statement above raises a number of
difficult questions that tempt one to resort to the
same shrug, the same smile and the same disarming
cop-out. What does it mean to imagine with the
body? After all the imagination, as far as we know,
occurs in the mind. Assuming that this kind of
bodily imagination is possible, how is it done? What
are the necessary conditions for its appearance?
When it appears, what is the nature of the discourse
between the imagination and the body?
Just before we succumb to the temptation to
sidestep these difficulties by employing Rush’s
simple answer, ‘It’s a mystery’, we should bear in
mind one important fact: everything Chekhov
wrote about the technique of acting was the result
of a painstaking and extraordinarily detailed in-
vestigation into his own – by all accounts brilliant –
creative processes. This being the case, this idea of
the body imagining, or the actor imagining with his
body, is undoubtedly one of the practical results of
his investigation into the actor’s creativity, and this Image 1 Melinda Kantor as ‘The Figure in the Bag’
in itself might be reason enough to look into the from The Bacchae which I directed at the Hungarian State
enigmas raised by his statement. What is more, my Theatre of Cluj, Romania in December 2004. Photo
own thirty odd years of empirical/experiential courtesy of András Peltán
research into this phenomenon as actor, actor
trainer and director have provided me, I believe, symbiosis exists and, more importantly for our
with a great deal of practical indications that this purposes, that it can be trained and turned into a

Contemporary Theatre Review ISSN 1048-6801 print/ISSN 1477-2264 online

Ó 2007 Taylor & Francis http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals
DOI: 10.1080/10486800601095966
 8
practical, on-tap tool for actors working in any style
of theatre. All of this provides a strong incentive to
look into these issues again, however briefly. If all
else fails, we can, at the very least, try to apply Jean
Cocteau’s wonderful follow-on to Rush’s cop-out:
‘Since these mysteries are beyond us, let’s pretend
we’re organizing them’.1
The quote from Chekhov’s On the Technique of
Acting reads as follows in its entirety:
The actor imagines with his body. He cannot avoid
gesturing or moving without responding to his
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own internal images’.2 (Emphasis mine).
Chekhov says little beyond this single sentence
about the necessary or unavoidable nature of the
relationship between this all-important faculty of
the human mind and the body that contains it.
Nevertheless, reading his books and listening to his
lectures3 it seems implicit in the entire range of his
Technique that it is the moving body and its
profound connection to the creative imagination
that make up the basis of his understanding of the
actor’s art. Clearly, the examination of his own
creative work led Chekhov to make a claim for the
‘oneness’ of the body and the imagining function
of the mind, according to which the reason why an
actor cannot ‘avoid’ the body/ imagination con-
nection is because these two elements of the human
organism are in fact not separable, but exist in some
reciprocal, mutually supportive relationship within
a single organizing principle of human existence –
the bodymind. And it is here, in this virtually
automatic connection between action and image
that the issue of the actor ‘imagining’ with his body
resides.
While the concept of the inseparable tandem of
the ‘bodymind’, or the body schema, is often related
to the daily functioning of the human organism,
the question I am asking here is highly specific and
related to certain general aspects of creativity and in
particular to the concept of the moving body as a
catalyst for the creative imagination in perfor-
mance. In order to set up the argument in its
simplest form, let us begin from what my experi-
ence in acting training has taught me to be virtually
axiomatic in this context: given the right conditions
1. In his brilliant Surrealist play Les Mariés de la tour Eiffel
(1921).
2. Michael Chekhov, On the Technique of Acting (New York:
HarperCollins, 1991), p. 95.
