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Honoring a Man of Movement By GILLIAN JACOBS
There is no movement class in the world like Moni Yakim's. Over the course of his career, he has created a series of incredibly demanding physical exercises for acting students with names like "the Spanish Inquisition." Yet what separates Moni's class from an aerobics or yoga session are the demands he makes on an actor's imagination and creativity. Just as he has you stretched to your physical limit, he may demand that you sing at the top of your lungs, "London Bridge Is Falling Down." The wonderful and sometimes incredibly frustrating thing about Moni's class is that there is no right or wrong. You are challenged to investigate and develop your imagination and inner resolve.Yakim, who has been a faculty member at Juilliard since the founding of the Drama Division in 1968 and currently teaches movement to second-, third-, and fourth-year actors, was honored this summer with a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Association of Theater Movement Educators (ATME) at their annual summer conference in New York. He is only the fourth person to receive this honor in the 15-year history of the organization (which comprises 150 movement educators from across the U.S., Canada, and Europe).
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| Moni Yakim conveys the subtlety of a movement to third-year actor James Seol. (Photo by Jessica Katz) |
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Before the award ceremony, ATME enlisted the help of Juilliard's Drama Division in soliciting comments about Yakim from his colleagues and from drama alumni. Rich Rand, president of ATME, says he received a flood of responses from Juilliard alumni from Group 1 to the present. Each one testified to Yakim's drive, his passion and intensity—the demand that he placed on the whole of each human being, and the profound impact on students of his insight into the creative process. Moreover, his caring and commitment to nurture their whole selves helped to unify everything they learned at Juilliard.Drama Division alumna Kathleen McNenny attended the award ceremony and spoke on behalf of Yakim's students. One of the most important lessons Moni imparted to his students, she noted, is that there cannot be a separation of the emotional and physical life of a character. Each physical movement is tied to an emotional movement, and committing to a physical gesture will cause an emotional reaction as well. In this arena, he has had a large impact on movement education in this country.Yakim's own training—once he left his native Israel after military service—occurred in France and the United States under the masterful teaching of Etienne Decroux and Stella Adler. The French master Decroux is called the father of modern mime and his innovations have influenced performers, teachers, and directors all over the world. Yakim spent many years studying with Decroux and five years in his company.After seeing Yakim perform in Paris, Stella Adler urged him to come to New York. He did, and almost immediately began teaching in her school. But Adler also demanded that he stop performing mime, because she saw it as the "art of indication" rather than truthful expression. This demand inspired Moni to defy Adler and deepen his study of mime. "I wanted to prove her wrong," he says—and he began to search for a way to fuse the emotional truthfulness he learned from Adler with the physical expression he learned from Decroux.Yakim has been working toward that end ever since. To support himself as an artist, he knew he had to teach. In the late 1960s he founded the Performance Theater Center (also known as the New York Pantomime School). For 26 years he trained performers and supported a company—an ideal situation, he says. "I could dream an idea in the morning and rehearse it in the afternoon." After more than 30 productions, an extreme rise in overhead costs forced him to close the school 11 years ago.ATME president Rich Rand—who studied at Yakim's New York Pantomime Theater in the early 1980s, after hearing enthusiastic recommendations from former Juilliard students—points out that Yakim has been a forerunner in the changes in movement education over the past 35 years. There have been many different approaches toward articulating character recently, and lots of books in the last few years with different theories. "But Moni was really one of the very first to publish a work in the United States [Creating a Character, a Physical Approach to Acting] that established a groundwork from which to authentically and imaginatively articulate character."Yakim directed the original production of Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living in Paris at the Village Gate in New York, as well as on Broadway and on tour throughout Europe, Israel, and the U.S. His numerous directing credits also include two Puccini operas at the Metropolitan Opera and productions for other opera companies, as well as contemporary and classical plays for Yale Repertory Theater, American Shakespeare Festival, and many others. He also created the movement for all three Robocop films, training actor Peter Weller for four months in order to convey the movements of a very tough but somewhat confused cyborg. Some of his other recent projects are Let Us Fly (which Moni and his wife Mina conceived, wrote, and directed), The Workroom, Under Milk Wood, Pollock, La Ronde, and most recently I Want The Whole World To See That I Can Cry (which was a part of 2003 New York Fringe Festival).Moni Yakim remains a hugely influential presence at Juilliard and also at the Circle in the Square Theater School, where he has taught for more than 30 years. He has lived a rich, creative life and found a way to balance his teaching, directing, and personal life. His wife, Mina—also an instructor at Juilliard, where she teaches a mask class to the first- and second-year acting students—frequently collaborates with him as an associate director.For many, Moni Yakim's class teaches about life as well as movement. One former student wrote: "He brings into his class the entire world through the most simple exercises. This is the defining mark of a master: Through simplicity he creates the portal to Everything."Moni says his hope as a teacher is that his students will have the "techniques to support them in whatever style they are performing in." Armed with the freedom and ability he has given us, and infused with his generosity of spirit, Juilliard actors can graduate feeling confident that nothing is outside their reach. Gillian Jacobs is a fourth-year drama student.
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