"Cats Who Take Direction"

by Amanda Hess

[I don’t post much about movies—mostly because I don’t really know much about them as an art form—but since performing in film is somewhat analogous to performing on stage, the anecdotes sometimes cross paths.  Amanda Hess’s New York Times article about performing animals in film is one of those because . . . well, animals sometimes also appear in plays, too.  (See my report on Will Eno’s The Open House, posted on Rick On Theater on 16 March 2014.  More recently, I reported on Jez Butterworth’s The Ferryman, 16 November 2018, which featured a live rabbit and a live goose on stage.)   

[I’ve posted one other article on performing animals: “Stage Rat & Doll Baby,” 15 January 2017, includes “White Rodent Finds Fame on the Great White Way”  by Corey Kilgannon of the New York Times.  “Cats Who Take Direction” was originally published in the “Arts” section of the New York Times on 3 January 2019.]

Animals are turning in more naturalistic performances in films like ‘Can You Ever Forgive Me?,’ making Toto look like a hack.

The movie had a dead cat problem.

As the director Marielle Heller prepared to shoot “Can You Ever Forgive Me?,” a biopic about the literary forger Lee Israel, she knew that she would need a highly realistic prop to pull off the pivotal scene where Israel finds her beloved pet cat, Jersey, dead. Heller wanted a dead cat with heft. She wanted an inanimate object that her star, Melissa McCarthy, could act against. “I was really intense about it,” Heller said over the phone recently. “We discussed strategy a number of times.”

So important was the dead cat that Heller sought to secure it even before casting the film’s real live Jersey. She’d just find a feline that looked like her wonderful prop. How much difference could the real one make, anyway? On her first film, “The Diary of a Teenage Girl,” she had saved money by tossing her own cat, Willie, in front of the camera. So when the movie’s animal trainer promised to bring in what she called her highest-performing cat, Heller wasn’t sure what that could mean. That it wasn’t going to pee everywhere?

The cat’s name was Towne. He was a lanky black and white guy with green eyes and a petal pink nose, and to everyone’s surprise, he was amazing. Yes, he followed directions — hitting his marks with the help of a trainer equipped with a clicker and a laser pointer — but he also seemed to do something more. “Towne had a very expressive face,” Heller said.

There is a moment in the film where he gazes toward McCarthy “sort of sympathetically, and also judgmentally, and you feel all of that,” she added. Heller ended up commissioning a prop modeled after Towne that cost thousands of dollars — the most expensive one for the production.

Towne’s efforts did not go unnoticed. “This cat is out-acting me,” McCarthy thought as they worked. “The Marlon Brando of cats,” Deadline raved upon the film’s release. Declared Jezebel: “This Cat Deserves an Oscar!”

Towne’s turn in “Can You Ever Forgive Me?” is emblematic of a new class of animal performances, ones that are recognized as much for what the animal does not do as for what it does. These animals are not filmed talking like humans or fetching things. They don’t shake hands or roll over. Instead they are captured somewhat naturalistically. Towne spends much of “Can You Ever Forgive Me?” gazing languidly from the couch. At the emotional core of “Roma” sits a family dog, its incessant barking, and its accumulating waste; Borras is a professional dog behaving as if woefully untrained. And in “Widows,” a fluffy white terrier named Olivia pants calmly, the image of unsuspecting innocence, as violent criminals creep around her. Olivia is “paving new ground for the canine acting community,” Alyssa Bereznak wrote at The Ringer, and she has ambled into her own grass roots Oscar campaign.

By these modern standards, Toto is an amateur. Mister Ed? A hack. A year of buzzy pet performances raises the question: Are animals getting better at acting?

Before we get to that, some sad news: After a decade-long career, Towne himself died last year. In a phone interview, his trainers described him as a really nice cat who loved people. He is survived by his look-alike brother, with whom he often acted.

Towne was never really acting, at least, not in the human sense. If animals have any “motivation” for their performances, it lies largely in delicious treats. Towne loved jars of baby food, while Olivia dined on hot dogs on the “Widows” set. Our sense of a “good” animal actor is a combination of its behavioral training and our own emotional projection.

But are they getting better?

They are, kind of.

Animals were among the first silent film stars, and they’ve been hailed as natural performers ever since. “A certain critical tradition has taken animals as the standard by which to judge all acting, animal or human,” said James Leo Cahill, a professor of cinema studies at the University of Toronto. The appeal lies in their “lack of self-consciousness before the camera.”

But while animals have often been coded as naturals, they have not always been filmed that way. It was once common to use physical restraints, shock collars and trip wires to produce unnatural animal behaviors on film. Consider the “Dogville” comic shorts that played before features in the 1930s, in which dogs appeared to play instruments, walk on two legs, and kiss each other, effects that could be achieved by attaching piano wire to the dogs’ limbs and manipulating their bodies like puppets.

Those practices drew protests from animal rights groups, and by the 1940s, animal welfare regulations had arrived in Hollywood. “One of the biggest shifts in how animals are filmed” arose from “cultural re-evaluations of what constitutes cruelty toward animals,” said Courtney E. White, an instructor at Columbia College Hollywood who studies the intersection of cinema and animal welfare. As Jonathan Burt noted in his 2002 book “Animals in Film,” the focus of filmmaking flipped from serving what the director wanted to what the animal needed.

The shift helped fuel a swiftly professionalizing animal training industry. A highly skilled and thoroughly prepared animal became much more important to a production’s success. Burt writes that while it was once typical for trainers to show up on set cold, they now received exacting instructions in advance. At the same time, training methods were growing more sophisticated: applying B.F. Skinner’s operant conditioning theories allowed trainers to reward more precise behaviors in animals and delay their gratification, too — helping animals to “act” in a scene without always looking to a trainer for instructions or treats.

As the treatment of animals changed, so did viewer expectations. Film became a powerful tool for animal rights activists, a trend that’s culminated in PETA’s sophisticated viral video operation. Modern audiences are now hypersensitive to images of animal harm. Just a whiff of force can make them uneasy, even when the animal on set is perfectly safe. Part of what was so unusual about Olivia in “Widows” was her apparent Zen calm even while in the clutches of a villain.

These changing norms can appear almost like a stylistic shift. Cahill calls the effect “not unlike pre- and post-Method acting, which dramatically changed the criteria upon which naturalistic acting was both approached and judged.” Today’s animals are, paradoxically, both better trained and styled as more “natural” than their predecessors.

It’s probably not a coincidence that “natural” animal actors are earning rapturous praise just as we enter a new era of unreal images, thanks to the rise of C.G.I. Olivia’s trainer, Greg Tresan of Animal Casting Atlanta, said that his animals are now routinely submitted for full body scans before filming. Disney’s forthcoming “live-action” adaptation of “The Lion King” will star a savanna of computer-generated animals. A performer like Towne — who, Heller assured me, was unassisted by C.G.I. — is now an outlier.

C.G.I. can achieve feats that real animals cannot, but like the piano wires before it, it can also disturb in its unreality. “A lot of film theory would argue that no matter how good the fake animal gets, it won’t produce the same emotional resonance in viewers as a real animal,” White said. Perhaps Hollywood’s wave of elaborate fake creatures has inspired a bit of a backlash, too, and a renewed desire for animal images that feel studiously real.

