The Magic If

Why everyone should take Acting 1 before graduating.

By Julian Rodriguez

Illustration by Julie Shi

It was 9 a.m., and I was lying on the floor of the Glicker-Milstein Theatre with my shoes off. Soon, Professor David Skeist would walk in, wearing a fuzzy Care Bear bucket hat, a lavender tank top, and a very loose pair of green linen pants, appearing a little frazzled. Professor Skeist is a Brooklyn-based actor, director, and adjunct professor at Barnard. Kooky and extravagant, Skeist fits the experimental New Yorker artist stereotype to a T. For a semester, Barnard's theatrical experimentalist would be Acting 1's guide in finding a mind-body connection that links imagination to physical action, and to the surrounding world. 

As students at Columbia, we are constantly set up to compare ourselves to those around us. A barrage of summer internships, research projects, impressively high GPAs keep us from reaching new heights in academic exploration. Thinking others will reject our ideas, we don't share them. We might keep our hands down in class or go with a safer topic when writing a paper. Acting 1 encourages students to face their fears, take risks, and explore freely. Together, shoeless and staring at the ceiling, we became actors.

An actor is unembarrassed. Acting 1 trains students to use the body unashamedly to find character. We played with gestures, physical scores, and movements from commedia dell'arte. These movements are exaggerated and nonsensical. Walking around the space, Skeist jumped into a feet-spread-apart position, then doubled over and slammed the floor with his palms. We wordlessly repeated the movement. Skeist reached up, then folded forward, sending his hands in a big circle, until they were behind his back, where he hopped when his arms hit their fullest rotation. My classmates glanced at each other before mimicking this move. We watched as Skeist jumped high into the air, reaching for an imaginary parachute, before landing with undulating hips and shoulders, as if he were slowly gliding to the ground. The class laughed, and Skeist had to repeat the movement before we copied it.

Acting 1 demands that every student ignore whatever voice is in their head. The movement training that takes place in Acting 1 is undeniably awkward and, at first, mortifying. Like most of my classmates, I came to Acting 1 without any previous acting training. Moving my body in this way was new, and felt unnatural. Doing it in front of others certainly didn't help. 

But conquering my embarrassment has made it easier to participate in my other classes. I feel more comfortable asking questions in a big lecture, asking my neighbour for help, and finally sharing the ideas that at one time only lived in my head. Taking Acting 1 gave me a greater tolerance for embarrassment, because whatever the public task, it can’t be as vulnerable as strutting like a 16th-century Italian clown in front of my class.

An actor imagines. Beyond exercises that explore physicality, training in Acting 1 also involves expanding and wielding one's imagination. The Stanislavsky System is the prevailing model in Western acting training, and it provides specific practices for developing an actor's imagination. As children, we played pretend, bringing our creative vision into reality, physicalizing imagination. However, traditional education methods confine. What we imagine becomes separate from reality; the mind becomes separate from the body. But imagination is a hopeful thing; it allows us to create a more perfect world in our heads. Moving these ideas into our arms, legs, and spine helps us to believe that this more perfect world can actually exist.

To train our physical imaginations, Skeist told us to pick a colour and imagine our hands and feet covered in paint. By moving and touching the space around us, we would leave that colour behind. Lines of varying thickness, dots, shapes, and streaks filled the room, living in our minds but created by the body. I danced around the room, mixing my carnation red with my classmates' lavender, navy blue, and ochre. This exercise brought me back to being a kid. Everything I had seen in my head was real again, and an incredible joy washed over me. I began asking, "If I can create a masterpiece with my classmates in this theatre, then why can't the real world be as beautiful as the one I'm imagining right now?" 

An actor asks. The Stanislavsky System creates the "Magic If," which prompts the actor to ask, "What if X were Y?" What if this ball were a stick of dynamite? What if that hat were a puppy? I encourage everyone to ask "What If?" What if we used class as an opportunity to explore without shame or anxiety? What if the good things we imagine were real? Acting 1 is not just for those who want to perform; it's for anyone who wants to discover what the world could be and learn how to share their discoveries. I've taken the lessons I learned in Acting 1 into every other aspect of my life. Every hand raised, every night out, every community event. Every essay, every study session, every train ride. Every day, I ask, "What if?" and every day, the answer is different.