Note: This post is about my journey developing an emotion affirming training organization. If you are looking for a short biography please click here.
Matthew’s journey
I grew up in a family of people who love the arts, and are performers, teachers, and creators of art. Their kindness, continued support, and generosity nurtured my interest and love of music, theatre, and film into a career and a pathway as an artist/educator.
I was privileged to have piano, voice, and acting lessons throughout my childhood and adolescence, and have been involved in professional music, film, and union theatrical work well before I began my undergraduate degree. I understand that I was lucky to have this experience and I seek to make my classes accessible, especially to vulnerable artists and communities.
Joan Reist watching over her students at a recital in 1984. I’m the one on the left.
As a young pianist and vocalist, I learned specific skills that gave me a strong foundation and supported the exploration of my own artistic impulses. I owe the bulk of my technical and improvisatory skills to my piano teacher Joan Reist and the Pace Method she lovingly taught all of her students. It led me to the joy of composition and collaboration I rely on as a central part of my work as an educator, director, and creator.
Yet, as an actor I never felt this same degree of reliable foundational structure. I had formal training with excellent teachers in Stanislavski, Meisner, Shurtleff, Practical Aesthetics, Viewpoints and many other methods and models. Although each of them added to the richness of my learning, none of them gave me the kind of foundation that was comparable to the musical education I received.
Fast forward through two degrees in music with a concentration in vocal performance and pedagogy, and certifications in several acting, vocal, and specialized training disciplines.
What has served me the most in my work as a teaching artist and director has been not to redirect access to emotions by placing attention on personal memories (or circumstances, actions, objectives, and tactics) but to seek as much information about emotions as I could.
Through engaging with the scientific study of voice, affect/emotion, and the social sciences (mostly as an informed consumer of science, frequently as a study participant) I have finally found for myself a missing piece of my personal puzzle. This ongoing evidence-informed curiosity surrounding the generation and display of emotion has benefited all aspects of my life and significantly helped my students. There has been a void in emotion-focused education for all of us. Performers need to be “experts of emotion” but there is little to support the development of emotion expertise. This is the field of Emotion Performance Pedagogy, and it is the reason I developed EmoVerity training.
My journey into emotion affirming pedagogy and models
Michael Chekhov Acting Technique
Michael Chekhov sitting on the edge of a stage, thoughtfully reflecting.
Michael Chekhov (1891-1955) created an acting pedagogy that sought to train actors in a manner that was similar to training of musicians, and he frequently used references to music and musical terms in his lectures and writings.
My first encounter with the Michael Chekhov Acting Technique was through Dawn Arnold the head of Moving Dock Theatre company and Chekhov Studios Chicago. Dawn introduced me to MICHA, the Michael Chekhov Association. in June of 2018, I received my Teacher’s Certificate of completion through MICHA, and serve as the current chair of the Diversity, Equity, Inclusion Committee.
Michael Chekhov’s psycho-physical techniques and explorations go beyond the traditional intellectual/analytical work of most acting methods and step directly into an embodied understanding of performance. In his essay “Everything is but the door to the feelings” - July 8, 1937 (available in Michael Chekhov’s Lessons for Teachers published by the Michael Chekhov Association) Mr. Chekhov beautifully articulates how to access emotions through physical and creative/generative explorations.
Movement and emotion scientists have published research supporting these types of psycho-physical-emotional phenomena in creating an emotion genesis loop, and in the role of emotion recognition through postural elements. (See the work of Rachael Tsachor, Tal Shafir, Mark Coulson, Carlo Fantoni, Sarah Awad, Stacy Marsella, and Margot Lor-Lhommet)
Emotional Effector Pattern training
German Chilean research psychologist Susana Bloch (b. 1931) along with her team, including neurophysiologist Guy Santibañez and theatre director Pedro Orthous, explored ways to help actors activate and release emotions at will without drawing on their own personal experiences and memories.
They discovered that actors could be taught how to induce specific emotion states using six very specific forms that combine four components:
a specific breath pattern
eye direction/focus
facial expression elements, and
body posture/spatial orientation combined with muscle tonus activation.
Their collective work was originally named the B.O.S. Method of Emotional Effector Patterns (Bloch, Orthous, Santibañez), and renamed Alba Emoting™ in the early 1990s. These six Emotional Effector Patterns (and a process to Step-Out of emotional states) are taught as the central focus for Alba Emoting™, the Alba Method, Alba Technique; and as a foundational practice within the Emotional Body, the Emotional Fluency Project, and EmoVerity training systems.
I first learned of the Alba Method when theatre educator Nancy Loitz returned to Illinois Wesleyan University from her sabbatical in Chile where she learned Alba Emoting™ from Susana Bloch. As an undergraduate studying voice performance in the School of Music I did not have the opportunity to apply to study the Emotional Effector Pattern with Nancy at that time. It wasn’t until February of 2015 that I had the opportunity to learn the Emotional Effector Patterns through Nancy’s excellent instruction and subsequent mentorship.