After all, on YouTube, hyper-realistic animal performances abound, filmed by amateurs who have all the time in the world to capture interesting behaviors from their pets. We’ve never been more aware of what cats and dogs look like in the natural wilds of our living rooms. The social internet is fueled by such images. Hollywood is panting to catch up.

[Some years ago, one of my cousins gave me a book as a gift: Broadway Tails by Bill Berloni and Jim Hanrahan (Lyons Press, 2008).  The subtitle of the book is Heartfelt Stories of Rescued Dogs Who Became Showbiz Superstars, all about dogs  who’ve appeared on New York’s stages.  (Berloni is the trainer of the dog that was part of the cast of The Open House.  He’s one of New York’s major stage animal trainers and has a 2011 Tony Award for Excellence in the Theatre.

[Amanda Hess is a critic-at-large. She writes about internet culture for the “Arts” section of the New York Times and contributes regularly to the New York Times Magazine. She has written for such publications as Slate, ESPN the Magazine, Elle, and Pacific Standard.]

"Why learning Latin stays with you forever"

by Frankie Thomas

[This installment of “In My Humble Opinion,” a series dedicated to video essays by writers, artists, and thinkers on diverse topics of interest to them, aired on PBS NewsHour on 31 December 2018 (rebroadcast from 9 April).  I’m posting it on Rick On Theater because it struck a personal note with me.

[Frankie Thomas is the author of ”The Showrunner,” a story which received special mention in the 2013 Pushcart Prize Anthology.  Her writing has also appeared in The Toast, The Hairpin, and Vol. 1 Brooklyn.  She is currently studying fiction at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa.]

What’s the use of learning a language that’s not spoken in conversation nor used in business transactions, and which most people consider “dead”? Writer Frankie Thomas shares her humble opinion on why it’s time to learn Latin.

William Brangham: There are many benefits of learning a foreign language. It opens up work and travel opportunities, and studies have shown that it might even slow the onset of dementia.

But what about a language that is rarely spoken in conversation, never used in business, and one that most people consider dead?

Writer Frankie Thomas shares her Humble Opinion on why it’s time to learn Latin.

Frankie Thomas: If you can possibly get away with it, you should study Latin. OK, hear me out.

Yes, any modern language offers more practical benefits than Latin, but Latin offers more fun. It has all the pleasures of puzzle, a time capsule and a secret code. You say dead language; I say ghost hunting.

My favorite thing about Latin is that all of its native speakers are dead. You will never have to talk to them. This makes Latin the perfect subject for introverts. There’s no pressure to become conversationally fluent, and no Latin teacher will ever force you to turn to your classmate and have an awkward scripted conversation about your winter break.

Unlike beginner’s Spanish or French, which teach you to say, “I would like a salad,” and “Where is the library?” beginner Latin teaches you to talk like a supervillain.

“Wheelock’s Latin,” the standard beginner textbook at the college level, teaches you how to say the following sentences, “You are all to blame, and, tomorrow, you will pay the ultimate price,” and “Our army is great, and because of the number of our arrows, you shall not see the sky,” and, “Human life is punishment.”

How can you not love a language that immerses you in this epic world of war and gods and gladiators, where every sentence is fraught with portents, and someone is usually about to get murdered?

My middle school textbook had a passage about a barber. Pretty tame, right? A barber who accidentally cuts his customers’ throat. To this day, we all remember how to say “Much blood flows.”

By the standards of middle school entertainment, it beat “Dawson’s Creek.”

That barber, by the way, was a real guy. He lived in Pompeii, as did all the characters in that textbook.

Here are some other vocab words it taught us, volcano, to erupt, ashes, to be in despair. Did I mention that all native Latin speakers are dead? Not only that, but many of them died horribly, buried alive in volcanic ash, which is why we know so much about them today.

To study Latin is to engage with the dead. True, you can’t talk to them directly. And thank the gods for that, because what would we talk about? Winter break?

But they have a way of getting into your head with their beautiful, useless words. No one speaks Latin anymore. No one needs Latin anymore, and yet here we are, here I am, watching my favorite sitcom, mentally translating the dialogue, and remembering that nothing is permanent, not emperors, not gods, not even me.

So that’s how studying Latin will change your life. You might never get a chance to use what you have learned, but it will live in your memory forever.

And, in that sense — here’s the secret of Latin — it’s not really a dead language at all.

[I studied Latin in middle school.  All 8th-graders at my school took Latin, and then I went to summer school to take Latin I before going away to high school.  (Okay, I was a geek, but it led to other academic pursuits—which is sort of the point.)  Latin was my first foreign language and, as Frankie Thomas says, I immediately found it fun, dead or not.

[Despite what Ms. Thomas says, however, we did have people who “conversed” in Latin.  Or tried to.  The high school had a Latin Club and though I have no idea what they did at their meetings or at other times—I changed schools before high school so I was never a member—I do know what the club members did on one evening of the year.  The high school Latin Club had a Roman Banquet—and we 8th-grade Latin students served as “slaves” at the feast.  It was a big role play and we served the high-schoolers their meals and “wine” as they reclined on benches decorated to look like chaises.  We wore little tunics and kibitzed as the “patrician” diners tried to hold conversations in Latin and give us orders in the ancient tongue as well.  Slaves or not, it was a hoot—and considered a great honor.

[We also never learned the kind of villain-speak Ms. Thomas describes.  The most memorable line in our Latin textbook was “Cuba est insula”—‘Cuba is an island.’  (This was just after the Castro revolution, but the textbooks were a few years older, I guess.)

[Seriously, though, I found that my study of Latin had several immediate benefits.  The first one I recognized, while it was happening, was that my active English vocabulary began to expand.  When we learned a new Latin word, we made a vocabulary card with the word’s principle inflections—singular and plural forms for nouns; masculine, feminine, and neuter forms for adjectives; principal parts for verbs—and a list of cognate English words derived from the Latin word.  We added to that list as we discovered new cognates, so I kept learning new English words all year long, and some of them worked their way into my 8th-grade vocabulary.  I might have done so anyway, but I developed a larger-than-average working vocabulary.  One of my college roommates used to call me his “walking dictionary.”

[In the era when I was going to middle school (back in the middle of the last century, in case you’re wondering), schools still taught English grammar.  I don’t remember having particular difficulties with this subject, but I do remember suddenly understanding some of the origins of the grammar rules we were learning because they, like those new words I was picking up, were derived from Latin grammar (which was a lot more regular and codified than English grammar).  All of a sudden , things that I had just been taking as given seemed to have a logic to them because they had an origin, a source.  (Later, I would also see why English grammar had so many exceptions.  I decided that the Latin grammar system that was being applied to English was being forced on a Germanic language—I learned that in high school and saw it confirmed when I started to learn German while living in Germany as a teenager—and just didn’t quite fit.  There were bits left over—so . . . exceptions.) 

[Finally, when I shifted from Latin to modern languages—French and German because I was going to live in Germany and go to high school in Switzerland, and later Russian because . . . well, it interested me—I not only recognized the close relationship between French and Latin, but the structures of both languages was analogous to that of the Latin I’d been studying for several years by this time (because of that summer course in Latin I, I was taking Latin III by then).  I started taking French the last year I was in school in the States (I began learning German with a tutor my Dad hired the summer my brother and I joined my parents in Europe; see my ROT post “An American Teen In Germany,” 9 and 12 March 2013) and I saw my classmates struggling with the concepts of verbs, nouns, and adjectives that inflected and nouns with gender while all that made perfect sense to me. 