3. In On the Art and the Technique of Acting, produced by
Applause Theatre Books in 1992. This is a re-mastered series
of lectures given by Chekhov in Hollywood in 1955, shortly
before his death.
on any given day (e.g. state of mind and body,
workshop space, etc.), and with the actor in that
state of performance that Chekhov defines as
‘beyond the threshold’ and Eugenio Barba refers
to as ‘extra-daily’ – given these basic conditions,
the moving body creates and excites up into
consciousness an endless series of images, and these
images in turn reverberate into the actor’s body
creating new movement which excites further
images, and so on ad infinitum – or as long as
the actor can stay on his feet. The nature of these
images is of course virtually impossible to define,
but they are comprised for the most part, as in
dreaming or daydreaming, of remembered, ‘histor-
ical’ images, false memories (i.e. things we think we
remember but may not have actually happened)
and pure abstract fantasy, as well as any combina-
tion of these that may possibly exist in our
imagination. After all, the vicarious experiences
acquired when reading a book or seeing a film –
both totally ‘imaginary’ activities – send as much
material to our visual memory as ‘real’, factual
events such as a wedding, a road accident or a
graduation ceremony. And since the human repo-
sitory is immense – we actually remember every-
thing, real, secondary (the book or the film) or
imagined, that we experience – the range of
available imagery is virtually inexhaustible. This is
particularly true if we take into account the simple
fact that our storehouse of images grows infinitely
as long as our mind is active and supple.
To begin pulling out a few threads from this
complex skein, let us have a look at a brief moment
of training from Keith Johnstone’s seminal book on
improvisation, IMPRO!4 In the chapter on Spon-
taneity, Johnstone records this conversation with
one of his students:
‘Be sad,’ I say.
‘What do you mean, be sad?’
‘Just be sad. See what happens’.
‘But what’s my motivation?’
‘Just be sad. Start to weep and you’ll know what’s
upset you’.
The student decides to humor me.
‘That isn’t very sad. You’re just pretending’.
‘You asked me to pretend’.
‘Raise your arm. Now why are you raising it’
‘You asked me to’.
‘Yes, but why might you have raised it?
‘To hold on to a strap in the Tube’.
‘Then that’s why you raised your arm . . .’
4. Keith Johnstone, Impro, Improvisation and the Theatre (New
York: Theatre Arts Books, 1979), pp. 81 – 82.

Johnstone then continues to work with the idea of
‘being sad’:
‘. . . Trust your mind. Take the first idea it gives
you. Now try to be sad again. Hold the face in a sad
position, fight back the tears. Be unhappier. More.
Now tell me why you’re in this state?
‘My child has died’.
‘Did you think that up?’
‘I just knew’.5
Between the act of ‘raising an arm’ or ‘being sad’
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and the explanation provided by the actor, ‘reach-
ing for the strap on the Tube’ or the ‘dead child’,
something happens that Johnstone does not
elaborate upon, not because he is unaware of the
process but because, I believe, it is so clear to him
that he feels that it doesn’t require any explanation.
The only indication we have of this understanding
on his part is his exhortation to the student ‘Trust
your mind’. Despite Johnstone’s apparent separa-
tion of the student’s ‘body’ from his ‘mind’, it
seems to me that what he was referring to was the
way in which the imagination is aroused and
activated by physical action, leading in the first
instance to the ‘strap in the Tube’ and in the
second instance, to the student’s certain knowledge
that her sadness was the result of her child’s death.
This, I believe, is what Chekhov is referring to
when he talks about the ‘imagining body’. Apply-
ing some conjecture after the fact to this example
from Johnstone, I would like to suggest that the
process that took place in the student’s mind
followed this trajectory: since there was no present,
logical, or ‘historical’ answer to the question put to
the actor about the source of an event taking place
at that moment – raising an arm or being sad – the
only thing the actor could resort to was the ‘logic’
of her imagination as it presented itself to her upon
raising her arm, or upon going through the motions
of sadness as Johnstone suggested (‘Hold your head
in a sad position, fight back the tears’). As I
understand this symbiotic mechanism of body/
imagination, the raising of the arm excited into the
actor’s mind’s eye, however briefly, the imagined or
remembered image of herself in a subway train
raising an arm to the strap, thus providing her with
an adequate answer to Johnstone’s first query.
