Walk Like a Musician:
The actors of Opus learn the secrets of string players
By Ian Chant |
Music Consultant Michael Jinsoo Lim teaches actors Allen
Fitzpatrick and Shawn Belyea how to hold a bow. Photo by Keri Kellerman. |
Julia Child chopping an onion is likely a far cry from you or I preparing vegetables
for stew. Few and far between are the football fans who know how to grip a pigskin like
an NFL quarterback. And as violist Melia Watras will attest, holding a musical instrument
like a classically trained performer isn’t something that comes naturally to most of us.
“A musician can spot a non-musician like that, just by seeing how they hold an
instrument,” says Watras. She should know—she has spent the last 12 years as violist
for the Corigliano Quartet, alongside her husband Michael Jinsoo Lim. The pair are lending
their decades of experience to Seattle Repertory Theatre’s production of Opus, training the
actors in just a few short weeks to seem like they’ve been playing in a quartet for years.
But even a crash course has to start with the basics, and that means teaching the cast
how to hold their instruments.
There is both deftness and familiarity in the way a musician handles their instrument,
a grip that is at once casual and careful. It’s a seemingly contradictory touch that comes
from decades of devoted practice that render a musician’s instrument an extension of
themselves. “It becomes a part of your body. It’s something that you are with eight hours
a day every day of your life,” Watras says.
The stance and grip that a musician takes are important details that could put to lie
the rest of an otherwise carefully constructed performance. But they’re not the whole
story. The cast will also get a boot camp in bow work that will allow them to appear as if
they’re actually playing the beautiful music that accompanies Opus, even though they are
very much not.
Throughout rehearsals, the cast of Opus will receive classes and one-on-one lessons from
Watras and Lim. They will also be able to refer to a video of the two performing as a sort
of cheat sheet. And while Watras and Lim will be putting the cast of Opus through their
paces in bow work, they won’t be training them in fingering, an attempt at realism that
would simply prove too distracting for audience and performer alike. “That will be plenty,”
says Watras, “especially since they will have to learn to coordinate what they’re doing
with the soundtrack.”
And as important as it is that everyone be able to create the illusion that they’re
actually playing, it’s also important that it remain an illusion. That’s why the props-which
are real, functioning instruments—can’t make any noise that could disrupt the play. There
are several options to prevent a performer’s instrument from making a peep, from using a
bow with fresh horsehair to soaping a bow so it glides across the strings without producing
a sound. The latter technique is a time-honored threat, often issued by frustrated middle
school band teachers to their less adept pupils, but has plenty of precedent in the
professional world as well. Renowned cellist Yo Yo Ma used a soaped bow while he played
along to the pre-recorded performance that accompanied the inauguration of President Barack
Obama earlier this year.
But it’s not enough to just teach the performers how to hold an instrument naturally and
pretend to play. They will also have to hit the right notes on all of the little things. And
when it comes to being a member of a professional chamber music quartet, there are a lot of
little things.
“They need to know the ways a quartet communicates with each other…the body language,
the visual cues,” says Lim. But whether it’s how a bow should move across the strings or
the nearly invisible communication that keeps four musicians on the same page during a
performance, Watras and Lim will be there to make sure that the Rep’s production of Opus gets
the details pitch perfect.