[I can’t swear that studying Latin had an effect on my skill in French and German, but I ended up becoming pretty fluent in both languages.  I have no doubt that living in communities where the languages were spoken—a small German city where my dad was first stationed as a Foreign Service Officer, Geneva and a small town nearby when I was at school—was a major factor in my eventual fluency, especially picking up the accents, but I suspect that having studied Latin before starting to learn both other languages helped jump-start my fluency.

[Oh, and that English grammar studying Latin in 8th grade helped me understand?  I found that it stuck with me well enough that when I needed it decades later to help me teach writing to college students, it largely came right back to me.  And what I needed to refresh was only lying dormant, waiting for a quick reminder.  Learning Latin had grounded me well in the fundamentals of language and, though I can no longer translate a passage of Latin, it still pays off even 58 years later.  So, Ms. Thomas, I did—and do—use what I learned back when I was barely a teenager.  Otherwise, I couldn’t agree with you more!

[And the fun I said I had in that middle school introduction to Latin?  During breaks in that summer-school Latin class, my friend and classmate Jim (who’d later go on to edit the Harvard Crimson and become a respected journalist, newspaper editor and publisher, and TV news show host, as well as a member of President George W. Bush’s administration) would put our heads together and compose Latin translations of advertising slogans, proverbs and maxims, song titles and lyrics, and everyday expressions.  Why?  Because we were 14 and it was summer and we were in a class with high-schoolers.  And we enjoyed being silly.] 

Rudolf Steiner, Spiritual Scientist

I live at 5th Avenue and West 16th Street in New York City and I often walk over to 7th or 8th Avenue for errands or appointments in Chelsea.  Frequently my route there or back takes me along West 15th Street, in which case I pass by the Rudolf Steiner Bookstore at number 138 (a little east of 7th Avenue) and the New York branch of the Anthroposophical Society in America at the same address.  I guess they’ve been there for about 30 or 35 years (I’ve lived in this area of Manhattan for 45 years). 

I learned about Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925), an Austrian philosopher, social reformer, architect, and esotericist, when I did some research on theater figure Michael Chekhov for a grad school project in 1985.  Chekhov (1891-1955)—the nephew of the famous playwright Anton Chekhov (1860-1904), a student of renowned acting teacher Konstantin Stanislavsky (1863-1938), and ultimately a respected actor, director, acting teacher, and theorist in his own right—had met Steiner in the 1920s and began to adopt some of his concepts.  They influenced him greatly, both in his art and in his life, and he incorporated them into his acting theories and training techniques. 

In order to understand this aspect of Chekhov’s Technique, I had to read up on Steiner.  As you’ll see shortly, Steiner’s beliefs are unusual, not to put too fine a point on it, so it should come as no surprise that his name stuck with me long after I finished that Michael Chekhov project (which was eventually published as “Konstantin Stanislavsky and Michael Chekhov: Realism and Un-Realism” in The Players’ Journal in 2008; I also posted it on Rick On Theater on 2 May 2011).  As it happens, I’ve been traveling pretty much weekly from my apartment over to Chelsea and often take a detour on the way back to stop at a store on 15th Street, so I’ve been seeing Steiner’s name frequently lately, so, always on the look-out for interesting topics for ROT, I decided to write a post on him while I’m between shows on which to report.

Steiner, of course, isn’t a renowned theater figure himself—but since Michael Chekhov was fairly prominent on the U.S. theater scene, I thought it would pass muster.  Chekhov isn’t very well known outside the worlds of theater and movies—and I daresay his name’s not all that familiar even to folks in the business—but he had some very prominent students and followers, including Marilyn Monroe, Anthony Quinn, Clint Eastwood, Dorothy Dandridge, Yul Brynner, Beatrice Straight, Patricia Neal, Sterling Hayden, Jack Palance, Elia Kazan, Robert Lewis, Paula Strasberg, and Lloyd Bridges, and he received a 1946 Academy Award nomination for Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound (1945).  With that (tenuous) connection, I figure Steiner fits my route-step criteria for the blog.

Rudolf Joseph Lorenz Steiner was actually born in Hungary, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.  (His birthplace is now in Croatia.)  Both his parents had been in service to an Austro-Hungarian count, but Johannes Steiner left the count’s household and went to work for the Southern Austrian Railway and the family moved around Austria, largely near Vienna, a lot.  Rudolf Steiner claimed to have had his first spiritual experience when he was nine: he believed that the spirit of an aunt came to him from a distant town asking him to help her.  Neither he nor his family knew at that time that the woman had already died, and Steiner wrote later that he became palpably aware of the existence of a spiritual world as real as the physical one.  In his autobiography, Steiner said that later he felt “that one must carry the knowledge of the spiritual world within oneself after the fashion of geometry . . . [for here] one is permitted to know something which the mind alone, through its own power, experiences.”

While he was still a youth, Steiner began studying philosophy on his own, reading Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814), and Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling (1775-1854).  At 15, Steiner experienced another spiritual event.  He believed that he’d come to understand the concept of time, the precondition of spiritual clairvoyance in his view.  He went on to study mathematics, physics, chemistry, botany, zoology, and mineralogy at the Technical University of Vienna starting in 1879, while auditing classes in  literature and philosophy, even attending lectures in philosophy at the University of Vienna.    All along, the young student was being deeply drawn to the questions of knowledge and self-awareness.  A scholarship student, Steiner left the institute in 1883 without graduating. 

When he was 21, he frequently met a man, Felix Kogutzki, on the train he took to and from his village and Vienna.  The man, an herbalist (someone who collects and prepares roots, plants, and minerals used to make natural remedies and medicines), told him about nature, plants, and the spiritual world “as one who had his own experience therein.”  Kogutzki introduced Steiner to a non-academic and spiritual understanding of nature.

In 1882, one of Steiner’s professors recommended him to the editor of a new edition of the works of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) and, despite his lack of academic credentials, the former student was hired as the natural science editor for the publication.  At the same time. from 1884 to 1890, the young scholar supported himself tutoring the children of a wealthy Viennese merchant and writing science articles for Pierer’s Encyclopedia.

Steiner eventually received a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Rostock in Germany (1891), based on his submission of a dissertation on German philosopher Fichte’s focal conception of self-consciousness (das Ich, the I, the ego).  The young scholar, however, had already begun a writing career, following his editorial work on the Goethe collection, with two books of his own about Goethe’s philosophy: The Theory of Knowledge Implicit in Goethe’s World-Conception (1886) and, after the awarding of his degree, Goethe’s Conception of the World (1897).  Both books concerned epistemology, the study of knowledge, and can be seen as the foundation of all Steiner’s later work. 

In 1892, Steiner published an expanded version of his doctoral dissertation, Truth and Knowledge: Prelude to a Philosophy of Freedom (all dates are those of the original German publication; I’m not giving the German titles of Steiner’s works unless there’s good reason to do so, but obviously his writings were first published in German before being released in translation) and in 1894, Philosophy of Spiritual Activity or the Philosophy of Freedom (both English-language titles have been used, along with Intuitive Thinking as a Spiritual Path).  The author was sorely disappointed in the book’s reception, feeling that it was badly misunderstood.  He was exploring epistemology as a route to spiritual freedom, the philosophical basis of Anthroposophy, Steiner’s proprietary philosophy (which I’ll be getting to shortly).

