Power of the Actor Ivana Chubbuck

THE POWER OF THE ACTOR

THE CHUBBUCK TECHNIQUE: The 12-Step Acting Technique that

will take you from script to a living, breathing, dynamic character.
INTRODUCTION
Every actor knows that discovering and understanding your personal pain
is an inherent part of the acting process. This has been true since Stanislavski.
The difference between The Chubbuck Technique and those developed in the
past is that I teach actors how to use their emotions not as an end result,
but as a way to empower a goal. My technique teaches actors how to win.
I teach actors how to win because this is what people do in real life!
They go after what they want. Interesting and dynamic people go after
what they want in interesting and dynamic ways, creating greater emotion
and intensity in realizing these goals. They do this subconsciously, whereas
the actor must understand himself thoroughly and have the tools to break
down a script in order to make this interesting and dynamic behavior appear
and feel like a subconscious process. The Chubbuck Technique stimulates
this behavior, allowing for this natural and powerful human drive to be
realized.
The Chubbuck Technique grew out of my own search to understand and overcome
my own personal traumas – particularly, how they impacted my acting
and my life. I had no idea how powerful and profound this concept would
become.
I grew up with a distant-dysfunctional-workaholic father and a physically
and emotionally abusive mother. I developed deep-seated abandonment issues
and felt unworthy of being loved. In essence, I rose to the occasion of
being diminished. As an adult and an actress, I took all my childhood
and adolescent horrors and wallowed in them. I was looking for sympathy
and understanding, which I thought would help relieve the suffering of
my past. As any actor would strive to be, I was truly in touch with my
emotional pain.
But, I began to wonder, “To what end am I feeling all of this? How
do the feelings and emotions from my past shape my work as an actor? How
do they shape who I am as a person? How can these fractured, scattered
and sometimes divergent emotions be focused to serve a character in a
script?”
As a working actress, I would see so many actors that were truly dredging
up deep, painful emotions, but whose work seemed self-indulgent. I realized
that having deep and profound feelings didn’t necessarily make me
a deep and profound person. I saw that coddling one’s pain –
in life and on stage — creates almost the opposite effect. It seems self-involved,
self-pitying and weak, the key characteristics of a victim. Not the most
compelling choice for an actor to make.
I began investigating how to put the legacy of emotions I had inherited
to better, more effective use in my work. When I examined the lives of
successful people, I noticed that they seemed to use their physical and
emotional traumas as a stimulus, not to self-indulgently suffer, but to
inspire and drive their great achievements.
I suspected that very same formula could be applied to actors and their
approach to their work. I watched the great actors of our time and I saw
in their performances the same emotional drive to overcome adversity,
and in fact, to use those very obstacles to necessitate achievement of
a goal and win. In their performances, great actors were instinctively
mirroring the behavior and nature of great people.
I needed to create a system that would reflect and guide this process.
A system to replicate real, dynamic human behavior. A system that, once
the actor committed to making fearless choices, would guide and empower
the actor to use their own pain to win their character’s goal. A

