I've been stockpiling research and failing to remember to put it on my blog... I'm going to start with my influences, and underneath in a different color I will talk about how I have applied concepts in my directing. I'm hoping that by condensing all of this in one post will give me clarity on which one practitioner I should focus on.
INFLUENCES
Megan Campisi/Lecoq
The aspects that I have taken into consideration most from her workshops is the idea of taking into consideration an inanimate object when acting or moving onstage. In her workshops we once observed a sugar cube melting in water. The physical interpretation that our class came up with to embody the characteristics of the sugar cube ended up becoming a key portion of the murder scene in our IB play. Though while not inanimate objects, following the Lecoq methods Ms. Campisi introduced the concept of absorbing an animalistic quality to our acting as well. Instead of obviously acting like an animal, the concept challenges the performer to instead inject maybe only 10% of an animal, vaguely giving a character the connotations associated with animals that they imbue.
In my work with the British School, I mainly used the idea of animalistic qualities in my work with a piece entitled 'To Risk." The piece is a physical staging of a poem, performed by a large cast of fifty students. The first animal I challenged some of the students to embody was that of a "donkey following a carrot" or a "dog following a treat". The students were limited to remaining on two feet as they had to move quickly to their next position as they were led by other students who acted as the manipulators. By limiting the students from the impulse to go on all fours and act like animals, the eager nature of a dog or donkey looking for food was accomplished without the cliche. Later in the performance the students who were animals are now transformed to be rabid dogs, clawing to be released while the owners hold them on invisible leashes. Right now this is still taken very literally, but I am looking to repair this moment in the piece to where the message of submission and domination is clear, but the image is stronger and not wholly animalistic.
Pantomime
Pantomime as an art dates back to the middle ages, but during its prime the art form went hand in hand with the British style Music Halls in the late 19th century. Pantomime moguls such as Augustus Harris of the Drury Lane Theatre put on grand shows with processions and tableaux, pantomiming tales ranging from "Cinderella" to "Babes in the Woods", an adapted story of Robin Hood. The art of pantomime has had to adapt to the times and has in the process been influenced by many other art forms, namely the Italian Commedia D'ell Arte. However, since there was a language barrier between the Italians and the English performers, they found that pantomime was a simple way to communicate to all of the audience.
In the British school performance, since the style is a British Music Hall performance, I got the opportunity to work on a pantomime piece. In their opening, "Once Upon a Mime", the children were able to experience handling pantomime objects. Using the research I had done on pantomime technique, instead of asking the children to mimic my movements I asked them to shape the object the way they imagined it to look, and then interact with it. This made the object real to them. They could pantomime a telephone better when they had built the telephone part by part in the piece right before using it. In a later pantomime/clown sketch, several of the boys wanted to perform a sketch where they were stuck inside of a box together. This sketch, while considered to be a basic mime sketch, was actually very difficult to work on because as a director i had to first take away all of the stereotypes associated with this and have the boys actually think about the placement, dimensions and textures of the box, as well as the way their bodies interacted with it. In the previously mentioned piece "To Risk", I worked with the element of pantomime when owners had to imagine their "dogs" were pulling at an invisible leash, challenging to students to work on maintaining the length of the leash as well as acting with the "dog" actor to know when to tug and be tugged.
GOB SQUAD
In the fall I went to see a production in Seoul called "before your very eyes", a joint endeavor by the artists collective GOB SQUAD from UK/Germany as well as the creators of the CAMPO trilogy, a series of three productions that while starring children were intended for adult audiences. The tag line for the show, the second in the trilogy, is a s follows:
Ladies and Gentlemen!
Gob Squad proudly present
a live show with real children.
A rare and magnificent
opportunity to witness seven lives
lived in fast forward…
Before Your Very Eyes!
(http://www.gobsquad.com/projects/before-your-very-eyes)
The show was constructed almost like an experiment: seven children, ranging from ages 8-14, were placed inside a glass box, one in which the audience could see everything, and hear everything, but the children only saw mirrors on the walls and heard an omniscient voice that controlled how they "aged" throughout the show. While the production itself was almost entirely in Flemish, the concepts transcended the barriers of language. I personally loved this show and was inspired in many different ways. First, the use of children to create a piece of theatre that deals with a subject that many would consider to be "over the heads" of the children in the show itself created a raw sense of honesty. Part of the belief statement of the GOB SQUAD says "We make performances and videos which search for beauty in the everyday, and look for words of wisdom from a passing stranger," a statement that i believe they hold very true to in this production. It is said on their website that the writers improvised and collaborated with the children, so that this show would reflect not only an adults opinion of growing up, but highlight a childs perception of what the future brings. The irony of seeing a child reflect on his/her past as if it is so far away and so much time has already been lost when they are only eight years old in a way mocks the way of the modern adult. Yet the caricatures created by children when asked to "grow older" point out the children's naivete and misconceptions about what it to come. The combination of the adult content and the child actors executing it gives the audience a 360-degree perspective, whether it is for someone like me who is caught in between the two, or someone much older who has lived through many of the phases illustrated but may have forgotten what it was like to view thing in the way of a child. I also loved the idea of the youngest people in the theatre being the actors, for those who are youngest all too often can teach important lessons of life whether they know it or not. Another concept the GOB SQUAD uses is "to try and explore the point where theatre meets art, media and real life". In the technology filled era we live in, i believe that it is only right that those three aspects blend together, and that if theatre is to help us reflect on life, it must adapt to the way life is. By starting this project two years prior, this theatre project was able to encompass seven young lives for a two year period and make this show an even grander experiment than most theatrical productions would attempt.
I really love this form of "experimental" theatre (and i don't mean that in the prententious way, i mean like a scientific experiment) because I feel like it stretches the capacity of the performers, which is particularly important when the performers are children, who are so raw and natural that while attempting to capture that honesty they must be refined to a point.
While I was probably inspired most by the Gob Squad and its work during my research, I found this to be the hardest research to weave into my work. Most of it was logistics, in the sense that there were set pieces in the play by this point and attempting to create a piece of theatre with a select amount of kids would take up time and resources we really didn't have to spare. The closest piece I believe to reflect the ideas I absorbed from the God Squad would be "To Risk". The piece has a message that challenges the audience to take risks in life, a concept that the children failed to grasp when first reading it. I found that we had to break past the words and discover our own risks that we had taken, and then we are able to convey the message appropriately. For example, one boy was assigned to read a line, "to love is to risk not being loved in return". I made it seem as though the lines were assigned randomly, but I picked each of the solo readers for a specific reason-- that they might find inside themselves a sympathy with what they were saying. I had observed this boy after-school as I went about my business and learned through the grapevine that this boy has been in a committed relationship longer than anyone else in his grade so far that year. On the stage, however, the boy seemed to have no connection to his lines. One day I pulled him aside and said that I had given him this line because I was hoping he understood the risks involved in love and relationships. The next time we ran through it, his attitude throughout the performance, as well as his approach to his own line were totally changed. There was life behind the lines, and i believe that the Gob Squad aims for that idea of having the life of the person shine through the lines, creating a dazzling sense of reality in the piece. I aim to take this concept further with the piece, since the movement has been (hopefully) ingrained in the students' minds by now. I want to not only strengthen the delivery of the solo lines by the same methods i did with this one boy, but I also want to challenge the group as a whole to realize that even performing this show is a risk that must be taken. I wish I could have done more with the work of the Gob Squad and applying their ideas to my work, but in a restricted show where there are specific acts and schedules, it is much harder to achieve. Oh well....
THEATRE in EDUCATION
CLOWNING
TO BE CONTINUED