In the midst of his burgeoning career as a writer and philosopher, during which he’d become a part-owner, publisher, and editor in 1897 of Berlin’s Das Magazin für Litteratur, where he published articles in support of French novelist Émile Zola (1840-1902) in the infamous Dreyfus Affair (1894-1906) and his correspondence with Scottish-born German anarchist John Henry Mackay (1864-1933), Steiner was introduced to the Theosophical Society.  The society, founded in New York City in 1875 by Russian  occultist Helena Blavatsky (1831-91), promotes the claim that insight into the nature of God and the world comes through direct knowledge, philosophical speculation, or a physical process and encourages the study of Asian philosophies and theologies, especially those of India.  Theosophy, from the Greek for ‘divine wisdom,’ is a philosophical system that stresses mysticism and esotericism (adherence to a philosophical doctrine that can only be understood by or is meant for a select few who have special knowledge or interest).

In 1899, Steiner published an article in Magazin für Litteratur entitled “Goethe’s Secret Revelation,” which discussed the esoteric nature of Goethe’s mysterious fairy tale The Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily (1795). The publication led to an invitation by the Count and Countess Cay Lorenz von Brockdorff (1844-1921 and 1848-1906, respectively) to speak on philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) at a meeting of Theosophists.  (In 1896, Nietzsche’s sister had asked Steiner to come to Naumburg to help organize the philosopher’s archive.  Nietzsche was already mentally incompetent, but Steiner had previously written Friedrich Nietzsche, Fighter for Freedom in 1895.)  Steiner became a favorite speaker at the Theosophist gatherings and this afforded him his first chance to speak openly and directly about his notions of spiritual perception, the concept on which he’d been working since his first spiritual experiences as a boy.

The attention Steiner began to get because of these appearances didn’t sit as well with his colleagues in conventional academia.  Some of his students rebelled and other scholars were bewildered to see the formerly respected, if sometimes radical, philosopher and writer, a student of science, turning into an occultist.  Only the Theosophists were receptive to his ideas. Though he had never formally joined the Theosophical Society, he was appointed leader of the German and Austrian branch of the group in 1904. 

Mainstream Theosophy was focused in drawing its methods and beliefs from Eastern philosophies, but Steiner looked to European culture, seeking a spirituality based on Western philosophical and esoteric traditions.  He referred to his endeavor as “spiritual science” and began to replace the terminology devised by Helena Blavatsky with one of his own.  Under Steiner’s leadership, the German-Austrian section of the Theosophical Society grew as he traveled extensively in Europe.  The further from the original Theosophy Steiner got, the more a rift between him and the mainstream society grew and finally, in 1912 or ’13, the head of the German-Austrian group formally split from the Theosophical Society and took a majority of the section’s members with him.  They formed a new organization, the Anthroposophical Society.

Anthroposophy, a name Steiner took from the title of a work of the Austrian philosopher Robert von Zimmermann (1824-98), Anthroposophy in Outline published in Vienna in 1882, comes from the Greek anthropos, meaning ‘man,’ and sophia, meaning ‘wisdom’ or ‘learning,’ thus ‘human knowledge.’  (Steiner adopted the name von Zimmerman coined but not the complete definition he crafted.)  Steiner said the term should be understood to mean “awareness of one’s humanity.”  The religio-philosophical teaching Steiner founded focuses on the spiritual aspect of life and human nature and his new society was aimed at founding “new methods of spiritual research on a scientific basis.” 

Commentary in a pamphlet on the movement’s founder published by the society states, “Anthroposophy is not a mere sum-total of ideas.  It is a living power, which appeals to the whole man, not only to his thinking.”  Steiner saw Anthroposophy as “the inwardly strengthened and practiced state of consciousness, by which man can experience himself as citizen of a spiritual world.”  He later capsulized this concept as “my consciousness of being Man.” 

By 1913, Steiner’s Anthroposophical Society expanded so much that the organization decided to build a center for lectures, research, and performances—the Anthroposophical Society had begun to present plays written by Steiner and Edouard Schuré (1841-1929), French philosopher, poet, playwright, novelist, music critic, and publicist of esoteric literature—and Steiner began construction on his first Goetheanum in Dornach, Switzerland, where he’d moved that year and where he lived for the rest of his life.  Designed by Steiner himself, the First Goetheanum, built largely of timber, was destroyed in an arson fire on New Year’s Eve, 31 December 1922-1 January 1923.  Steiner had just delivered a lecture and opponents of the philosopher and his society, which included the Nazis, had threatened to burn the building, causing a three-man guard to stand duty for the previous 18 months.

Steiner set about designing the Second Goetheanum immediately, but it wasn’t completed until 1928, three years after architect’s death.  Steiner went on to design 17 buildings, both organizational and residential, in and around Dornach between 1908 and 1925.  There’s no record of Steiner ever having formally studied architecture, he was largely self-taught and was one the few important architects never to have studied with another major architect.

After World War I ended, Steiner began lecturing more widely and initiated a number of other activities, including founding the first Waldorf School in Stuttgart, Germany, in 1919.  In 1923, Steiner also launched the School of Spiritual Science, a center for research into and study of esotericism as the core of the Anthroposophical Society.  Though Steiner only taught the first lesson of the School of Spiritual Science, the basic guide to esotericism, in his lifetime (recorded in Johannes Kiersch, A History of the School of Spiritual Science: The First Class [Forest Row, UK: Temple Lodge Publishing, 2006]), the school continues today.

Steiner had worked as a private tutor in Vienna and conducted a series of history and natural science lectures at the Arbeiterbildungsschule (Workers’ Training School) in Berlin, an educational program for working class adults sponsored by the trade unions and social democrats.  He began forming his own ideas about education and child development, which he eventually laid out in “The Education of the Child in the Light of Spiritual Science,” a 1907 essay.  He wanted schools to train not just the mind and intellect, but make room to educate the will and the feelings.  The intent, according to Steiner, is to enable the children to become “free human beings” by developing their “spiritual identities”—that which Steiner claimed he began to discover from those early experiences when he was a boy. 

Though Anthroposophy was the principal philosophy behind Waldorf education, it isn’t taught as such in any of the Waldorf Schools, which now exist all over the world.  (As I understand this, it’s like a Christian school that teaches Christian principles and values, but doesn’t actually instruct it’s pupils in Christian doctrine.  For example, I went to a Quaker school and we were expected to behave according to Quaker principles and values—no violence; no intolerance; no rude language; courtesy to teachers, fellow students, and visitors; neatly cut and groomed hair; leather shoes with laces, shirts with collars, and no pants with “rivets”—jeans or corduroy jeans—but we never had classes in Quaker religious beliefs.) 

As you might imagine, however, there are tensions inherent in this system.  Though the schools don’t teach Anthroposophy as part of their curriculum, by their very nature, there’s a dissonance with some parents and teachers.  Since one of the fundamental Waldorf tenets is to provide a spiritual component to education, secular teachers and parents who’re committed to secular schooling can have a problem with this emphasis.  (Though Waldorf schools are non-sectarian, families with strong religious beliefs of any denomination may experience a conflict because they prefer to develop their children’s spiritual life in their own ways.)  The Waldorf educational approach, while it can serve as a shield against nonce concepts in pedagogy and educational fads, can also be an impediment to useful educational innovations, including new technologies (computers aren’t available to students until their early teens in order to promote human interaction) and advances in testing and reporting methods. 