At Nancy’s summer intensives I also had the opportunity to learn from teaching artist/activist (and current co-president of the Alba Method Association or AMA) Elizabeth Townsend who also trained with Susana Bloch. Elizabeth has written about the effective use of Michael Chekhov Acting Technique and Alba Emoting™, and in those summer trainings we explored some integrated possibilities which I continue to use in my EmoVerity for performers coursework.
I continued to explore Emotional Effector Pattern education outside of the AMA with Jessica Beck (who also trained directly under Susana Bloch), and Violette Kjeldgaard; both serve as faculty of the Emotional Body methodology.
Facial Action Coding System (FACS), Social Psychology and Communication Theory
While Bloch and her team were researching and codifying the Emotional Effector Patterns, Paul Ekman and his team including Wallace V. Friesen, and Joseph C. Hager, were exploring facial expressions, gestures, and vocalics (in addition to, and alongside the social psychology) research of Richard Heslin, Edward T. Hall, Thomas J. Bruneau, George L. Trager, Ray Birdwhistle, and many others.
I had the opportunity to study with Erika Rosenberg who, as Ekman’s protégé, has been given the task of updating the Facial Action Coding System (FACS) from the current iteration last published in 2002 containing photos and videos dating back to the 1970’s. The new edition will feature many useful updates and benefit greatly from Erika’s vast history and experience with FACS, her precise instruction as an educator, and her organizational skills as a textbook author and editor. Erika is also the Chief Scientific Officer at Humain, Ltd., a company that creates digital humans, fantasy creatures and digital doubles for many of the top entertainment and technology companies around the world.
Performers who choose to learn the basic Action Units (AUs) and Action Descriptors (ADs) will have an almost limitless repertoire of precise facial muscle action options at any level of intensity. These AUs and ADs have various associations with specific emotion categories and mixed emotion possibilities.
Being able to accurately recognize and activate AUs and ADs creates clarity in emotion expression behavior, and allows for a richer kinesthetic understanding of how to express one’s internally felt emotion (subjective and/or physiological experience) as an external behavior with precision. In other words, it allows a performer to move from six colors of various shades to a theoretically unlimited color palette, which is recognized in genuine and nuanced emotional expression.
This color palette extends beyond the face as performers acquire a practical understanding of behavioral and expressive gesture theory (kinesics), vocal behavior (vocalics and paralanguage), touch (haptics), spatial relationships (proxemics), and time values (chronemics). These social psychology and communication theory skills foster clearer communication across all fields and disciplines.
For performers, a practical understanding of these concepts opens a richly expressive tool kit that is applicable to any performance discipline, in every genre, regardless of venue size or shot size for on-camera performance. These tools are especially useful for performers who wish to enter the world of mo-cap (motion capture performance) for animation and video game characterization.
Estill Voice Training
I began my Estill Voice Training journey with a course taught by the current head of Estill Voice International, Dr. Kimberly Steinhauer and Cari Tellis. Jo Estill’s protégé, voice researcher Kerrie Obert of Obert Voice Studios, saw me through my Estill Master Teacher (EMT) certification in 2017. Kerrie fostered a love of science in me and has become a friend, colleague, and collaborator.
Vocally, the precise skills that Estill Voice Training teaches speakers and singers is a perfect complement to the training systems and tools mentioned above. The figures for voice control are similar to in feel to the variables and permutations for the four components of Emotional Effector Patterns (breath patterns, eye direction, facial expression elements, postural elements).
Once learned, the figures for voice are combined to make the Six Qualities for Voice which help a performer to shape the sound as demanded by a particular genre/style of music, or vocal characterization.
There is a similar feel to combining specific variables and permutations from the four components of the six Emotional Effector Patterns to precisely induce a specific emotion or an intentional mix.
It should be noted that Estill Voice Training is a proprietary system and as an EMT I am only authorized to teach it privately one-on-one. Estill has enriched my life and my students’ lives, but I only draw on publicly available research and collaboration with Kerrie Obert (and our friend and colleague Dr. David Hoffman) for the vocal elements of group workshops and EmoVerity training.
The Path to integration
EmoVerity began during quarantine to address the emotional discomfort experienced by performers who lost the ability to work in front of live audiences in person as well as the loss of income and purpose. Through several beta-tests, EmoVerity for performers was developed to address embodied emotional regulation and emotional intelligence skills for performers of any discipline. Frequently, these topics are taught in an intellectual and theoretical manner. EmoVerity training is embodied and practical in nature.
EmoVerity training helps to develop:
a kinesthetic and embodied understanding of emotion recognition (in self and others)
access to and choice of emotion behavior
release from emotional states at will
precise and helpful interpersonal communication choices
All of these tools help to foster a greater response-ability so we can better evaluate and fully consent to responsibility. These twin values are at the heart of all EmoVerity trainings.
EmoVerity for Corporations will beta-test this Spring and we expect a full launch by the end of 2023. EmoVerity for Educators will beta-test in 2024.