Andrei Serban

Columbia University

By Ellen Orenstein

Serban has been a professor of theatre arts and director of the Oscar Hammerstein II Center for Theatre Studies at Columbia University since 1992. He has taught at schools worldwide, including the Yale School of Drama, Harvard University, Paris’s Conservatoire d’Art Dramatique, University of California–San Diego and the Pittsburgh Theatre Institute. After early studies at the Theatre Institute in Romania, he was invited as a young director by Ellen Stewart to La MaMa Experimental Theatre Center, where he directed Fragments of a Greek Trilogy, which won several Obies and went on to be performed at more than 20 international festivals. He has directed theatre and opera widely in the U.S. and abroad, and his 1977 production of The Cherry Orchard won a Tony for best revival.

How do you begin with your acting students?

Two directions. One is working on technique: on skill, on their voice and their body and coordination, on text work. And then the other side: totally free improvisation. Without technique, you cannot be free; but if you only emphasize skill, technique and rigor, then you get stuck in something that is too uptight. So, you have to know how to allow creativity to go completely wild, and then you must come back to what is called discipline. These two are always important—together.

It seems there is a very difficult negotiation between creativity and technique.

Yes. Some of the training exercises we do, dealing with counting and movement and voice exercises, require total precision. Then in the scene work that they have to present to me, I ask them to bring something that is surprising: Be original, be eccentric, be over-the-top. Always try to bring this element of surprise—because theatre which has no surprise is dead.

We are in a situation similar to that of a lab: Nobody sees these experiments. And we always learn from making mistakes—so striving to make mistakes is the best thing. You go to the limit of what the imagination can do and then you return to the, let’s say, rigor of the text—asking yourself, all those fantastical fantasies of mine, do they illuminate the scene, or do they obscure the scene?

How do you get your students to take those leaps into the imagination? Are they afraid at first?

Of course. It takes a long time. The first presentation—it is total lunacy. (Laughs.) Then, you know, I’m very harsh with criticism—extremely harsh—and they get scared. And the next time they do something which is totally tame and plain boring—and then I am even harsher. (More laughter.) Peter Brook says the devil in the theatre is called boredom.

Do they try to please you?

Absolutely. But, at some point along the road, what they discover is that the body is the vessel for all the energy of the action of the play or of the character. It’s not in the head. It doesn’t come through a kind of cloud of the imagination.

When they feel what is called presence—the presence of the actor—then everything changes. When the presence of an actor is really matching the role that he or she is playing, the actor and the role become one, in the way a glove fits a hand: The glove is not the hand, and at the same time it matches, totally, the shape and the movement of the hand. And when one feels that sense of presence, one isn’t so much worried, or panicked, about pleasing somebody else. This rush to please is there because something inside is not calmed down, something is not assimilated, something else is absent. This kind of crazy desire for approval is there—we all feel it in the theatre—but, somehow, when you get nourished by the work on stage, then that is what really matters.

What do you look for in the actors that you choose to work with?

They cannot be amateurs; they have to have skill, and at the same time they have to have heart.

Heart. How do you see that?

You can see it immediately. I can tell.

What’s the audition process for your program at Columbia?

I have a lot of callbacks. The first day, they do a monologue, a song and a dance. I can see people more by the way they sing than by how they do a monologue. The body is like a map. We are very good at trying to hide—but the body cannot hide. The way you hold your body—your posture, the expression on your face, the look in your eyes—all this cannot lie. So I can see the tensions a person has; I can see the potential for adventure or for journey.

It’s very tricky, because some people who are very good at auditions may turn out to be the same all the time—they don’t change a bit up through the opening night or graduation. And some people who are disasters in auditions may grow spectacularly afterwards. That’s why I need to see a person more than one or two or three times.

Some teachers, in the classroom, prefer a horizontal relationship between them and the students. Others prefer a hierarchical relationship. What is your preference?

I don’t believe at all in either a kind of fake dictatorship or the power of the teacher or director—nor do I believe in democracy in the theatre. (Laughs.) We joke as if I am one of them. But, when I give my observations, it is from a very clear place of authority.

The reason I work in the theatre is to discover something, always. To just teach something I know would be a waste of time. I believe that we are all searching together. I never know beforehand how it should be—the evidence is in the moment—then the critical mind has to come into play. The critical factor is very important, but if you only fulfill the critical factor, then you come to a dead end. Because then you are only dealing with the conscious, which is deadly—there is no flesh, only bones.

Say more about that.…

Well, what I mean is that the mind sucks away life. Just as you cannot make love with your mind, you cannot act with your mind. You just can’t. You have to put order into things—so the mind is a great detector, an organizer. But the real intelligence is not in the mind. The real intelligence is in the intuition. If there’s too much mind, it paralyzes the students. It takes their courage away. It takes their appetite for joy and pleasure and freedom.

How do you find that balance —not to say too much?

Through trial and error. You have to learn what it is to teach. When to stop.

How do you know when to stop?

Peter Brook has this great definition of what is a director or teacher. It’s visual. (Pushes his hands toward the listener. Pulls his hands toward himself. Folds his hands in his lap.) First movement: I am pushing, pushing. Second movement: I stop pushing and let them do it—I am still there, ready to intervene, but I am withdrawing my hands and letting the student/actor take over. And third movement: I am just watching. All three are important.

Why do you teach?

I could say, for a very selfish reason: to keep myself young. And, in the best ways, to be in connection with the powers of the young generation. In each generation, something changes, you know? But, with each generation there remains the same deep question of the human condition, which doesn’t have anything to do with young or old: Why are we here? Why are we doing theatre? What is theatre for? Only by staying with the question every day can we find out if there is an answer. Even that answer is not an answer.