There are three Waldorf Schools in New York City and more around the state, not to mention the country and abroad.  Many of the schools are strikingly designed and decorated, creating an exciting and stimulating environment.  Most evaluations indicate that Waldorf Schools, both here and abroad, measure up educationally and socially to standards of both private and public institutions.  (Many Waldorf Schools are constituted as charter schools.  Most are elementary or primary schools.)  Waldorf teachers undergo a separate training program taught by the Anthroposophical Society with teacher-training facilities around the world.

I’m sure it comes as no surprise, considering that Steiner had opinions, ideas, and theories on just about everything (I’ve left out some, otherwise this post would be a book), that he had thoughts on politics as well.  Of all the topics in which he held forth, politics was arguably the most volatile and he became a controversial figure during and after World War I.  German civil society was in turmoil after the devastating defeat and then the burdensome terms of the surrender.  The Weimar Republic (1918-33), the short-lived experiment in German democracy, was weak and beset with troubles: the abdication of Kaiser Wilhelm II (1859-1941; reigned 1888-1918), hyperinflation, a Bolshevik-style revolution in 1918-19, the Spartacist (communist) Uprising of January 1919, a contentious relationship with the victorious allies, the rise of politically extremist factions from both right (National Socialists) and left (Spartacists).  Into this noxious mix, Steiner dared to venture with solutions no group liked—often because they were too radical or futuristic for the era.

Steiner laid out his social-reform theories principally in 1919’s Toward Social Renewal.  For one thing, he proposed a “Threefold Social Order,” which the cultural, political, and economic segments of German society would be independent of one another, arguing that an integrated social system was unwieldy and inflexible, leading to disasters like the Great War.  He also opposed U.S. President Woodrow Wilson’s idea of redrawing the map of Europe along ethnic lines rather than the traditional and historical national boundaries.  The first idea was greeted as crackpot, but the second got Steiner publicly branded a traitor to Germany. 

In 1919, Dietrich Eckart (1868-1923), then a founder of the German Workers’ Party, precursor of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, the Nazis, attacked Steiner as a Jew (which he wasn’t), and in 1921, Adolf Hitler (1889-1945), the Führer of the Nazi Party, which was growing in strength since its founding the year before, attacked him as a “friend” of the Jews.  As they grew in strength, the Nazis and other German nationalist parties went to war against Steiner and the Anthroposophists. 

Indeed, Steiner had published essays and articles even in his early career denouncing anti-Semitism in all its manifestations.  (Note the pieces he ran in Das Magazin für Litteratur in 1897 and ’98 in support of Zola’s criticism of the Dreyfus Affair, the notorious anti-Semitic prosecution of a French army officer.)  But he also called for the total assimilation of Jews into the larger cultures in which they lived, a position regarded by some as anti-Jewish.  To be fair, however, Steiner generally believed that all racial, ethnic, nationalist, and religious distinctions that divide society should be obsolete by the dawn of the 20th century (thus liberating “free” humans from what we now call “identity politics”).  The Anthroposophist leader therefore opposed the Zionism of Theodor Herzl (1860-1904)—on the same basis by which he disapproved of Wilson’s scheme of creating a Europe based on ethnically homogenous nations.

Nonetheless, Steiner did sometimes fall into non- or quasi-scientific racial assumptions based on historical (mostly 19th-century)  tropes, and these usages often got him labeled a racist.  At times he touted the superiority of the White European (or Germanic) culture, but at other times he wrote of race as merely a physical manifestation that was inconsequential to a people’s intellect or morality.  Just as Anthroposophy is aimed at developing each person’s individuality, he posited that physical attributes such as race or ethnicity are simply part of that individuality, along with their experiences and development.  Through his whole career, Steiner promoted the notion that people’s fundamental spirituality is at the core of their common humanity and that all forms of racism are anathema. 

A fundamental tenet of Steiner’s Anthroposophy is to use the methodology of science, meaning principally natural science (the social sciences weren’t formally recognized as academic subjects until the end of the 19th century), to the study and analysis of humankind’s spiritual life.  Hence Steiner applied the term “spiritual science” (Geisteswissenschaft) to Anthroposophy.  Of course, detractors of Steiner and his philosophy didn’t (and don’t) accept that spiritualism and occultism, which is how they view Anthroposophy, even in Steiner’s hands, are science at all. 

Drawing on his early focus on epistemology, the study of knowledge, Steiner concluded “that the experience of thinking, rightly understood, is in fact an experience of spirit.”  His intention was to use his training and experience in math, science, and philosophy to develop disciplined and precise arguments for his theories regarding spiritual experiences and, thus, make them acceptable as true research analogous to the hard sciences and mainstream philosophy.  For him, the human spirit was a real, concrete entity that can be studied and analyzed like the circulatory system or the mind, elevating spiritual science to the same level as biology and the newly emerging field of psychology. 

What Steiner was aiming for in the end is the revelation that the spiritual world and the natural world are two views of a single unit.  Our consciousness perceives them as separate, but as we develop our thinking through both about the natural world (that is, through natural science) and about the spiritual world (through spiritual science), we come to see the hidden unity of our experiences.  Gaining knowledge will make us truly free to think not just received thoughts, thoughts generated by our bodies or passed on to us by society, but our own original and creative thoughts generated by our individuality.

I said earlier that Steiner isn’t a major theater figure, and he isn’t.  You won’t find his name listed in theater reference books like the Cambridge Guide to World Theatre or in theater history texts.  But the founder of Anthroposophy did have a connection to theater; indeed, the First Goetheanum was built largely to provide a stage and auditorium for theatrical productions.  (The present Goetheanum has a 1000-seat theater for performances.)

Among his many interests and talents, Steiner worked in the visual arts.  I’ve spoken of his architecture, but he also created a 30-foot wooden sculpture with English sculptor  Edith Maryon (1872-1924), The Representative of Humanity (1922) that was meant to be displayed in the First Goetheanum.  It hadn’t been installed at the time of the fire, so it is the only object left of that building and now sits in the Second Goetheanum.

Steiner was also a playwright, however, having composed four modern mystery plays that follow the journeys of a group of characters through a series of lives (Steiner believed in reincarnation, which I haven’t addressed): The Portal of Initiation (1910), The Trial of the Soul (1911), The Guardian of the Threshold (1912), and The Soul’s Awakening (1913).  (Mystery plays, a medieval theatrical event, were enactments of Bible stories.)  The plays reveal how spiritual development becomes evident in karmically-connected people.  (Karma’s another of Steiner’s beliefs.)  He had also previously directed plays by French dramatist Édouard Schuré (The Sacred Drama of Eleusis, 1907 at the Munich Theosophical Congress; The Children of Lucifer, 1909).  Steiner’s plays are still performed around the world by Anthroposophical organizations.