Along these same lines, creating the physical
attributes of sadness – head off to one side, mouth
drooping as the chin wrinkles upward, tears barely
held back – must have fleetingly excited the image
of a room, a morgue, or a roadside, where her child
5. Ibid., p. 82.
9
lay dead, giving her the answer to Johnstone’s
second query. In both cases it was a physical
movement that sparked a visual image, either totally
imaginary, or based on a memory that provided the
answer.
There are three more ingredients here which are
important to note before we leave this example, all
of which, I believe, play an important part in this
process. The first of these is ‘incentive’ which is a
powerful catalyst for the appearance of images; the
second is ‘openness’ or disponibilité and ‘vulner-
ability’, which invite them to make their appear-
ance, and the third is what I have come to believe to
be an automatic human reaction – particularly in
any state of performance – to any external stimulus:
the appearance of images. In this case, the work-
shop situation where the actor was fairly bluntly
asked to perform before her colleagues must have
certainly rendered her vulnerable and as a result
open to her images, and, by the same token,
Johnstone’s direct and uncompromising manner
must have created a strong incentive for the actor
to demand results from her imagination in order to
come up with a solution to the questions put to her
by the highly respected teacher. Finally, being
questioned like this by Johnstone, she just ‘knew’
the answer because, without any visible effort,
images simply popped into her mind, there for the
taking.
This analysis of Johnstone’s exercise brings us to
the next question in this enquiry. If this oneness of
body and imagination is a natural, virtually
unconscious process that goes on in the human
organism all the time, then a) how can it be honed
into a technique for professional use in perfor-
mance, and b) is there a difference in the way it
functions in training and in performance? In order
to examine this phenomenon on both of these
levels let us look first briefly at a sequence of
exercises that I use in workshops and acting classes
which are aimed at giving actors a conscious
experience of the phenomenon and a first indica-
tion of how it can be harnessed for performance.
Transcribing living exercises into writing is always
tricky, so I would like to suggest that you seek an
opportunity to try out these exercises for yourselves
in order to get a much clearer, experiential grasp of
what they offer. They require no props, very little
space and offer virtually immediate satisfaction.
Early in my own experience as an actor I began
to be aware of certain processes that later became
the basis for all of my training. Chief among these
was the fact that even in daily life all aural, tactile, or
olfactory stimuli arouse visual images (actual visual
stimuli are excluded from this list since they are – by
 10
definition – visual images and cannot serve our
purpose here except in a very advanced form of
learning) and that with practice, this can be turned
into a conscious technique. This is of course
particularly true of ‘extra-daily’ life when we are
involved in creative work. If we add to that the
understanding that in the absence of visual stimuli –
as in ‘blind’ or ‘eyes closed’ exercises – then this
image-producing faculty is enhanced a hundred-
fold since it serves as a virtually animal-like defense
mechanism. Touched by something in the dark,
our imagination strains to protect the organism by
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sending a stream of images racing before our
mind’s eye in order to give us, if necessary, ample
warning of imminent danger. The same applies to
sounds or smells in the dark. This process, like
many other capabilities of the mind, goes on at
lightning speed, moving from the wildest, most
fantastic imaginings to a calm identification of the
source of the stimulus, all of this within seconds.
The first of these assumptions defines our area of
inquiry, and the second gives us a useful tool for
intensifying the body/imagination experience for
learning purposes.
