Free An Improvised Life by Alan Arkin Page B

vortexes, but reading about them was like reading science fiction, interesting conceptually, but who the hell knew if it was true? There was no way to verify any of it. Before the heart episode I had no place to put any of that exciting but far-out information. Now I did, but it required that I rethink who I was because the new sensations in my chest were insisting that I react in new ways to almost all the situations in my life. It also meant that to a certain extent I needed to re-examine my acting technique.
    There was an actor named Michael Chekhov, popular in the 1930s, who had also been an acting teacher of some reputation. He had stumbled onto the theory of these psychic centers, these vortexes, intuitively I suppose, and he used
this idea as part of his teaching method. His idea was that each of us is locked up in certain parts of our bodies and open in others, and that most of us are focused in one particular spot. People with energy focused in their lower back would feel and act a certain way, their emotional lives reflecting this specific weight and concentration. People who are focused in their throats would behave in another way. People in their hearts, yet another. Playing with this idea, thinking of myself as being weighted or having more life in one specific area of my body, immediately gave me a completely different sense of who I was, emotionally as well as in essence. In imitating people, which I’d done since I was a kid, I realized that I’d been using Chekhov’s method intuitively for most of my life. Now with my heart having exploded open and being forced to live more fully in that area, I realized for the first time that this place within me had been closed all my life. Now I was thrust into feeling myself in a new way.
    At first it was disconcerting and frightening. The heart, from a metaphysical standpoint, is just what you would expect it to be, a place of love and connection and vulnerability. Somewhere along the line I had shut it down, for my own reasons, and I didn’t particularly enjoy this new vulnerability, not to mention its effect on my instincts about a character I might be playing.
    The new sensations threw me for a loop. It took many months to readjust to the new me, and once I did, a new opening took place somewhere else in my system that would require seeing myself in yet another light, and once again this
would force me into adjusting to a new physical center of gravity. This has continued to happen right up to the present. Not as dramatically as that first experience with the heart, but dramatically enough so that my sense of myself as an entity, an energy field, has become fluid rather than fixed. Our energetic perception of ourselves is as profound a statement of who we are as anything else about us, and each time these energy fields go through a transmutation, a shift, we have to re-examine ourselves. We feel differently, within ourselves and in our relationship to the outside world. And when we feel differently we behave differently, and when we behave differently, as actors, we have to change our techniques, our approaches to our work, the places we work from.
    When I did Catch-22 , I worked with Tony Perkins, who was a delightful, kind, and literate man. For some reason the moment he appeared before a camera things became painful for him. Just before the word “action,” Tony would unfailingly say, “Oh God, where did I go wrong.” It was the place he worked from. He needed, for whatever reason, a sense of shame, or discomfort, or self-judgment that took him to the place he felt he needed to act from.
    When I worked with Jack Lemmon on Glengarry Glen Ross , Jack would say before every single take, “It’s magic time!” That was the place he worked from. It was what propelled him into his acting place.
    Another way to approach the work was told to me by my son Matthew, when he was studying with Uta Hagen,
who, along with being a brilliant actress, was one of the most