Last week, Katherine Banos, who played Lady Macbeth twice in The Shakespeare Center of LA’s production of The Tragedie of Macbeth, let us in on some pretty inspiring acting advice and even shared her story of rejection gone wonderful in this article. This week, we get a little more in-depth with it. She gives her younger self (or me) some advice and talks about her personal acting technique.
Wanna stay up-to-date with all of our articles on acting? Sign up for our emails!
Let’s go from where we left off!
There’s no reason to feel like you need to be anywhere at a certain time, just because you see your peers getting there.
-Katherine Banos
Jessica Bell: This one is so important to me, because I just had an epiphany the other day. Is there anything that you wish you could’ve told yourself at the beginning of your career?
Katherine Banos: I think if I were consider the beginning of my career, I would think of going into college in NYU as the beginning of my professional time, cuz that’s when I started to understand just how much there is to do, so I think the thing I wish I could tell myself is, even though it’s important to have goals that feel time sensitive—because of course you want to light a fire under you to get things done—there’s no reason to feel like you need to be anywhere at a certain time, just because you see your peers getting there. It’s not even, like, seeing people your age on TV, it’s like, I’ve had so many friends all around me who are doing such great work and really have hit it very big, very quickly, and it’s not to diminish their success or hard work, but those people are the exception to the rule, they’re not the actual rule, so I wish I could go back and be like, don’t worry so much about figuring out getting an agent, don’t stress yourself out with things you can’t control. The only thing you can control is good work, and I think I finally have started to sink into that, but I wish I could just go back and be like, there are so many other things that are going to be more important than feeling like you have somewhere to be, because this career is very, very long, you know?
J: Most definitely. So, could you walk me through your preparation for each character that you do? Like, are there any special rituals or special rehearsals or practices, or just lessons, coaching, anything?
K: So, for me, there’s nothing specific that I do to think about—it’s not that I’ll sit there and do character work; I’ve never been the person that’s gravitated towards a list of questions or writing things out or anything like that—but my main two techniques that I’m based in for acting are Meisner and Grotowski. And Meisner specifically is all about truthfully listening and truthfully responding, and Meisner’s big thing, which my acting coach has kind of changed the definition a little of it—my acting coach is Terry Knickerbocker, and he’s located in New York—and his definition of acting is doing truthfully under imaginary circumstances. So, it’s the idea that everything is completely active while you’re in an imaginary circumstance and you, yourself, can trick your brain into thinking everything is real, but the second the director calls cut, or the second that somebody’s on stage and falls and you need to be out of it, you’re out of it. So, there’s that nice, healthy separation. While Grotowski is physical-based acting, so while Meisner is very brain-oriented, Grotowski is a belief that all emotional memory lives in your spine, and lives in your body. So, he created this process known as plastiques, where he created different physical movements that he believed if you repeated over and over and over again, it will trigger images in your brain that you can’t control, and hence you will feel an emotion. So, I don’t know if you’ve ever noticed, but doing this spot monologue scene twice a day or like today, three times a day, and doing it 12 [times] a week or this week 14 [times], it’s hard because you know it has so much emotional weight, but you also don’t want to manufacture anything that feels false. So what I learned in school when I was doing Grotowski about myself, is that for reasons I can’t explain, a lot of emotional memory—and cuz I don’t believe in going on stage and playing my memories, I’m not the type of person that’s like, I’m thinking of like my dead whatever, like that—
J: Substitutions?
K: Yeah, cuz I think substitutions are helpful in a rehearsal process, because for example, if you need to be surprised by someone on stage, right? If I’m having a hard time doing that and I have to turn and act surprised by you, it’s hard to manufacture that, so my substitution might be that I’m imagining you wearing some crazy ridiculous hat.
J: *laughs, because that was hilarious*
K: And you do that during the rehearsal process, and then suddenly you’re able to take that away, which is Meisner’s belief: you could take that substitution away, and by nature within your body, you’ll be able to react as if that’s already there, because you’ve now trained brain, oh, when I’m supposed to see Jessica, I have to act surprised.
J: Oh, wow.
…I felt like I was being pushed over a cliff. And my entire body went into genuine shock, […] and I was like, I get it now, I’m ready to go into this.