The first exercise in this sequence, then, works as
follows. Having ‘crossed the threshold’ into the
workspace and thus, by definition at least, being
disponible, the actors sit in the space with their eyes
closed and listen for sounds. Having been given the
above explanation about the defensive function of
our imagination, they are asked to pick out single
sounds that may be heard in the workspace, and try
to catch the very first image that comes to mind as a
result of the stimulus. In other words, what they are
being asked to do is not identify the source of the
sound with the help of their imagination, e.g.
hearing the sound of a plastic bottle being
squeezed and then seeing just that, a small, plastic
water bottle being squeezed, but rather to catch the
first raw, uneasy image that the sound may arouse
in the first millisecond after its perception. For
example, frantically searching its database for an
identification of this sound, an actor’s imagination
might suggest, with a highly detailed visual image,
that the sound comes from the rapid progress of a
fire racing through a wood-lined study – the
popping sound being ‘seen’ as the popping of the
wood consumed by the flames. The actors are also
asked to try and ‘manage’ this raw, first image by
moving around in the picture that comes into their
consciousness until they arrive at what is for them
the ‘affective’ detail of the entire picture – the detail
that satisfies them in relation to the original sound
stimulus. This might be, for example, a ‘zoom in’ in
their imagination on a single pinewood knot
popping in the heat of the flames. As soon as they
arrive at this satisfying detail, they are instructed to
‘clear the screen’, in other words, having satisfied
their curiosity about the image, they must now
remove the entire picture from their imagination,
and thus make themselves available for the next
aural stimulus and the next image it arouses. Going
back each time to a blank screen ensures that each
sound will excite a brand-new image and not pick
up the ‘story’ of the previous one.
This is a very basic exercise which is aimed at
expanding and rendering conscious the mechan-
isms of what is usually simply taken for granted: the
associative capability of the imagination. In order to
have a totally focused experience of this, all
extraneous body ‘noise’ is silenced. But theatre
implies motion, and in order to take this awareness
into the next level we have to examine this
experience in the body, using the same basic
assumption: just as aural stimuli in the previous
exercises excited up visual images into the actors’
consciousness, so tactile stimuli provided by
physical adjustments to the actors’ bodies will have
a similar effect.
This exercise involves two actors, a Sculptor and
a Sculpture. One actor – the Sculpture – stands
relaxed with his eyes closed and ‘centered’; a
second actor – the Sculptor – waits until she feels
that the first actor is centered and has achieved a
state of relaxed concentration, and then proceeds to
‘sculpt’ him by arranging his torso, head, limbs,
hands and fingers, even his facial expression, in
some random position. The randomness of this
sculpting – i.e. not consciously seeking to create a
story-telling pose (praying, begging, threatening,
etc.) – is extremely important because that leaves
the imaginational ‘interpretation’ of the body
totally up to the Sculpture. To help the actors with
this I side-coach the Sculptors to regard the bodies
of their Sculptures as ‘a random collection of
articulated limbs’, i.e. that they can be put into
endless physical combinations. What this means for
the Sculptors is that they must form and adjust the
actor’s body without thinking about what the final
result will look like or what story or situation the
Sculpture might be involved in or represent. When
the Sculptor completes her work she now questions
the Sculpture about his identity (‘Who are you?’),
location (‘Where are you?’), dress (‘What are you
wearing?’), time of day, etc., taking care to refrain
from any psychological/emotional descriptions
(e.g. ‘What do you feel like’) or suggestions that
might add extraneous details into the Sculpture’s
imagination. Asking him, ‘What colour shoes
are you wearing?’ might instantly attach to the

Sculpture’s feet a pair of bright yellow, long-
pointed crocodile-skin shoes that weren’t there in
the original image, but once mentioned are greedily
incorporated. Phrasing the question differently –
‘Do you have anything on your feet?’ – leaves much
more freedom of choice to the Sculpture and would
probably produce the real, un-suggested answer:
‘Yes, a bloody bandage.’
