Alba Emoting: A Preliminary Experiment with Emotional Effector Patterns

COMMENTS ON PROCESS ALBA EMOTING: A Preliminary Experiment with Emotional Effector Patterns Roxane Rix Introduction "ALBA EMOTING," so named by its creator, Dr. Susana Bloch of the Institute of Neurosciences at the University of Pierre and Marie Curie in Paris, France, has been introduced to the American actor training community in recent years largely through presentations at ATHE conferences (1991, 1992). The approach—manipulating breath, posture, and facial expression to produce emotion—seems a logical extension of known psychophysical techniques, as well as, in some ways, a scientific clarification of what many acting teachers have been doing intuitively for years. Bloch's technique was developed through laboratory tests in which she recorded breathing patterns, physical tension, and other autonomic responses in subjects who had been asked to recall vivid emotional experiences. Finding remarkable consistency among the subjects' responses to joy, sadness, anger, fear, eroticism, and tenderness, she identified these as the "six basic emotions" (Bloch, Lemeignan, and Aguilera 141-42). Bloch hypothesized that the process might also work in reverse—that consciously reproducible physical responses might stir these emotions in subjects without use of memory or imagination— and began to experiment with actors, with promising results (Bloch, Lemeignan, and Aguilera 143-52, Bloch, Orthous, and Santibáñez 6-19). As she has described in the articles cited above and in her sessions at ATHE, Bloch guides actors through a three-step procedure to produce each emotion: 1) reproduction of a specific breathing pattern, 2) manipulation of physical tension and direction of movement (approach/avoidance), and 3) manipulation of the facial mask. In practice, she begins with warmup exercises similar to those in many acting classes—tensing and relaxing muscle groups, observing and manipulating breathing, etc.—then instructs the actors in what she terms a "step out": return to relaxed, neutral posture with slow, deep breaths, 139 140 RoxaneRix light facial massage, and shaking out if necessary. Coaching is accomplished both verbally and through touch. [See also Bloch's article in this issue 130-32. Ed.] I found the potential of the technique exciting from the first time I heard of it but shared the concern expressed by Jean-Marie Pradier of the University of Paris ("Commentaries" 205-7) regarding the effect of the experimenter's expectations on the subjects: Bloch's instructions to actors include phrases such as "as if ready to attack" and "as if trying to avoid something," as well as facial and postural manipulations that seem particularly likely to "signal" an emotion (Bloch, Lemeignan, and Aguilera 144). Dr. Bloch also has a dynamic, charismatic personality —all factors which make it more difficult to determine whether, in her studies, emotion was stirred by the process alone or produced by the actors through other means (conscious or subconscious) in order to achieve the intended effect. Wondering if the technique would work without the presence of its creator, I constructed a small-scale test with volunteer acting students. While modeling the basic procedure on Bloch's, I consciously altered some aspects of presentation: first, I began with the breathing patterns alone, since this seems the newest and most specific aspect of the technique. After the actors had worked through all six, I asked them to repeat each pattern with the addition of the second phase: guided tension/relaxation-approach/avoidance states with postural manipulations. I tried to keep my language and demeanor as neutral as possible and the physical manipulations very small. I did not include the third phase, facial manipulation, at all, for several reasons: 1) this seemed to me the aspect most prone to "signalling" the actor to try for a particular emotion; 2) in teaching college-age actors I often must discourage over-reliance on the face and thus have a bias against emphasizing it; and 3) my own training suggests that if the body is in a psychophysical^/ connected state, the face will be expressive without specific attention—as, indeed, did occur. The Session Seven graduate acting students, four male and three female, volunteered to participate in the study; participation was limited to students who had trained with me in order both to facilitate trust and communication and to insure some pre-existing level of psychophysical...