A blog on presence. Can we measure the presence of an actor?

Over my brief journey as a director, I have become fascinated by an energy or attribute within certain exceptional individual actors, an energy that can only be described as presence. Most often it’s something that makes an actor compelling to watch and unforgettable long after the performance is over.

Joseph Chaikin described presence as “a quality given to some and absent from others…It’s a quality that makes you feel as though you’re standing right next to the actor, no matter where you’re sitting in the theatre.”  Presence is executed and experienced in many ways: the actor needs to be available to himself, he needs to engage his concentration, focus, imagination, his dreams and nightmares, his understanding of the very moment in history that the performance is taking place.

The writings of voice coach Patsy Rodenberg (2009) have been responsible for inspiring my thinking on the topic, including this earlier post.

She has given presence her own label “the second circle” a space where actors are centered, focused and alert.  She says, “it moves out toward the object of your attention, touches it and then receives energy back from it.”  Rodenberg believes presence and the second circle is a quality our greatest actors possess.

But above this it’s not just the realm of trained actors, but something possible for all to achieve as crucial to our humanity. She says it’s something that babies and children have as they watch and interact with the world around them, in a truly positive way.  She believes presence and the second circle is a quality our greatest actors possess.

As a result of reflecting on this information I have become increasingly interested in how actors approach the process of creating and building a character, and how as a director, I can support them in establishing a sense of free energy and playfulness, allowing them to communicate freely and to share the space of imagination with the audience.

However, when I discuss presence or read about the topic, I can’t help but feel slightly concerned that it sounds a little too ‘magical’ and ‘out-of-this-world.’

Take for example Michel Sain-Denis’ description of a performance at the Moscow Art Theatre. “The deftness of the company’s acting was absolutely incredible: without forcing anything, they were alive. They did not seem to touch the ground. Their movements seemed to flow through them as they communicated freely with one another.” He finishes his writing by saying their performances were an enchantment(Saint-Denis, 1982).

It’s hard to define presence, but here are just a few terms I’ve come across: an element of electricity, a chemistry, a magnetism – call it what you will, but notice a common thread in the quotes across my initial research, we often describe a performers presence by borrowing words from the field of science or the mystical. This strikes me as particularly interesting and makes me wonder if presence is something which is truly a gift, a way of being that is absolutely unique to that one very fortunate individual; or is it something the can be learned through training, process and social circumstances.

To put it more succinctly is there a scientific way of measuring an actor’s ability to have presence or to define the quality?