These two exercises are essentially static and can
only provide some initial data on the body/
imagination symbiosis. In the first exercise the
body is cancelled out by the sitting position and the
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only thing that’s ‘moving’ is our imagination, and
in the second exercise we are using our bodies, but
ultimately applying our imagination to an unmov-
ing ‘statue’. In order to try and arrive at a more
elaborate understanding of this symbiosis and how
it conceivably works in live performance, we have to
add movement and change – which brings us to the
next exercise in the sequence. Using the same
Sculptor/Sculpture format, we now change the
rules a little: as long as there is physical contact
between the Sculptor and the Sculpture, i.e. as long
as the ‘sculpting’ is still going on, the actor with his
eyes closed must just follow the images that appear
in his imagination; as soon as the sculpting stops,
the Sculpture must begin immediately, of his own
accord, to relate out loud all the details of the
particular body/character that he finds himself in at
the moment the contact was stopped: who and
where he is, what he is wearing, the time of day, the
people or objects in his immediate environment,
etc. When the Sculptor renews contact to continue
sculpting – which she is allowed to do at any
moment – the Sculpture must instantly stop
speaking and concentrate again on the images
sparked up by the new movements imparted to his
body. In this way, if the Sculpture has allowed his
imagination to free-float, then every time the
sculpting stops he provides us with a verbal
description of a totally new body/character. An
important element of this exercise is the gradual
reduction of the dimensions of the changes made
to the Sculpture’s body, ending up perhaps with no
more than a tiny shift of the top section of a
forefinger from a straight 180 degrees to a slightly
curved 150 degrees, and the gradual increase in the
pace of the changes being worked on the Sculpture.
In this way, within a fairly short time the Sculptor
should be making some kind of infinitesimal
change to the Sculpture’s body every 10–15
seconds or so – in between which the Sculpture is
still asked to acknowledge the effect of these rapid-
fire and absolutely minute changes that appear in
his imagination by reporting back to us on the
11
stream of body/characters that he embodies, even
for a few seconds at a time. However magical this
phenomenon may seem, it is in fact hard work.
More often than not at the end of a brief session of
this active sculpting, the Sculpture/actor is drip-
ping with sweat, drained by the sheer effort of
actively engaging his or her imagination so
intensively.
The practical results of this exercise are almost
always fascinating. Within a very short range of
time, and with nothing to go on but increasingly
tiny, increasingly rapid physical changes to their
bodies, the actors being sculpted ‘see’ themselves in
an almost endless sequence of different bodies or
characters, every change in their physical position,
however minute, creating in their imaginations an
entirely different body and character. What is more,
the actors also actually touch on what might be
regarded as solid ‘proof’ of the body/imagination
symbiosis: that every change to their body, even as
they are being sculpted, and not just in the static
statue pose they arrive at when the sculpting ceases,
gives rise to many more body/characters, so many
in fact that they simply don’t have time to share
them all with us.6
Given the rapidity of the changes wrought on
the body of the Sculpture, it is not at all surprising
to find men or women discovering suddenly that
for a moment they are a member of the opposite
sex, small children, giants or ancient crones –
because that is what their imagination gave them in
response to a particular adjustment of their bodies.
What is no less surprising is the amount of detail
that attends each of these bodies: dress – down to
earrings and shoelaces; location – down to a
particular crack in the sidewalk on a busy corner,
not to mention detailed descriptions of all the
people passing within his or her ‘view’. And, given
the axiomatic contention that the moving body
automatically excites images, what is most surpris-
ing to me is that almost invariably, when I
demonstrate this exercise for the first time with a
6. Note the following from Chekhov’s On the Technique of
Acting in relation to the Psychological Gesture: ‘The more
you become sensitive to such alterations in your Gesture, the
more imperceptible changes you must make. The position of
your head and shoulders, your arms, hands, elbows. The turn
of your neck and back, the position of your legs and feet, the
direction of your glance, the position of your fingers, all will
call up in your creative spirit corresponding Qualities and
Feelings. Go on exercising in this manner this way until you
feel that even the slightest idea of a possible change makes you
react to it inwardly. You will also awaken in yourself the sense
of harmony between outer and inner expressiveness in your
acting’, p. 79. It seems to me that ‘creative spirit’ can easily be
changed to read ‘imagination’ without doing any injustice to
Chekhov’s meaning here.
