Welcome.
Welcome to Stella Burden dot com. This site is hosted by Rude Mechs- a theatre company based in Austin, Texas.
We are currently conducting research for our next play, The Method Gun. Our aim is to produce a fictional biography and a theatrical production tracing the life and tragic death of Stella Burden (aka “the other Stella”). We haven’t been able to find as much information in the archives as we would have hoped, so we could use your help to fill in the blanks of her life, and for those of you who may have trained with Stella, to share those experiences. Here’s what we do know.
Stella Burden was a relatively obscure actress and an actor-training guru who created a suite of actor training exercises that she called “The Approach.” Stella was a world-traveler, and so “The Approach” fused Western naturalistic techniques with exercises that Stella gleaned from all over the globe. These exercises were physically-based and often very dangerous (for instance the land-diving ceremonies of Vanuatu). We are particularly interested in one specific exercise – The Method Gun – which was extremely dangerous and, in fact, rumor has it that it was eventually the cause of her death. As far as Stella’s actor training, we know that she asked just one question for her entrance exam: Truth or Beauty? From 1954-1974, Stella only accepted students into her class that answered Truth. Then in 1975 for some unknown reason, she switched and took her first class only of students that answered Beauty. In 1976 Stella was dead.
For the production, we’ll be using the biography, salvaged film clips, rediscovered interviews, live re- enactments of theatre and film’s greatest undiscovered scenes (many of Stella’s students went on to become film actors and we have a valuable resource in the HRC in Austin where we’ve found great old clips). The play will culminate in a re-enactment of the – pray for us – very dangerous method gun exercise.
So, again – if you know any stories of Stella or you know anyone who knows someone who trained with Stella – please let us know by posting your stories.
November 27th, 2006 at 1:06 am
I was very interested to hear that there was still interest in Stella Burden. In the early 70’s I was an emergency room doctor at St. Vincent’s Hospital on 7th Ave. and 12th St. Because of the hospital’s proximity to Ms. Burden’s studio, students (and sometimes others) who were injured during or as a result of what I now know was called the “method gun” exercise frequently came through our doors.
I would not have noticed the pattern except that they were often accompanied by a striking young woman named Hannah Zedlove.
When I first spoke with Hannah, I assumed she was a private duty nurse because she had brought so many patients to the emergency room. It turns out she was Ms. Burden’s “key student.” She got a scholarship of some kind and basically was Ms. Burden’s assistant.
The patients themselves seemed at a loss to explain their injuries and associated symptoms. The symptoms themselves were varied, unusual and, for the most part temporary. An example; the first patient I treated believed that he had lost his left hand above the wrist. He very obviously had not. The hand however did not function or respond to stimuli (pin prick) but just hung there at the end of his arm.
I can’t remember what he said but I do remember thinking he might be in a cult or a graduate student in sociology at NYU. I was just asking him (for the third or fourth time) what drugs he was taking and was about to call for a psych consult when Hannah intervened. She said he had taken part in some kind of exercise that was designed to slice away everything that was fake… inauthentic was the word she used. Something about his left hand was fake and until it was somehow authentic he would not be able to use it. She agreed to go to dinner with me and I agreed to run some tests and hold off on the psych consult. Sure enough the hand “reappeared” an hour later. The tests, however, showed that the nerve function in his hand had been zero.
Over the months that followed I treated method gun injuries that presented as hysterical blindness (inability to see women between the ages of 20 and 40), difficulty breathing quietly; the inability to say a particular phrase like “thank you” or “I love you”; and one instance of nearly complete paralysis between the shoulders and hips. The symptoms themselves were real whatever mental aspect may have been involved.
Hannah and I dated through the spring of the next year, off and on. I never mentioned the method gun in any of the patient’s charts; partly as a favor to Hannah and partly because I had no idea how dangerous the exercise was… I am confident that the care of my patients was not compromised by these omissions. I do sometimes think that, had I said more, that Ms. Burden would have survived her own encounter with the method gun.
There is little I can add about the exercise because I never saw it performed and Hannah would not or could not describe it. She had done the exercise but never told me about any symptoms. But as we dated she slowly grew hard of hearing me… I mean she grew deaf to the sound of my voice… I don’t know what became of her… when I would call her she thought the line was dead… If you are in contact with Hannah please forward my email address to her.
Thank you.
March 7th, 2007 at 2:00 pm
This is marvellous that you’re bring the work of dear, dear Stella Burden to the public eye. It’s terrribly sad that she’s never been recognised for the genius she was, and for the contribution she made to the industry. I first met Stella in outrageous circumstances, on the floor of a men’s public lavatory in Stockwell, London. It was a bizarre and incredible coincidence that was one of those truly precious moments of synchronicity that lets you know there really is a diivine presence.
We’d both been researching depravity and humiliation at the time, and I’d been doing some auto-strangulation in a men’s cubicle on my own, and by glorious happenstance she’d been doing something peculiar with lemons in the cubicle next door. We were both covered in vomit, neither of us had slept for days, and we were both at our wits end, wondering why the eternal muses hadn’t brought us anything. This, I discovered later on, had been her period in the late 70s when she’d lost faith in The Method Gun and was going “back to the roots” by trying to find the core “ego vacuum” that she’d been so adamant was at the very heart of the creative process. Stella of course put out the rumour that she was dead. But of course she wasn’t. She’d just let go of everything in order to go deeper - beyond Method Gun, beyond The Approach. I became obsessed with Stella from that moment on.