The area in which Steiner so strongly influenced Michael Chekhov, acting and actor-training, the founder of Anthroposophy developed with his second wife, Marie von Sivers (1864-1948).  The two also devised new methods of storytelling and poetry recitation.  (The last public lecture Steiner gave before his death was on acting and speech.)  According to a brochure for the Chekhov Theatre Studio, Steinerian speech training “aims at awakening and freeing living forces of speech and of developing its plastic movement and musical element.”

Steiner and von Sivers also developed Eurythmy, “the science of visible speech,” which makes perceptible what Steiner asserted were the internal expressions and gestures of language and music, generated when the spiritual world penetrates the soul.  The Chekhov Studio described Eurythmy as “based on the laws of movement which underlie man’s capacity for speech and for movement, and linking them together.”  According to Steiner,

Eurythmy is neither dance nor mime, but a new form of art, which brings to appearance in coordinated movements the sound-quality of music and speech,  When the human being speaks or sings he forms with his breath the air around him.  Unseen gestures and movements accompany in us each sound and note.  These hidden movements are the source of the art of eurythmy.  Thus it can be called “visible speech” and “visible song.”

By 1923, Steiner had become increasingly frail and weak.  He continued to lecture widely and work on his autobiography, Mein Lebensgang [My life’s path] (published uncompleted posthumously in 1925), and tour.  He delivered his last lecture in September 1924 and died on 30 March 1925 in Dornach at the age of 64.  The nature of his final illness has never been reported.

[I can’t tell if Rudolf Steiner was in the same league as L. Ron Hubbard or Sun Myung Moon and if Anthroposophy was akin to Scientology or the Unification Church—or if he was a charlatan and his philosophy was cult-like.  He had plenty of detractors (aside, I mean, from Hitler and the Nazis) but he seems to have been greatly respected by many, many people.  (Among the prominent Anthroposophists are writer Saul Bellow; painter Joseph Beuys; actor, director, teacher Michael Chekhov; sculptor Edith Maryon; playwright Édouard Schuré; conductor, composer, pianist Bruno Walter.) 

[It seems clear that Steiner was very smart—he mastered a large number of subjects, both academic and esoteric, and was accomplished in several arts as well—and had a large ego.  From my reading, Steiner doesn’t seem to have set out to bamboozle anyone, even if you consider his ideas specious.  He seems to have been entirely sincere in his beliefs and many of his ideas were more impractical than crackpot. 

[As I said above, I have left out some of the topics that are part of Anthroposophy (I didn’t even attempt to go into Steiner’s relation to Christianity and Christian beliefs—it’s not only very esoteric, but Christianity isn’t in my wheelhouse), and even those that I have tried to cover are over-simplified.  Anthroposophy is very complex and expansive, as I’m sure readers have seen, and I can’t say that I have understood even most of it.  The language is often dense and hard to unpack, and like most philosophies, it’s hard to pin down in digestible terms.  I’ve tried to give an overview of the philosophy, simplistic and superficial though it may be, and trust that ROTters who are interested in learning more will go out and find more detailed sources to satisfy their curiosity.

[I plan to write a profile of Michael Chekhov for a future post on Rick On Theater.  I don’t have a specific date selected for publication, but I hope it will be soon, perhaps in February.  (I have two posts, “Psychological Gesture & Leading Center,” 27 October 2009, and “Konstantin Stanislavsky and Michael Chekhov: Realism and Un-Realism,” 2 May 2011, which deal with aspects of Chekhov’s acting theories, but neither article has much biographical detail.  My new post will focus on the life of the actor, director, acting teacher, and acting theorist.)]

'The Natyasastra'

Somewhere between the 2nd century B.C.E. and the 2nd century C.E., what are now The Natyasastra’s 37 chapters were likely assembled in India.  (Some editions have 36 chapters, including Manomohan Ghosh’s 1951 version, and some have 38.  I used Ghosh’s 1967 37-chapter rendering of The Natyasastra.).  The oldest known “how-to” book on Asian theater, predating Zeami Motokiyo’s (c. 1363-c. 1443) treatises on Japanese Noh drama (written between 1402 and 1430) by some 16 centuries, it’s attributed to the sage Bharata-muni (dates unknown; may have lived about 500 C.E.) but was probably compiled by several contributors over many years.  (The compilation and publication is likewise uncertain and estimates range between 500 B.C.E. and 500 C.E.) 

The book’s title is variously rendered as Natyasastra, Natyashastra, Natya Sastra, or Natya Shastra, often with diacritical marks.  The word(s) mean, loosely, ‘theater treatise’ or ‘performance manual.’  The Sanskrit word natya is usually translated as drama but it can refer to other expressive performance forms, such as dance (one of the Hindu god Shiva’s avatars is Nataraja, “the lord of dance”), and sastra (which is pronounced ‘shastra’) means ‘treatise,’ ‘manual,’ ‘book.’ ‘rules,’ or other term of similar meaning.  Because I based my reading of The Natyasastra on Ghosh’s translation, I’ll be using his version of the book’s title. 

Our primary source of information about ancient Sanskrit performance and a guide to understanding many of the living performance traditions in India today, the treatise is still used by classical Indian performers such as actors of Sanskrit dramas by the likes of Kalidasa, Sudraka, Bhasa, and Asvaghosa; Kathakali dancer-actors; Kutiyattam storytellers; and Bharata Natyam and Orissi dancers, as well as classical musicians and singers.  Unlike Aristotle’s (384-322 B.C.E.) Poetics (c. 335 B.C.E.), The Natyasastra was written for theater practitioners, not analysts.  A complete handbook of theater production, it covers all elements of playwriting, theater construction, costume, make-up, acting, dance, music, and aesthetics (including Rasa theory, on which I posted on 13 January 2010) in the minutest detail. 

(The root of natya is the Sanskrit work nat, which means ‘act’ or ‘represent,’ so natya can even be rendered as ‘acting.’  Like many Asian performance forms, classical Indian theater doesn’t make the same distinction we Westerners make among ballet, drama, and opera.  What we call Chinese or Beijing Opera is the progenitor of Japanese Kabuki, which many Western critics categorize as dance drama.  But Kabuki performers don’t consider themselves “dancers.”  Ask them, and they’ll insist they are Kabuki “actors.”  The form they work in, like Kathakali in India, Indonesian Wayang Topeng and Wayang Orang, and many other Asian performing arts, combine acting, singing, dancing, and what we’d recognize as mime into one synthesized art form.  The Natyasastra reflects this totality: performance, according to Bharata, is a combination of all the arts: speech, dance, singing, music, gesture and mime, decor and costumes.)

The Natyasastra is partly a religious text, the “fifth Veda,” revealing to the people the rules of dramaturgy and stagecraft as handed down to Bharata (muni is a term of honor meaning ‘sage’ or ‘saint’) by the god Brahma.  The production of a play is an offering to the gods, and performing is a Vedic ritual act.  Composed in verse (with some prose passages in a few chapters), The Natyasastra (like Konstantin Stanislavsky’s “ABC’s”) is conveyed as a sort of dialogue between Bharata and his disciples.   Bharata (whose name is also the Sanskrit word for both ‘actor’ and ‘India’) had 100 sons, who all became actors.  (Bharata Natyam simply means ‘Indian dance,’ for instance.)

In addition to the presentation of ancient theology, principally of the Vedic tradition of pre-Buddhist and pre-Hindu India (though, because it was compiled during a period of religious transition on the Subcontinent, its religious philosophy is something of a hybrid), The Natyasastra also discusses what we’d call performance theory, aesthetic philosophy, mythological history, and practical theater craft. 

