Re-Purposing Suzuki: A Hybrid Approach to Actor Training by Maria Porter (review)

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Reviewed by:

• Re-Purposing Suzuki: A Hybrid Approach to Actor Training by Maria Porter
• Christopher J. Staley

RE-PURPOSING SUZUKI: A HYBRID APPROACH TO ACTOR TRAINING. By Maria Porter. New York: Routledge, 2022. 172 pp. Paperback, $42.95.

In Re-Purposing Suzuki: A Hybrid Approach to Actor Training, Maria Porter offers a “system of text analysis” that synthesizes certain principles that she “culled from the Suzuki [Method of Actor Training]” (p. 29). For context, the Suzuki Method was developed by Suzuki Tadashi and members of Waseda Shogekijo (Waseda Little Theatre) which became the Suzuki Company of Toga (SCOT) in 1976. The forms in this so-called “vocabulary of the feet” originated as blocking from SCOT’s repertory. As their plays began touring on international circuits, the company needed to onboard new actors who, in order to perform, required training in this aesthetic. Out of their rehearsal practice, a method was extracted that since became a major paradigm shift in global actor training pedagogies.

Porter explains in her autobiographical sections that she participated in the mid 1980s and early 1990s Summer Training Camps hosted by SCOT. She joined a cohort of international artists who went to the village of Toga-mura to study the method at its source. Of this gathering, Porter became most affiliated with Steve Pearson and Robyn Hunt, both founders of the Pacific Performance Project and early bridges between SCOT and American institutions like University of California San Diego. Porter prefaces that she learned her ability to [End Page 468] “re-purpose” the Suzuki Method by following a model of adaptation that Pearson and Hunt provided after they stopped working with SCOT. Along with Pearson and Hunt, other Americans worked with Suzuki in the late 1970s and 1980s, who then became company members of StageWest, such as Kelly Maurer, Will Bond, Tom Nelis, and Ellen Lauren. Along with Anne Bogart, Suzuki conjoined this collective into SITI Company, making them primary disseminators of the Suzuki Method worldwide.

Porter harkens to this lineage, and confirms she received “permission” from Suzuki to teach decades ago. This is not necessarily for self-legitimization, but rather to suggest how varied all these artists’ legacies have since become. Through this variability, Porter evidences how overdetermined the method remains due to the increasing number of students and collaborators who have traveled to Toga for training and left with their own agendas. The field of Suzuki Method practitioners and teachers—sanctioned or otherwise—is larger and more unwieldy than ever given the range of artists/teachers adapting it for their own ends. This book accords with that trend.

Porter’s methodology extracts different “Rules of the Body” from the training which, she notes, also exist in many other actor-pedagogies. These five rules focus on control of the center of gravity, maintaining a consistent sense of resistance, cultivating a specific foot to floor relationship, toggling between acceleration and braking, and finding a dynamic inner movement in stillness (pp. 14–17). Combined with these rules, Porter lists a set of “ideals” that she calls “The Aesthetics,” which taken together form the “pillars of the pedagogy outlined in this book” (p. 18). These aesthetics maintain that: the actor always works with “Performance Energy” and not “Rehearsal Energy”; the actor must attempt to transcend their own “perceived limitations”; the actor must generate a fictive “God of Perfection” against whom the exercises are measured; the actor must have awareness of their habits and in turn mastery over them; and lastly that the “actor works with a clear focus and always has an image” (pp. 18–20).

After defining these principles—all of which are germane to SCOT’s rehearsal and performance regimen—Porter alters exercises from key disciplines of the Suzuki Method (like Stomping/Shakuhachi, Slow Ten, Statues). She suggests these “tweaks” open different interpretive scaffolds with which to analyze the written and spoken word. Porter then traces her experiences teaching what she calls “The Myth Project,” which focuses on Greek tragedies or otherwise elevated contemporary texts (e.g., Sarah Kane’s 4:48 Psychosis). She also adds into her system the use of gesture, lyric, and singing. While Porter’s parsing of these different projects is helpful on certain...