Christopher Bayes

Yale School of Drama

By Ellen Orenstein

Bayes is head of physical acting at Yale School of Drama in New Haven, Conn. He has served on the faculty of Brown University and the Brown University/Trinity Rep Consortium in Providence, R.I., as well as the Juilliard School, the Actor’s Center, the Academy of Classical Acting, and New York University’s Graduate Acting Program and Experimental Theater Wing. He has taught workshops at the Public Theater’s Shakespeare Lab, Cirque Du Soleil, Williamstown Theatre Festival and the Big Apple Circus. Bayes’s theatre career began in Minneapolis, where he worked for five years with Theatre de la Jeune Lune as an actor, director, composer, designer and artistic associate. In 1989 he joined the acting company of the Guthrie Theater under the leadership of Garland Wright, where he appeared in more than 20 productions over seven seasons. He has directed widely in New York and regionally.

It seems that an enormous part of your teaching is working with the performers to be connected to the audience—to become friends with the audience—but not to perform for the audience, for the laugh.

Actually, I think I try to train people to perform more for the audience. Not to try to solve the problem of the audience by manipulating it in some way, but to invite the audience into a deeply vigorous, playful comic world. So it’s not about where the laugh comes. It’s about how you live in a comic world without needing to solve the problem of the comic world.

Do you work in a horizontal plane in the classroom, rather than vertical, in terms of the authoritarian presence of the teacher?

No. (Laughs.) No, no. If I did it that way, then there would be more room for argument or resistance. I think it’s very important that you make it clear you have an opportunity to investigate something together, but that you’re going to have to, at a certain point, embrace the hierarchy of how that’s going to be investigated. It’s important that that relationship is established right away.

You go to the teacher because the teacher has something of value—but that something demands of the students to be open, to be ready. I don’t want to ever feel like I’m your dentist—that I’m pulling something from you that you’re reluctant to give. I’m trying to make more room in your body for your talent to surprise you.

Have you encountered students who are so enamored of what you’re doing that they stop working for themselves, or for the thing itself, and start working only for you?

Not really. I think the people who come to study this work are anxious enough about learning this training that that doesn’t happen as much. (Laughs.) Because I almost solely investigate the comic world, if the rest of the students don’t laugh, then it’s not funny. And I laugh when everyone else laughs, generally.

I’ve noticed, though, that you’re not overly effusive about your responses. Is that on purpose?

Well, my responses are usually, “Great. And now…” or, “Great. But…” Generally, when we go back and make those adjustments, then the room laughs more. It’s in the adjustment that you find those magical moments of transformation or insight. I have a very specific arc of training that I’ve developed over the years—and that’s pretty set.

Can you describe that?

Well, right out of the gate, I bring a kind of lightness to the room, a playfulness, that it’s not that precious. If the audience doesn’t laugh, it’s not the end of the world. It means you haven’t invited the audience properly yet. We always start with group songs—very simple ones, like “it’s so funny” or “I’m so funny.” The songs do everything that I think is exciting about theatre: There’s kinesthetic awareness, there’s harmonic listening, there’s some choreography involved, there’s playfulness and abandon in the solos, as well as a way to go back to structure.

And the instructions are...?

The song has to have four elements: It has to have a really strong chorus that you all sing together in the speed of fun, which is pretty fast; there’s choreography that everybody does; there’s harmony in the chorus; and everybody gets a solo. I encourage the actors to take the time to say what they need to say. And I discourage rhyming in the solos because I feel like unless you’re a genius, as soon as you begin to pursue a rhyme, you end up saying all kinds of ridiculous things that you don’t really mean in order to solve the problem of the rhyme. I try to discourage the solution. I want the students to enjoy the problem more. Once you can begin to enjoy the problem, then we don’t feel the dynamic that the actor would rather be off stage as quickly as possible.

This is appropriate for tragedy, also.

All the most beautiful actors enjoy the moments that they’re in the light. That’s why we do the work, right? Enjoy the challenge. Find pleasure in the fact that you are actually on stage in front of people, in a conversation with the audience—it’s not a lecture, or a demonstration of how brilliant you are, but actually conversation. The most basic and fundamental theatrical conversation, I think, is the conversation between the clown and the audience. It’s prehistoric. (Laughs.)

When you first meet the students you are going to work with, what do you see?

Almost everybody’s nervous. Including me. Because we’re about to jump off a big cliff together, and we don’t know what we’re going to find.

I begin with everyone the same way, which is that we are going to build up or reinvestigate certain muscles, impulses, that may not be very strong—may not have been given the value they deserve. A sense of innocence. Soft brain delight. A way of living in your body with a kind of squirrelly-ness. A lightness. But also, at the same time, a kind of muscular ferocity that allows you to give as much value to your playfulness as to your despair.

When I get to know the students more, I begin to see the catch places—the places where they are reluctant to go. If I see people reluctant to be messy, then I make them be messy. If I see them reluctant to be out of control and ferocious, then I make them—I encourage them to go there. If they’re reluctant to be quiet—to really listen to their own bodies in a quiet, delicate, fragile way—I ask them to do that, and I try to build a physical life that allows them to go there.

Also, you have to do battle with the socialized self. And the great desire to be polite, the great desire to be appropriate, the great desire to be cool, to be in control. The desire to not look stupid.

What happens when you get past that place?

Then you find the clown.

That’s when you begin to do an exploration of what the clown is, what your relationship to the audience is, what your relationship to your clown is. I always feel like the clown is the beginning of everything. That everything springs from that. That thousands of characters can come from the clown. But there’s one—and it’s you. It’s the one that got tucked under the bed in the shoebox.

And it’s the most exposed you.

The skinless grape. (Laughs.) The softened armor. But, with a kind of honesty—of incredible, vulnerable honesty.

It seems so connected to the most basic actor training —pure Stanislavsky, in a way.
But, it’s relatively new, actually, that it’s in training programs.

What I hear again and again from other teacher artists is that after students have done clown, all of a sudden they can listen—because they are curious about the answer—not because they already know what the answer is and now it’s time for them to respond.

The ultimate goal seems the same as with many other forms of training: pure authenticity and truth.
Right. Mine is just oriented toward the comic world. What’s interesting is often that moment of truth is where the laugh is. It’s not in the clever idea—it’s not in the good idea. It’s in that honest response—to the fact that there wasn’t the laugh there where you wanted one. We laugh because we understand. We laugh because it makes sense. Not because you’re clever. Not because you’ve manipulated us.

How does this work give ownership to the actor?

The actors are generally the last ones invited to the party. (Laughs.) They’ve already designed the costumes, they’ve already designed the set—you were cast to fit into a machine that’s already in the process of being built. But when you begin to explore the world of the clown, you see all that other stuff that we think of as necessary to make an interesting theatrical world—that becomes frosting. The actor is the central, creative element. And it’s incredibly empowering. You can take that into anything—into Shakespeare, into the Greeks, into Shaw or Pinter or, obviously, Beckett. You can go anyplace—because it’s yours. Clown, for me, is a rediscovery of self. The playful self. The ferocious self. The vulnerable self. The artist.