Robyn Hunt
University of South Carolina
By Ellen Orenstein
Hunt is a professor of acting at the University of South Carolina in Columbia, S.C. She was previously a professor in the School of Drama at the University of Washington, where she taught acting on the graduate faculty and where, in 2000, she received a UW Distinguished Teaching Award. She is co-founder and director of Pacific Performance Project east and has appeared in professional theatres throughout North America, Europe and Japan. She worked with Japanese director Tadashi Suzuki for more than a decade and studied with Shogo Ohta in Kyoto. She has performed regularly at Actors Theatre of Louisville in Kentucky; Seattle’s Intiman Theatre, ACT and On the Boards; and at Connecticut Repertory Theatre in Storrs. She wrote, directed and choreographed Suite for Strangers, a dance/theatre trilogy, which premiered in Seattle in 2004.
Why teaching?
It starts with my dad, who is such a brilliant teacher. His route was of the physical also: He’d been a professional athlete, and he was coaching when I was growing up. Track and gymnastics were his two favorites because he said the individual could shine—but then the overall team is what made them win. His was the first model. Early on I had examples that life could be changed in a fundamental way by this direct contact between teacher and student.
For me undergraduate school coincided with the civil rights and Vietnam War protests—and so I started to see this amazing idea that teaching could be a social activity whereby I could play a part in reminding learners that a single voice is potent.
My minor at the University of California–San Diego was the sociology of education. I analyzed transcripts from elementary school classes, looking at what kind of signals went out to learners to discourage or encourage them. That analysis seemed so far from the stage at the time and yet I think that it has served me very well: It primed me for paying attention to the cues that I give and that there could be a miscommunication, despite fabulous intentions.
What kinds of cues?
I’m thinking of things like, “You have to fight hard.” A learner, in an effort to please, could think that “fighting hard” means a bearing down or a tightening. To achieve centering, that learner could think that there should be a kind of physical sensation in the center, which could cause him to tighten, when in fact that would be the last thing you would want to happen.
I would say maybe the most significant thing is to make sure that the cues one gives as a teacher have to do with the learners’ ultimate independence. In fact, it might be the main thing one teaches. I’m teaching them to be resilient, courageous, energetic, hungry, curious and particularly to have a sense, to develop inside oneself something that I have been calling the unassailable core. Nobody can get at it, nobody can steal it from you—and you have to develop it.
How do you help them to do that?
First you have to acknowledge that it’s possible that there is a place that no one can get to. It’s of course what those who meditate are interested in—it has to do with breathing—and I think that a lot of the slow tempo work helps people to find that. They have to go way deeper than the way they previously thought of concentration being, in a sense, a demonstration to the director that you’re working hard. There’s someplace way deeper to go, where the director then would just be witnessing the process.
How have you reconciled the need for that “unassailable core” with the desire to please—the teacher, the director, the audience?
I guess I would start to discuss this “core” with the experience I had with Tadashi Suzuki directing me as Clytemnestra in 1986. It was trial by fire: One, I didn’t know how to do what he was asking me to do, and two, if I couldn’t figure out a way to make major progress, I would have to give up acting, because I would never be able to live with myself. I remember standing there, and I couldn’t open my mouth and tears were running down my face because I knew what was at stake.
What happened in rehearsal?
He would say that I was too psychological. I didn’t know—all I had been asked to do up to that point was what Suzuki was calling psychological. He wanted it in the whole body and he wanted it huge—it was a Greek play, for goodness sake!
What was it you were confronting?
I was afraid to make that kind of sound. I think I was instinctively afraid of how it would look kind of primal or sexual—
That you would feel too out of control?
Too out of control personally, but also, so ugly and so naked and so foolish. I was confounded too, because in my fear to take a chance, I realized how safe I had been playing it for more than 20 years. And that was its own recrimination.
Finally, it came to a run-through at which Suzuki had his whole company, and all of his assistants, and all of the Americans. We were rehearsing Clytemnestra’s big entrance and Suzuki stopped me, and he stopped me, and he stopped me. I must have done it 15, 20 times—that’s not it, that’s not it, that’s not it. I was feeling completely exposed: I’ve come all the way to Japan, I’m 35 years old, I’m someone who teaches acting. Everybody was watching. At one point Suzuki stopped everything and said through the translator, “Why are you so good at my training and so bad on stage?”
There was a moment in which I wanted to wail and cry and quit—but that was not tenable. And something happened. I don’t know what to call it. It was all at once—I felt slammed against the wall—it was like I knew that Suzuki couldn’t get to the heart of me—even though he was seemingly attacking me—there was something in that moment I realized that he couldn’t ultimately hurt or touch. And it had to do with who I loved and what my favorite flavor of ice cream was…. All of that is a little too literal. But there was a sense that there is some place where I can go to now and I can rest in—even as he is nailing me to the wall, I can find protection there and I can keep working.
People watching said that I looked like I suddenly got taller. Whatever happened, I received his fierceness, and I took a minute, and after that was the most astonishing change. He stayed as hard on me—but it didn’t matter. Everything in the rest of my life has changed because of that.
We kept rehearsing that night. And inside—everything was different. I’ve never forgotten it. The next day, Mr. Suzuki’s assistant walked by and she said, “He said to say you got better.”
So, before that moment, there was not only a fear of failing yourself, but of failing Suzuki —and others’ expectations of you. Do you think in that change you reached a place where you could work only for yourself?
The ultimate answer is yes. But I would put it a little differently. It’s not for myself. It’s for it—the work. It’s neither for me nor for the director, it’s this idea of something splendid or something beautiful or something remarkable or something transcendent. That’s what it’s for. Once you’ve experienced this thing where you can feel there’s insulation between you and the people watching—between you and approval or disapproval—it means that you can work. It means you can rehearse. And you can take chances and you can be fearless.
And how do you teach this?
I’m trying to be in the service of finding the way to do it, and I haven’t arrived yet. But I think it starts with naming it, so that learners can believe that it’s possible. As soon as you describe self-consciousness as the primary inhibitor to good work, then you start to create an appetite for the alternative.
When I describe that self-consciousness, I call it the “satellite loop.” That is to say that self-criticism beams out to the director’s eyes like a satellite, and then comes back at me doubled with the director’s scorn. By now, I’m nowhere near actually rehearsing, and now the action becomes not what the character’s action might be, but what do I need to do so I don’t feel foolish.
Obviously your acting was deeply affected. How has your teaching been affected?
One of the ways the teaching has changed is that I read what I see differently. So, if the head is working overtime—if the head and the analytical mind and the brain are going like crazy and the body is dead, we have to start over. And because this is one of the central problems, it means that every moment of diagnosis is changed.