 12
randomly chosen actor, his or her capacity for rapid
and seemingly endless changes of character elicits
an enthusiastic response from the observers as if the
other actors were congratulating the actor for
giving them all a taste of his superior imagination,
and congratulating me for choosing the one actor
in the group who, endowed with such an unusually
rich and responsive imagination, could give the best
demonstration of the exercise. But on the basis of
my experience I am convinced that had I chosen
any other actor from that group he or she would
have performed equally well, because the body/
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imagination connection is universal, an integral part
of our psychophysical structure, and as such, as
Chekhov suggests, the endless stream of imaginary
bodies arising from physical stimuli, however
minute, is indeed unavoidable.
There are a few other aspects to these exercises
that are not directly connected with the body/
imagination tandem, but are important byproducts
of the overall examination of the actor’s practical
imagination, and can serve to enhance our under-
standing of the processes at work here. First of all, in
these and many other related exercises, one of the
most important lessons to be learned is the fact
through training we can learn how to develop,
control and use our imagination consciously for our
creative work. For example, in the first exercise with
the sounds, looking for the ‘affective detail’ involves
consciously ‘moving around’ in the picture excited
up by any individual sound. Secondly, when,
through training, this becomes a habit, we actually
learn how to encourage or ‘push’ our imagination to
provide us with images to fuel our creative work. In
the last exercise, when the Sculptures’ physical
positions are being changed every few seconds, they
tend to discover that they are endowed with an
unusual power: the ability to ‘demand’ and get
results from their imagination. Transformed
through training into a technique, this can provide
actors with a highly important tool for developing a
creative approach to character and to moment-to-
moment existence in the performance space.
Once a basic understanding of these phenomena
is achieved through exercises such as these, it is only
a short step from there to the realization that in
performative circumstances, the body/imagination
symbiosis is working all the time, and that there is
almost no end to the way in which it can be
developed further as a conscious tool. In my
ImageWork Training7 this fundamental sequence
7. This training is the subject of my book: Body Voice
Imagination. A Training for the Actor (London: Routledge,
2002).
of exercises is followed by increasingly complex
work based on the reciprocal nature of physical
movement and the imaging function of the actor.
Eventually, given the right circumstances (‘crossing
the threshold’, concentration, relaxation, disponi-
bilité and a high level of training in physical
expressiveness), the dialogue becomes extraordina-
rily fertile, with actors able to create 20 to 45
minute-long abstract physical improvisations based
on a chosen ‘anchor image’ (a visible physical
object – a ball, a rope, a shoe – or a created image –
anything the imagination may provide) which
opens out into myriad sub-images excited into
their consciousness by their physical movement,
which, in turn, move the body into a multitude of
different physical expressions, which excite yet
more images, and so on in an infinite whirligig.
The duration of all this is determined only by the
measure of the actor’s physical stamina, or by the
extent of his or her ability to remain in a
concentrated state of creative response to images
and movement.8 After 45 minutes of intense
physical work an actor may simply run out of gas
and be physically unable to continue, or, for many
different reasons, she might momentarily lose
concentration and thus ‘interrupt’ the fecund
dialogue between the body and the imagination
bringing her out of her depths into self-conscious-
ness that will bring the exercise to an end. Further
development of these exercises in body/imagina-
tion training become even more demanding once
voice and text are added, and the entire concept of
the ‘imagining body’ is put to use in performance.
Two examples, one from an exercise and one
from a performance, might illuminate this further.