I’d been locked into Method Gun since its inception. British actors hardly knew anything about it, but I’d heard about it through an American friend, B_____, who’d been Stella’s lover in the 60s. B_____ showed me her early papers on The Approach, and it kind of went from there.
But you must see my film soon. I’ve been interviewed by the BBC about her work, and I’ll let you see a clip from the documentary as soon as I can.
Stella changed my life, utterly. The method gun made me the actor I am today. God bless her spirit, her soul, her memory. Stella Burdon was and is a treasure. The world is an empty place without her.
March 28th, 2007 at 2:55 pm
Hey, guys ~
I wish I could help y’all by illuminating some aspect of this Method Gun as promoted/practiced by the late Stella Burden, but I’m rather ignorant about the activity and so am looking forward to your show providing whatever information you’ve been able to gather.
I’m writing, though, because I had a sort of brief connection to Burden ~ or, actually, my uncle Tim did, back in ‘76, right before (I reckon) she died.
Tim, my mother’s youngest brother and pretty much the black sheep (bipolar, drug-abusing, suicidal) of the family, was 21 at the time and taking acting classes in New York City. And he’d write me these long, rambling letters, as he’d been doing for years (we were always sympatico, cut from the same genetic cloth, it seemed ~ although I was never half as fucked up as Tim ~ and he liked to think of me as the younger brother he never had).
And in the spring of ‘76, the year in which my family’d later move from Florida to Saudi Arabia, the year filled with Bicentennial Minutes on TV and Tall Ships sailing past the Statue of Liberty, Tim wrote to say that he’d been taking classes from this woman named Stella Burden.
(Of course, he also wrote about the various women he was sleeping with, and the sort of substances he was abusing, and just how unfair it was that the world had so far failed to recognize a truly great creative talent (himself); and of course this was all a bit more knowledge than my 15-year-old self was prepared to care about, having a variety of adolescent difficulties of my own to deal with; but Tim just needed to ramble, and this was before the Internet and its myriad blogs, and so I was the metaphoric ear he’d chosen.)
I can even quote from the letter, because I keep it (along with most of the letters I’ve ever received from anyone) in a small lockbox in my hall closet. This is what Tim had to say:
” Stella’s so fucking INTENSE, Wayne, especially when she starts going on about this gun method we’re gonna start next week. She gets this look on her face like she’s being FUCKED BY JESUS or something, it’s really FREAKY, and Caroline [one of Tim’s girlfriends, who was taking the class with him] thinks she’s a big speed freak but I don’t know she seems REALLY STRAIGHT except maybe theatre and this gun thing are LIKE DRUGS for her. ”
And that’s all I’ve got. Because Tim quit after one more class (due to some bullshit about Caroline and their dayjobs, I think) and never mentioned Stella Burden or the Method Gun again.
Well, there’s one other thing, but it’s kind of a surface thing …
In July of 2001, when Molly and I were still married, we drove up to Long Island for my grandmother’s 80th birthday. And Tim was there, among all the relatives milling about my Uncle Steve and Aunt Sharon’s backyard, looking much dilapidated and world-weary. (Well, that’s putting it mildly. Moll and I thought he might have AIDS, even, he looked so physically wasted.) (He didn’t ~ doesn’t ~ though: it was just decades of bad living, coming home to roost.)
And at one point in the afternoon, most of the geezers off playing bocce ball behind the garage, Tim walked up to where I was leaning against the wall beside the kitchen window. “Your wife looks like that drama teacher I had,” he said.
I’d forgotten the letter by that time. “Like who?”
“Stella Burden,” said Tim. “Twenty-five years ago, back when I was dating Sandra.”
My memory kicked in a bit; I could picture the letter, the words in his spidery handwriting. “You mean Caroline?”
“Yeah,” said Tim. “It was Caroline, wasn’t it? Fuckin’ long time ago.” He shrugged. “But Mary looks like ~”
“Molly,” I said.
“Yeah, Molly. She looks like Stella, except Stella was more of an anorexic version. The eyes are exactly the same, though. Seriously ~ it’s fuckin’ uncanny. ”
“Huh,” I said, nodding, trying not to think of Auschwitz while looking at Tim’s pale, hollow-cheeked face.
“I heard she killed herself that summer,” he said. “Stella.”
At which point my sister came and rescued me, saying I was needed in the front yard, for a photo-of-all-the-grandchildren …
So there it is: What little I know about your Method Gun woman, and all of it secondhand.
I hope it helps.
~ Bren
July 14th, 2007 at 10:45 pm
July 14th, 2007 at 10:46 pm
Clip from an interview I did for the BBC:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kcEQO-dwgl4
You’ll have to copy and paste it
July 14th, 2007 at 10:47 pm
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kcEQO-dwgl4
March 9th, 2008 at 1:03 pm
BiPolar Information …
Information on BiPolar Disorder…