I first met Sam Kogan at Mountview Theatre School (now known as Mountview Academy of Theatre Arts), it must have been 1990/91. I knew nothing about him only that he was a new guest teacher who was going to teach us acting – more specifically a technique he had developed, called The Science of Acting.
Straight away that didn’t sit well with me. 20-year-old me, who thought he knew everything. I’d been to the National Youth Theatre and I’d got my place at an accredited drama school. I balked at the application of the word Science to the artistic pursuit of acting. It seemed a dangerously analytical word when aimed at the mystical profession I’d chosen and the inscrutable, god-given acting talent that had been bestowed upon me. In fact so threatened was I that in my very first Science of Acting lesson, when Sam challenged my sulky teenager slouch by politely asking me to sit up straight, I muttered loudly enough for everyone in the class to hear…
…‘this is bullshit’.
Come the next lesson and I was equally challenging. ‘How can science have anything to do with art?’ I thought. As a protest and thinly veiled, puerile challenge to this charlatan, for an exercise he’d asked us all to prepare, an ‘objectless action’ which is a re-creation of an everyday mundane task without the objects, I chose going for a dump. I was a teacher’s dream back in those days, a complete twat but I can’t remember anything other than Sam patiently asking me to choose something different.
I’d tried to rattle this Science of Acting guy and it hadn’t worked. He hadn’t got angry or dismissed me from the class. Why not? What’s the deal with this idiot? I thought I’d change tack and do some of this stupid Science of Acting work, see if the fraud notices. Hence, I remember the next exercise vividly because I did do a lot of work on it.
It was simply called ‘Animal’ where you chose an animal, worked on it at home and then acted it for the rest of the class. I chose a fly and by this stage, I thought I knew enough of what Sam wanted to have a good go at it. I still wasn’t having any of the ‘Science’ bit but I’ve always had a pretty strong purpose to please and now everyone was convinced by my rebellious antics, it was safe to revert to type.
So for this exercise I knew I needed to rehearse 7 times, that I had to think about size, define my fly-body, think about my fly-life until now, and my purpose for the future, to see through my flies eyes, and have something happen that would result in a small movement of my fly. I imagined that I was in a house on a white, papered wall in the warm sun, some shade falls on me so I move a couple of steps with my six legs, back into the sun. I worked pretty well on this exercise though looking back I created a fraction of the pictures and impressions that I would do now, (in other words, I used comparatively little of my imagination) but as I took my place on the floor of the classroom to act my fly, I was pretty confident I’d done some work and my exercise should hold up well.
So I’m acting my socks off (you know, doing my best to please and trying not to think about my audience of classmates while of course thinking about them and what they think – a lot) imagining the world through my multiple-lensed eyes… my diminutive size, the massive distance to the ceiling and the floor, the texture of the paper.. my hooks stuck into it, my wings, the warm sun on my exoskeleton, the cold of the shade and my six legs moving as I step back into the sun. So Sam sits there arms folded his head slightly tilted, looking on, and he asks a couple of my classmates what they think… A girl who I think likes me says unconvincingly ‘yeah I can see he’s a fly’ and my mate declines to be critical at all by stating, “I’m not sure”. Then Sam says quite simply, directly to me…
“This fly has never flown.”
This fly has never flown.
All the work I’d done. Through the hours I’d worked on my fly, I’d tried to cover everything… eating, walking, climbing, the environment I lived in, all imagined through my fly eyes but he was devastatingly right. Even though I’d defined my wings and where they were attached to my body, I’d not thought about and imagined flying at all. I say devastatingly because it was like my mind had been opened and looked into. Even more astonishingly a part of my mind that I myself previously was unaware of. How could he do that? How did he know? In comparison to other acting tutors I’d had this was very, very different and from that moment whatever Sam wanted to teach, I wanted to learn.
Like my fly to the wallpaper, I was hooked.