Still, Silent, Exposed

The "Stomp" in Tadashi Suzuki's training is a physical reminder for the performer to be in touch with their body, their mind, and their environment. Each stomp forces the performer to be present; the foot pounding the earth is the constant reminder "I am here now... now... now".
Having trained in such physical forms, I am capable of engaging with my body and mind to be present in each moment when physically active. However, being still with nothing to do terrifies me. I struggle to engage moment by moment and fear that every member of the audience can see my excruciating discomfort. As for my presence, it becomes either bad/negative or non existent.

I began to wonder; how then is it possible to achieve presence when there is no physical reminder? How can a performer be and remain present with the performer is still, quiet and unmoving? And how can I challenge my fear of being immobile and silent on stage?

Ariane Mnouchkine observes 'that presence increases with the capacity of the actor to be naked'.
As such I became the Exposed Body; to magnify my weaknesses, to challenge my comforts, to be naked and exposed to what ever is happening and who ever is watching, to discover how, where and if it is possible to be present when my task is to do nothing.

An Introduction to Speed Reading (Version Two)

I think Google is having some problems with its videos these days, so I don't know why I'm even bothering to upload this, but here it is anyway: version two of 'An Introduction to Speed Reading', this time with the text included.

Word Cloud

I came across a cool little website on the internet that takes blogs and turns them into 'word clouds', in which the most used words are displayed largest. Take a look at the word cloud generated from this blog:



What word is notable by its absence?

FAILURE.

I cant even find where 'failure' is, though I'm sure it must make an appearance somewhere. I started wondering what this meant and realised I was relieved to see that it wasn't the main feature there.

To be continuing to center on 'failure' as the sole focus of my work would to me mean I wasn't doing it right, that I wasn't developing my ideas and taking them depper, further. It's becoming about more than failure, now - through the frame of failure in the performing body I am looking at other things, asking other questions, making other discoveries.

This isn't failure for the sake of failure (can that technically even exist?) - it is there in order to uncover profound questions about performance, about the way performers and people deal with their bodies and with others, about presence, about liveness and the moment in performance, about honesty and spontanetity in performance, what they mean, and why they are important.

So, what words feature most prominently? 'Performers', followed by 'body' and 'moments'...hooray!

I think I'll keep making word clouds throughout the process, as a visual aid to my explorations and how they are progressing.

This is where it all happens...

So now we have our four performers, they have all met each other (although we have yet to see everyone in the same room together), and we’ve started some, perhaps tentative, tasks.

I have defined each performer’s ‘thing’:

Sarah Jane: the exposed body.

Hayley: the enduring body.

Mandy: the displaced body.

Darren: the restricted body.

Now is the time to start pushing it.

To start pushing the performers, their limits, their bodies, their emotions, their everything, to run the risk that they will hate me by the end of this process but do it anyway because hopefully we can create something great.

An Introduction to Speed Reading.

What’s the difference between an homage and a plain old rip-off? I’m not sure I know.

I’ve been deliberating over text within the piece – will there be text at all? If so, where will it come from, how will it be generated, and how will it be incorporated within the piece?
Jane Munro set me the challenge of finding a text which I could potentially use in the Failure Project – this may not be it, but it’s a damn fine text to start with. I took Chris Goode’s ‘An Introduction to Speed Reading’ and set my performers the task of, yes, speed-reading it. I’ve been meaning to set a task based on speech, sound and the movements of the mouth so this seemed perfect.
I’ve edited the results here in my ‘homage’ to both Chris Goode and Beckett’s ‘Not I’ (which I will try to find a video for to add here). Follow this link to read about various productions of ‘Not I’, and the difficulties the actresses who performed in it faced – for some, it became a terrifying but illuminating experience: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_I

Can 4 solo performances co-exist on stage???

This was the question that has been plaguing me recently. I didn’t know how to bring each performer’s experience together on stage without it becoming jarring and messy to the spectator.
I used to think I would solve this problem with staging; just mess about with the staging in some way so that each performer is in their self-contained space, never interacting with the other performers. I came up with a million complicated staging ideas with this in mind.

This is now a terrible idea to me!

Each performer will follow their own unique journey, but bridges and cross-overs between have already become apparent and should be recognised and built upon. What I as director need to do now is create a structure to the piece from which the performers can improvise on the night – integrating and juxtaposing those moments of solitude with those including the other performers, moments of tension with moments of release, moments of connectedness with fragmentary moments, playing with the dynamics, shapes and tensions of the action etc. etc…to make something (hopefully) beautiful which the performers can play with and within.

Yes? No!

Sometimes the simplest-seeming tasks can be the most impossible.

Have you ever played the yes-no game? We did it all the time in my school.

There used to be a gameshow on TV called Take Your Pick, hosted by Des O’Connor. In order to get through to the next round, contestants had to pass the yes-no game, in which they were asked a series of questions to which they were NOT allowed to answer with “yes” or “no”. It seems pretty simple, right? Our performers certainly thought so…I had a few confused looks from them when I suggested it as the very first exercise in our process.

It is actually incredibly tough - as they all found out - simply because it involves suppressing an action which, although small, is extremely instinctual. “Yes” and “no” are the sorts of words that can roll off the tongue without you even knowing you’ve said them, so often are they used in everyday life. The game is about the elimination of habitual and almost natural-seeming actions – replacing a normal response (“yes”) with one which, in the context of the question, seems completely unnatural (“I DO have Turkey at Christmas!”).

It’s an ideal game for the Failure Project…in the film below, we see our performers struggle as they fight off impending failure, and react as they, inevitably, fail. Notice their body language – often tense, on edge – and their emotional responses – laughter, anger, frustration, and often, disbelief.