Between 1865 and 1898, a number of studies, articles and partial translations of The Natyasastra and other Sanskrit treatises were published in several European languages, including French, English, and German, though none seems to have been a complete rendering of the text.  In modern times, particularly after 1950, there have been many translations of The Natyasastra, all or in part, into English and other languages, as well as many more critical studies of the treatise.  (An Internet search indicated that few are currently in print or available even to special order from stores like Barnes and Noble or Amazon.)  

Because of its status as a Vedic text, The Natyasastra views theater not as an entertainment, but as a way of getting spectators to another state of mind (rasa).  (This is what Rasa-Bhava is intended to accomplish, as you’ll see.)  In theory, because attending a performance is supposed to be a spiritual experience, the viewer is supposed to be transported to a more transcendent plane, but today Indian performers see the effect in a more secular frame.  (There is at least a superficial resemblance between this precept and Aristotle’s notion of catharsis as mentioned in his definition of tragedy in chapter 6 of the Poetics.)

A complete run-down of all the topics touched on in The Natyasastra would be impossibly lengthy, and I really mean this post to be a general introduction to the treatise.  (There are various translations in libraries, especially university libraries, and used copies can be found on line and in antiquarian bookstores.)  I’ll compile a précis of the chapters (which will vary slightly depending on whether you compare mine with a 36- or 38-chapter version) and comment at more length when I feel it’s warranted.  (Note that my original study of The Natyasastra was in pursuit of its discussion of acting and Bharata’s instructions in comparison to the Konstantin Stanislavsky system, the basis of my acting training.  I developed this comparison into “The Natyasastra and Stanislavsky: Points of Contact,” published in  Theatre Studies, volume 36 [1991].)

The first chapter of The Natyasastra recounts the mythical “Origin of Drama” (chapter titles will vary depending on the translation).  Bharata tells his disciples that Brahma, the Creator, handed down The Natyasastra to all the castes as the Natyaveda.  The sage describes the first production of a play at a festival for Indra, the guardian god, but Vighnas, evil spirits, try to ruin the production.  Indra destroys the Vighnas. 

Chapter II is the “Description of the Playhouse,” detailing how the theaters are to be constructed.  Bharata describes the rites and rituals associated with the theater construction.  “Puja to the Gods of the Stage,” the third chapter, lays out the hierarchy of gods of the theater and which one presides over which areas of the theater building.  (Puja is a devotional prayer ritual.  Even today, when dramatic performances are no longer considered worship rituals, a prasad, a food offering, is placed at the edge of the stage.)  The gods have to be pacified and the building purified to avoid terrible consequences of offending the gods.

In Chapter IV, “Description of the Class Dance,” Bharata says that he’s written a play to be performed for the gods.  The deities are pleased and instruct another sage, Tandu, to teach Bharata the Tandava dance (literally ‘Tandu’s creation’ but commonly known as the “class dance”) and there’s a detailed, gesture-by-gesture, body part-by-body part description of the dance.  Bharata explains when dance is appropriate to a play and when it’s not.

“Preliminaries of a Play,” the fifth chapter, describes the rituals associated with the prelude to a dramatic performance (Utthapana ceremony).  Following the set-up, there’s a song in praise of gods, Brahmins, and kings (“Benediction”); an entrance song (“Walking Around”); and the introduction of the play (“Laudation”) by the Director (literally, ‘the expert,’ not a prototypical, pre-Saxe-Meiningen stage director but the company manager).

Chapter VI (“The Sentiments”) and VII (“The Emotional and Other States”) cover Rasa-Bhava.  This is the section of the book that makes it possible for the actors to transport the spectators to a different frame of mind, not unlike what we in the West mean when we speak of “the willing suspension of disbelief” (a term coined in 1817 by the poet and aesthetic philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1772-1834)—we freely enter into the fictional world of the play.  The Natyasastra is very precise in its discussion and description of this process—but if you can cut through the Sanskrit terms and stilted English translation, the basic principles of the theory are not more alien than that which Stanislavsky, Uta Hagen, Lee Strasberg, or most 20th-century acting teachers inculcate.

Chapters VI and VII together identify and describe the bhavas, the “Psychological States” or “Modes of Being” of the performers, and the corresponding rasas, the “Sentiments” felt by the spectators.  The bhava, the emotion felt by the actors, results from a “Determinant” (vibhava), or determining circumstance.  The vibhava affects the characters so that they feel sorrow, fear, wrath, or some such emotion (bhava).  The “Consequent” (anubhava) of a particular bhava is a specific behavior such as weeping, fainting, blushing, or the like.  The anubhava, if properly executed, will cause the audience to feel a specific rasa corresponding to the bhava felt by the actor. 

Chapter VII goes into great detail about the bhavas, which are broken down into three categories.  The third category of bhavas are the eight sattvas, or “Spirited” modes.  There’s no adequate translation of sattva, but this allows the actor to convince himself the circumstances are real to the character, even though, as the actor, he knows they’re not.  (This is a very simplistic reduction of Rasa-Bhava.  I’ve tried to be brief here; however, I refer the reader once again to my post on Rick On Theater “Rasa-Bhava & The Audience,” 13 January 2010, for a more detailed examination of this complex and fascinating acting theory.)

Chapters VIII, IX, and X (“The Gestures of Minor Limbs,” “The Gestures of Hands,” and “The Gestures of Other Limbs”) cover in great detail all the codified movements of the parts of the actor’s body.  Indian classical theater, like many other Asian performance forms, uses highly stylized and long-established gestural expressions and The Natyasastra naturally stresses the expressiveness of the body, since it is vital that “the audience . . . follow the meaning of the play visually, through the codified system of hand gestures and facial expressions.”  These chapters and others that describe the movements, gestures, and expressions of the actors, which in Indian classical theater are closely related to Rasa-Bhava, are very technical and extremely detailed.

Chapters XI, XII, and XIII (“The Cari Movements,” “The Mandela Gaits,” and “The Different Gaits”) cover walking and foot movements the same way the previous three chapters did gestures.  (A cari is the movement of a single foot.  There are movements of two feet called karana and a combination of karanas is called a khanda.  Three or four khandas make up a mandala.  That may give readers an idea how precise The Natyasastra is in codifying movements and gestures.)

“Zones and Local Usages,” the fourteenth chapter of The Natyasastra, designates the different "zones” of the stage and explains the significance of each one to the play and the characters that appear there.  “Local usage” (pravrtti), just as the phrase suggests, applies to the costumes, languages, manners, and professions of different countries in the world as they appear in plays.  (The “world” to which Bharata refers, of course, is largely the Indian subcontinent of South Asia and the countries are the ancient kingdoms.)  Even this is codified as The Natyasastra designates only four regions for this differentiation: Daksinatya Local Usage (southern countries), Avanti (central and western), Odgra-Migadhi (eastern), and Pancala-Madhyama (northern/Himalayan).