In the course of a workshop I gave to a mixed
group of acting students and professional actors
from Zagreb in 1999 in a picturesque little
Croatian village called Groznjan in the northwest
area of Istria, we were working through what is
described in my ImageWork Training as the
‘Creative WarmUp’ which leads, at the end, to
what I call ‘plastiques’: complete movement
phrases that the actors pluck out of a sequence of
abstract movements, and then repeat precisely – as I
explain it to them – for as long as the movement
interests them. The training issue here is to prolong
the active connection between the body and the
imagination, in order to make every repeat of the
8. A truly extraordinary example of the kind of stamina
demanded by physical exercises of this kind can be seen in one
of the Odin Theatre training tapes in which Ryszard Cieślak
works with Tage Larsen in a totally abstract movement
exercise for the better part of an hour and a half with only one
brief pause.

chosen plastique absolutely precise and at the same
time a completely new experience. In this instance,
the organizer of the workshop, a highly talented
Croatian actress by the name of Suzana Nikolić,
found an extremely simple plastique: sitting on the
floor, her legs drawn up underneath her and her left
arm on the floor, palm down, to support her upper
body, she repeatedly, and with the utmost preci-
sion, put her right thumb under her short blond
hair and lifted it over and behind her right ear. By
the time the rest of the workshop group noticed
this – after they had all completed their plastiques
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and sat down – Suzana had already been doing this
plastique for about ten minutes. From that moment
on, alone in the workspace, as we watched her in
absolute fascination, mesmerized by the powerful
emanation of her intense concentration, she pro-
ceeded to repeat this simple gesture for about 25
minutes more, until, worried perhaps that she was
holding up the workshop, she stopped – and there
was a spontaneous round of applause which I
joined in gladly. Questioned about the process, she
told us that the dialogue between this minimal
movement of her body and her imagination
was so intense that every time she began the
plastique she was in a different world, doing the
action for a different purpose in a different context
with different images informing it every inch of
the way. The result was an extraordinary 25-minute
‘performance’ of a single physical action, which
drew us into her work in an enormously powerful
way.
The techniques of body/imagination that are
employed in rehearsal and performance function on
two different levels, the first leading seamlessly into
the second, and both dependent on the Training
that forges the body/imagination symbiosis into a
powerful performative tool. In rehearsals, these
techniques are brought to bear on the search for
the inner score of the performance, as the actor
remains disponible throughout the rehearsal pro-
cess, responding instantly to images produced by
his or her body in the performance space in order to
discover the imaginational keys to moments in the
play, or vice versa: instinctively moving independent
images into the body to see how they affect the
moment. By the same token, the entire rehearsal
process may become an ongoing exchange of
body/images flowing from actor to actor, actor
to director, or director to actor, images that will
ultimately be set as the notes in the performance
score. To demonstrate this, here is an example from
a production of the great Jewish play, The Dybbuk,
which I directed at the Hungarian State Theatre of
Cluj in Romania in 2002.
13
The story of this play involves the possession of
young woman’s body by the spirit – dybbuk – of her
dead beloved, and the climax of the play is a brutal
exorcism that rips the young man’s spirit out of her.
The exorcism scenes are enormously difficult to
play convincingly, and were perhaps particularly so
at more or less zero distance from the audience on
the transverse space designed for the production
by my colleague Miriam Guretzky. Prior to the
beginning of rehearsals I had the extraordinary
good fortune to find a brilliantly talented actress for
the part of Leah, Imola Kézdi, who, together with
one or two other actors of the company, I trained
in the ImageWork Training. In the course of the
rehearsals, and based on the ImageWork Training,
Imola developed a series of images – a physical/
imaginational score – that made it possible for
her to move through the frightening exorcising
process in increasingly difficult stages. Some of
these images emerged from her body/imagination,
others emerged out of the dialogue we had in the
rehearsal sessions, but all of them shared the same
source: the imagining body.
One of these images will serve our purpose here.