-Katherine Banos
K: So with the plastiques for the spot monologue, because I learned a lot of emotion and a lot of images for some reason go into my hands, I guess I hold a lot of—cuz our bodies are very much like an armor, a way to keep us safe from the world, so we put so much tension, so much good and bad in so many different places, that that’s why […] in eastern medicine, they believe certain people will have pain because of where they’re placing trauma—so for me, I learned in school for reasons I don’t know why, a lot of my emotion lives in my hands, which is funny especially because of this monologue. But there’s two different plastiques with your hands, one—it’s weird, it’s just like—drawing your fingers to yourself, and it feels silly at first, but if you were to literally sit here and do that and just really focus on your hands, and do that for minutes and minutes and minutes, you will start, by nature, to see something. It’s very bizarre […] and then for some reason, [if] you’re not feeling that, the other hand plastique is you push it forward. So those are the two hand ones, but there’s everything from doing this [move] with your elbow, […] the other one I like too because it’s hands and arms and sometimes I do it if I’m getting frustrated. This is where I know I can have a lot of frustration images come my way, is [if you’re] flailing your arms this way and planting your hands or flailing your arms like this. And then there’s this other crazy thing which I won’t do full out, because at first it freaked me out. Mind you, I thought when I started doing Grotowski, all of this was [crazy], cuz Grotowski is the idea that it’s like oh, the floor is lava, and I just believed this is [crazy], and I’ll never forget, there was a class where someone was pushing up against my back—we were all doing different partner work—and I genuinely, for reasons I will never be able to describe, I felt like I was being pushed over a cliff. And my entire body went into genuine shock, where I was so freaked out, and then I finally looked at my teacher afterwards and I was like I get it now, I’m ready to go into this. When you’re nineteen, you’re like what the hell is this? But yeah, so there’s this thing that’s called The Cat where you do all this weird stuff, like there’s this whole waking up thing, and sometimes you’re sort of in a plank, and you’re doing things like this, and weird undulations, […] and just by nature, because you’re working your body and making noise, you just feel things. And it feels like a river of emotion, and you don’t judge what you’re feeling, [you just] feel it. And then you let it go.
J: Wow, that is so interesting.
K: Yeah, so I do substitution, [and] endowing is also really important for me. I’m trying to think of anything in this show that I endow. Yeah, I mean, not that I play this so over-the-top, because I think it would be distracting, but the ring I have that I get from Duncan obviously has to have some kind of importance, because he gives it to me and then obviously I end up killing him. And even though that was pretty easy for me to connect to, because that’s just such a [messed] up concept that someone who gifted you with something, you then were the person responsible for their death. So I didn’t really need to endow it, but that would be if I looked at it and was having trouble, cuz all I’m seeing is a ring, so how does this mean anything? Meisner’s belief of endowing is [that] you can put a personal circumstance on it, where you’re endowing that object to then have value because it makes sense to you in your mind. So, to an extent, I actually do kind of do it with the other line I have trouble with, [and that line] is, “I have given suck and know how tender ‘tis to love the babe that milks me.” In order to particularize it, and make it specific, and really endow that line with meaning—because I obviously as [a] 24-, almost 25-year-old person have no connection to children or babies—I think specifically about my cousin’s baby. And I’m not playing it about my cousins baby, because I think the reason why that, to me, doesn’t resonate and it’s not helpful, is because my life circumstances are not going to be as high or as important as someone like Lady Macbeth’s, cuz if all of us had the heightened circumstances that a play requires, then all of our lives would be a play and that’s just not true. So I endow in the way of being able to truly imagine that kid as if it’s my own, and then knowing that that image comes up, it makes it that much more specific and truthful, because I know I’ve held that baby, I know what that baby looks like, how that baby sounds, how he laughs. So yeah, it’s kind of like [a] combination of all different things.
J: So cool.
K: That was a very big answer, sorry if that was a lot!
J: No! It’s great, it’s wonderful, its great! And this is the last question—if someone was on the fence about being an actor or actress, what would you tell them?
To be continued…
Next week, Katherine goes into detail on that incredibly important dilemma. But don’t worry! Subscribe to our email list below, and you won’t miss our last Interview with Katherine Banos! Also, make sure to check out our Instagram, Facebook, and Pinterest!
Have a wonderful rest of your week!