Chapters XV through XXII cover playwriting and dramaturgy.  “Rules of Prosody” (Chapter XV) defines, describes, and classifies the poetic meters used in classic Indian drama.  Since Sanskrit drama is written mostly in verse, it also details the proper way an actor must recite each kind of poetry.  It’s a lesson on elocution, voice, speech, and articulation—a voice and speech lesson with specific instructions in the proper pronunciation of the sounds of the Sanskrit and Prakrit languages.  “Metrical Patterns” (Chapter XVI) lists all the different types of poetic meters and how they are employed in plays, with examples of various dramatic situations in which each pattern would apply.  Different meters correspond to specific rasas.  Chapter XVII, “Diction of a Play,” names the 36 “marks of excellence” of a well-written play, such as Ornateness, Compactness, Simile, Metaphor, and 32 more.  (In this usage, “diction” doesn’t refer to speech articulation or enunciation, but the effectiveness and clarity of the poet’s word choice and expression.) 

Chapter XVIII, “Rules of the Use of Languages” instructs poets on the distinction of Sanskrit, the largely literary tongue which on stage is used for the speech of noble, heroic, and refined characters, and Prakrit, the vernacular language, with its many regional, local, and class dialects, of lower-caste, mad, or drunken characters, as well as women and children.  (Prakrit is also often more appropriate for songs in a play.  Most of a classical Indian play is written in Sanskrit.)  “Modes of Address and Intonation” (Chapter XIX) explains how characters of different types and social status speak to one another.  It also specifies how the verses are to be recited in terms of vocal quality, with certain inflections corresponding once again to certain rasas.  (This is that other kind of “diction,” how words are pronounced.) 

In Chapter XX, Bharata describes the “Ten Kinds of Play” that make up classic Sanskrit drama.  He lays out their structure, the rules for their composition, and what is appropriate or not to represent on stage.  Chapter XXI, “The Limbs of the Juncture,” is a detailed analysis of the plot structure of a play.  (“Joints” and “Limbs” are the terms The Natyasastra uses for what Michael Chekhov, the acting teacher, theorist, and director who was a nephew of playwright Anton Chekhov, called the play’s “Main Climaxes,” the points in the play’s action when the character’s pursuit of his major goal changes direction.  

The Natyasastra divides the action of a play into five stages: Beginning, Effort, Possibility of Attainment, Certainty of Attainment and Attainment of the Object.  Roughly, these stages agree with the Stanislavskian identification and pursuit of the objective (Beginning and Effort), encountering obstacles (Effort and Possibility of Attainment), and overcoming the obstacles and achieving the objective (Certainty of Attainment and Attainment of the Object).  Sanskrit drama did not have unhappy endings so there were no plays in which the main characters’ objectives were not accomplished.

In “The Styles,” the twenty-second chapter, Bharata relates the mythological origins of the performance styles of Sanskrit dramas, which is both a matter of the way the plays are written (that is, the writing style) and the way they are performed (the acting style).  As with most other categorizations in The Natyasastra, these are very specifically defined and described, and, once again, each style corresponds to certain rasas generated in the audience. 

Chapter XXIII covers “The Costumes and Make-up” of a classical Indian play.  It covers props (including fake animals) as well.  Bharata describes both how these are made and how they’re used on stage.

Chapters XXIV through XXVI deal with acting, portraying specific characters, and what we’d call acting technique (the practical methods of making viewers believe a fiction: that it’s cold and rainy, that the knife you’re playing with is really sharp, that you have a headache).  Chapter XXIV, “The Basic Representation,” focuses on speech, the movement of the body, and physical grace.  It also instructs aspiring actors on portraying emotions and feelings and various psychological and emotional states, and how to respond to different circumstances and situations that occur in Sanskrit drama.  Successfully representing these states is key to creating the correct rasa in the spectator.

“Dealing with Courtezans [sic]” (Chapter XXV) actually explains how to portray men and women in various types of courtship, romantic, and sexual relationships (for example, a woman overcome with love, winning a woman’s heart, and a courtesan’s mercenary treatment of men).  Most Sanskrit plays are some sort of love story.  “Special Representation,” the twenty-sixth chapter of The Natyasastra, is instruction on how to enact physically what Uta Hagen called the “given circumstances” of a scene: the time of day, the season of the year, the weather, bright sun, dust, and so on. 

Chapter XXVII describes “Success in Dramatic Production,” which Bharata separates into two kinds.  One is human success, which is simply signs of appreciation from the audience for the performance—applause, laughter, praise, gifts.  The other kind is divine success, which is the approval of the gods.  This is manifested by the lack of disturbance from the audience, errors in the performance such as accidents or actors forgetting lines, fire or an animal getting loose in the theater, and so on.  If all goes well, the gods are signaling their approval. 

The music of a Sanskrit performance is discussed in Chapters XXVIII through XXXIV, covering not only the types of music to be heard, but the instruments on which it will be played (with several chapter devoted to specific types of instruments such as reeds, cymbals, and drums).  Chapter XXXII describes the songs performed in a play. 

Chapter XXXV, “Types of Characters,” is essentially the breakdown of the classical theatrical troupe.  Like Shakespeare’s Lord Chamberlain’s Men in Elizabethan England, Sanskrit acting companies had to have the actors on hand to cover all the plays in their repertory, so, like repertory companies in the West from Shakespeare’s day to the Straw Hat Circuit in the first half of the 20th century in the U.S., they categorized the characters so they could distribute them to the appropriate performers according to their abilities, special talents, age, appearance, and so on.  In other words, they engaged in “typecasting,” just like Western companies in the 19th and 20th centuries. 

(To be clear, “typecasting” isn’t what most people think it is.  Characters are divided into “types,” such as “leading man,” “leading lady,” and “character man.”  The company’s actors are also “typed” and when it comes time to assign actors to roles, actors are matched to their roles according to type—along, of course, with other considerations.  So a leading actor is cast in a leading man part, a character woman is cast as a character part, and so on.  It was a way for repertory troupes to be sure that they had enough appropriate actors on the roster to cover all the parts in their repertoire.  The classic Indian categories were different, of course, but the idea was the same.)

The Natyasastra, needless to say, describes in great detail many different characters that make up the three types that populate the Sanskrit plays and the physical and temperamental attributes of the actor best suited to play them.  In “Distribution of Roles” (Chapter XXXVI), Bharata advises the Director (this is the company manager once again) to follow the precepts for typecasting that he’s laid out.  This chapter also describes at length each of the kinds of parts that occur in a Sanskrit drama, and also non-performing member of the troupe such as the makers of garlands and headgear, the company painter, and so on.

The last chapter, XXXVII, in Ghosh’s translation of The Natyasastra, is “Descent of Drama on the Earth.”  When Bharata had finished presenting the Natyaveda to the sages, they asked him how the drama had come from heaven to the earth.  Bharata explained to them that his 100 sons had angered certain sages by caricaturing them and the sons lost their status as Brahmins, members of the highest caste, and became Sudras, the lowest caste.  The sages cursed Bharata’s sons, but the gods interceded on Bharata’s behalf.  Indra retrieved the Natyaveda and instructed Bharata to spread is over the earth.  The 100 sons of Bharata, having become actors themselves, taught the text to their sons, founding a family of actors, and the gods were pleased and redeemed Bharata’s offspring.  (This suggests that, at least in ancient India, the acting profession was prized and honored, a fate actors didn’t experience in the West, where they were often vilified and ostracized, especially among religious folk, because they make their living by lying, pretense, and deceit.  There are still members of some faiths that see acting and theater as inherently sinful.)