At the height of the play, the exorcising rabbi, Reb
Azriel, brings to bear the ultimate weapon of
excommunication on the dybbuk, Hannan, by
proceeding in stages through three different forms
of the blowing of the shofar, the traditional Jewish
ram’s horn, t’kiah, shevarim, t’ruah. For the second
stage, shvarim, the image that emerged out of this
dialogue in rehearsal was of a window that has been
hit by a stone and, with cracks snaking out rapidly
all over it, is about to disintegrate. The stone in this
case was the first note of the shvarim tone of the
shofar. Since Leah is trying with all her strength
to keep Hannan inside her, Imola’s acting task was
to hold the glass together and not allow it to
disintegrate. What transpired then, and does to this
day,9 is a stunning, draining battle in which the
image of the disintegrating glass, and the need to
exert superhuman strength to keep it from falling
away into dust, moves Imola’s body in the most
heart-wrenching way, as her Leah struggles in vain
to prevent Hannan from being torn out of her.
Despite the extremity of the demands on her as an
actress in this scene, Imola used the Training to
apply the physical and imaginational elements of
the moment with enormous precision, leading to
an application in performance of the body/
imagination symbiosis which is simply breathtaking
to watch. To the best of my knowledge, the ‘anchor
9. At this writing, August 2006, the play, which opened in May
2002, is still in repertoire.
 14
image’ of the disintegrating window still works for
her four years after the opening night. However,
watching how her performance of the role has
deepened over these past four years, I have no
doubt that in order to create that greatest of all
theatrical paradoxes – the first-time repetition –
Imola responds to myriad new images every time
she goes into that scene, keeping the form of the
score absolutely precise, but allowing these new
images to infuse her performance with deeper
reverberations every time.
Observing the results of performances like these
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by actors I have trained, or the performance of
exercises in class or workshop situations, with
actors and students from very different theatre
cultures, literally from around the world, has
brought me to these inescapable conclusions: a)
the vast repository of images that lies just below
the surface of our consciousness is a practical
resource of enormous importance for creative work
in the theatre; b) these images can be accessed and
Image 2 Imola Kezdi as Leah in The Dybbuk, the
Hungarian State Theatre of Cluj, Romania. Photo
courtesy of Szabó Péter
translated into creative work by establishing the
conditions for their arrival: preparing through
training a highly expressive, responsive body,
‘crossing the threshold’, concentration, relaxation,
and disponibilité; c) through training we can both
become aware of the symbiotic connection between
the body and the imagination and learn how to
explore and exploit it as a permanently available and
practical performative tool. In other words, the
concept of the actor ‘imagining with his body’,
however mysterious, is first of all absolutely natural,
and secondly absolutely trainable.
Training of this kind – which is not a one-time
event and must be regularly reinforced – eventually
leads to what I believe was the source of Michael
Chekhov’s brilliant achievements as an actor, and
the key element in the Technique he bequeathed to
us: an endless capacity for responding on one’s feet
to images excited into the imagination during
rehearsal or performance by one’s physical actions,
and shaping them into the form of one’s art. It is
perhaps this capacity, more than any other that
enables an actor to make every moment onstage a
unique, first-time experience since it is fed by new
and surprising images in every performance, re-
gardless of the strictures of mise en scène, light cues,
music cues or relationships between the characters
in the play.10
Creativity indeed involves many mysteries, as
Geoffrey Rush keeps reminding us in Shakespeare in
Love , but Cocteau’s suggestion that, in the absence
of any other recourse, we should pretend we’re
organizing them is, as I see it, a call to explore the
mechanisms that sustain this powerful connection
between the body and the imagination in perfor-
mance in order to enrich every moment of
performance and engage the audience on a truly
profound level.
10. Chekhov was known for his tendency to change his
performance, sometimes even radically, from one evening to
the next – often to the exasperation of his fellow actors. His
explanation for that was that if he received different
vibrations from either the spectators or his partners on any
given night he could only respond to those energies and not
to any remembered energies from the night before.
Exasperating it must have been, but this ability to live in the
moment of every performance – not just in the moments of
the written play – was undoubtedly part of his brilliant
achievements as an actor.