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system that would also provide a way to craft risky choices that would
allow an actor to break the rules and make new rules, inspiring exceptional
work and characters. A system that would create an emotionally heroic
character rather than a victim.
I realized that an actor must identify their character’s primal
need, goal, or OBJECTIVE. With this OBJECTIVE in mind, then the actor
must find the appropriate personal pain that can effectively drive this
OBJECTIVE. After working with this idea for a while, I understood that
the pain must be powerful enough to inspire an actor to fearlessly commit
to doing whatever it takes to WIN their OBJECTIVE. If the emotions were
not strong enough, then there wasn’t enough there to help the actor
sustain their fight to win. But when the appropriate personal pain is
paired with an OBJECTIVE it connects the actor to their character’s
predicament, making winning the OBJECTIVE real and necessary for them
as a person, not just as an actor playing a part.
Over the past twenty-five years, I have coached thousands of actors on
thousands of parts in literally thousands of movies, television shows
and plays. These actors are a living (and acting) research lab for my
acting technique. Often, I have coached several actors auditioning for
the same part in the same movie. I have seen, first hand, what works and
what doesn’t. Over time, I have identified the common denominators
of what is most effective. When I would see certain approaches succeed
again and again, I would develop, explore, and refine them until they
were easily reproducible. When my actors would get parts, win great reviews
and awards, I found that it frequently came from using similar fundamental
tools, all rooted in basic human psychology and behavioral science.
An actor who merely feels tend to turn his performance inward and does
not energize or inspire himself or an audience, whereas watching someone
do anything and everything to override pain in an attempt to accomplish
a goal or an OBJECTIVE puts an audience on the edge of their seats because
the outcome becomes alive and unpredictable. Taking action results in
risk and therefore, an unexpected journey. It’s not enough for an
actor to be honest. It’s the actor’s job to make the kind
of choices that motivate exciting results. You can paint a canvas using
real oil paint, but if the final painting isn’t a compelling image,
no one will want to look at it.
This technique will teach you how to use your traumas, emotional pains,
obsessions, travesties, needs, desires and dreams to fuel and drive your
character’s achievement of a goal. You’ll learn that the obstacles
of your character’s life are not meant to be accepted but to be
overcome, in heroic proportions. In other words, my technique teaches actors how to win.
Aristotle defined the struggle of the individual to win as the essence
of all drama more than two thousand years ago. Overcoming and winning
against all the hurdles and conflicts of life is what makes dynamic people.
Martin Luther King, Jr., Stephen Hawking, Susan B. Anthony, Virginia Woolf,
Albert Einstein, Beethoven, Mother Theresa, and Nelson Mandela all had
to overcome almost insurmountable struggles in their lives to achieve
their goals. Indeed, the greater the obstacles and the more passion these
people brought to overcoming their obstacles, the more profound the achievement
or contribution they made. They didn’t become amazing, accomplished
people in spite of their challenges, but because of them. These are qualities
we want to duplicate in characterizations. It’s much more captivating
to watch someone try to win against the odds, than someone content to
put up with life’s travails. A winner doesn’t have to actually
win to be a winner — A winner tries to win, a loser accepts defeat.
The better you know yourself, the better actor you’ll be. You need
to understand what makes you tick, profoundly and deeply. The 12 acting
tools will help you to dig into your psyche, allowing for discovery and
a way to expose and channel all those wonderful demons that we all have.
Your dark-side, your traumas, your beliefs, your priorities, your fears,
what drives your ego, what makes you feel shame and what initiates your
pride are your colors, your paints to draw with as an actor. The 12 tools:
1. OVERALL OBJECTIVE: What does your character want from

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 life more than anything? Finding what your character wants throughout
the entire script.
2. SCENE OBJECTIVE: What your character wants over the
course of an entire scene, which supports the character’s OVERALL
OBJECTIVE.
3. OBSTACLES: Determining the physical, emotional and
mental hurdles that make it difficult for your character to achieve his
or her OBJECTIVE.
4. SUBSTITUTIONS: Endowing the other actor in the scene
with a person from your real life – that makes sense to your OVERALL
OBJECTIVE and your SCENE OBJECTIVE. For instance, if your character’s
SCENE OBJECTIVE is, “I need to get you to love me,” then you
find someone from your present life that really makes you need that love
– urgently, desperately and completely. This way you have all the
diverse layers that a real need from a real person will give you.
5. INNER OBJECTS: The pictures you see in your mind
when speaking or hearing about a person, place, thing or event.
6. BEATS and ACTIONS: A BEAT is a thought. Every time
there’s a change in thought, there’s a BEAT change. ACTIONS
are the mini-OBJECTIVES that are attached to each BEAT that support the
SCENE’S OBJECTIVE and therefore, the OVERALL OBJECTIVE.
7. MOMENT BEFORE: The event that happens before you
begin the scene (or before the director yells, “Action!”),
which gives you a place to move from, both physically and emotionally.
8. PLACE and FOURTH WALL: Using PLACE and THE FOURTH
WALL means that you endow your character’s physical reality, which,
in most cases, is realized on a stage, sound stage, set, classroom, or
on location, with attributes from a PLACE from yur real life. Using PLACE
and the FOURTH WALL creates privacy, intimacy, history, meaning, safety
and reality. The PLACE/FOURTH WALL must support and make sense with the
choices you’ve made for the other tools.
9. DOINGS: The handling of props, which produces behavior.
Brushing your hair while speaking, tying your shoes, drinking, eating,
using a knife to chop, etc., are examples of DOINGS.
10. INNER MONOLOGUE: The dialogue that’s going
on inside your head that you don’t speak out loud. Those thoughts
that are vulgar, inappropriate, self-indulgent, self-deprecating, paranoid
and generally not politically correct. Those thoughts you can’t
speak out loud because there would be some form of repercussions.
11. PREVIOUS CIRCUMSTANCES: Your character’s history.
The accumulation of life experiences that determines why and how they
operate in the world. And then personalizing the character’s PREVIOUS
CIRCUMSTANCES to that of your own so you can truly and soulfully understand
the character’s behavior and become and live the role.
12. LET IT GO: While The Chubbuck Technique does use
an actor’s intellect, it is not a set of intellectual exercises.
This technique is the way to create human behavior so real that it produces
the grittiness and rawness of really living a role. In order for you to
duplicate the natural flow of life and be spontaneous you have to get
out of your head. To achieve this you have to trust the work you’ve
done with the previous11 tools and LET IT GO.