Endowment and the Physical Senses

Endowment is the art of "endowing" an object with properties that it may not possess in real life (i.e., the smell of a rose), or that may cause danger to the performer onstage (a sharp knife).

By endowing the objects that you use in the course of the opera, you are able to summon sensations at will.

It was Uta Hagen's firm belief that the doorway to our human experiences was through our senses. Taste, Touch, Smell, Hearing, and Sight can often remain unexplored by the average person. However, as singer-actors it is vital that we reconnect with these five senses in order to stimulate our onstage life.

It is in the five senses that you can truly open yourself and increase your sensitivity to everything around you. Normal everyday things that can pass you by, can become miraculous when you take them in with your five senses. For example, a tree that you pass on the way to work can become a great thing of beauty when you allow yourself to take it in.

To this day, I can't smell lilacs without being transported to my childhood home in the early spring, when the lilacs were in full bloom. My mother and I would go out and cut branches off the trees and use them as centerpieces for the kitchen table. The odor of those blooms stays with me to the present day, and whenever I smell them waves of nostalgia and memories of my deceased mother move in on me, and I may even find my eyes mist at the memory.

In the same fashion, the taste of cake and ice cream will transport me back to family parties that can instantly create intense feelings of happiness and well-being.

The more attuned we can become to our senses, the more closely we can access a world of creative expression in our acting.

The recreation of physical sensations is a major component of an acting technique.

For further evidence, here is just a very brief listing of physical sensations as they pertain to opera:

Drunkenness: Le nozze di Figaro, L'elisir d'amore

Heat: Carmen, Tosca

Cold: La boheme, Vanessa, Fidelio

Sharp Objects: Madama Butterfly, Tosca, Wozzeck, Lulu, Pagliacci

Fatigue: La Traviata, La boheme, Fidelio

Waking Up/Sleeping: La Sonnambula, Hansel and Gretel, Macbeth

Coughing: Adriana Lecouvreur, La traviata, La boheme


In the next post, I'll describe and discuss the Fifth Exercise: Recreating Physical Sensations.