I shouldn't even be writing now; my brain is about as synapse-friendly as a bowl of forgotten porridge and I could use some sleep, here, nearing six o'clock on a sunny sunny Friday.
We're about 70% labyrinth-built I think. You go in to the space and it's a mess of shelves, walls, doors that go nowhere, doors that you think go nowhere, and various other features I won't spoil. Walls made of stacks of boxes, Minos' empty bottles and bathtub, Ariadne's falling apparatus. Pilar (designer extraordinaire) is being frightfully excellent by not allowing me to cut any corners in the interests of being done earlier and letting the actors loose on the place. Damned detail-oriented designers. I know I'll be happy in the end.
So anyway I have a problem that I didn't think I needed to solve but apparently I do: I don't know what to call the people who come to Tower Room. If I call them audience, the players are irritated. If I call them players, the spectators are made nervous. If I call them participants, everybody cringes. Co-creators? Ticket holders? Initiates? Guests? The Golden Few? Seriously.
I've taken to using the terms rather interchangeably just so I can get rid of the annoying connotations, but really all that does is make a mushy imprecise mess of your language and unless people hang around you enough to hear you mixing and matching and reworking all those words, they won't understand you properly anyway. It's not like terminology catches on just because you use it. And also if I call the piece theatre, which it partially is and in my mind certainly it is, it creates a load of expectations for the audience. If I call it a game, ditto only scarier, because now people will be rushing in and looking for clues and getting six ways of active all over the piece. And if it's esitystaide or performance art or an installation, well, I don't know what the worst-case scenario is for that kind of spectator/ticket holder/person, but one might at least expect a certain kind of critical distance.
These are all normal ways to take in a piece. You go to a theatre, you expect to sit. You go to a gallery, you expect to wander. You go to a week-long larp, you expect to live there and make everything yourself and experience, not watch. What I'm interested in is the fuzzy area in between, or perhaps the process of moving back and forth between creating a piece yourself in participation, and watching the fruits of someone else's labour. This is particularly interesting for me when the artist's work (as opposed to the participant's) requires the passage of time, like in dance, theatre, music, and film... and poetry, too. These performances, while they might not be finished products (depending on whether you believe that a) they are ever finished and b) whether completion depends on a receiver), are at least prepared. They're thoroughly thought through; even if they're improvisations, you can bank on years of performance experience which may count as prior preparation.
Hermetic art isn't a problem - very often I'm perfectly happy to sit in a dark room and let David Lynch show me something from his brain for two hours, and I don't even get to talk to him afterwards and tell him how weird it was, and that's totally fine. What I want to find is a way of working hermetically--making the decisions myself or in a working group--but with the understanding that in performance, the piece will open up to participation, and not just your lip-service variety.
Of course there are aesthetic principles that I stick to and that I am not too worried about wanting to teach to other people. One is patience and listening. There's nothing worse in a band than the person who plays all the time. Sometimes not playing is the best way to play. This is such a no-brainer that I'm nearly embarassed to write it here but it seems to take effort to put listening into practice. It's just so easy to go go go, grab the bull by the horns and get lost in your own feel for the thing. I find this is also a common feature of those roleplaying games that I've been in: game designs and players alike seem to be very good at taking into account the fact that many players will be active by default. They talk and come up with ideas and plot twists, often much more than in real life--it's amazing how many times in a game someone asks something of another character, who in turn responds with a complete nonsequitur. It's to be expected; each player is trying to come up with what happens next and it interferes with the ability to listen.
When I was studying theatre in Canada it took ages to turn me into an active performer. I was shy as all get-out, as much as nobody who knows me would credit that now... but so anyway once I finally flipped the switch and swore I would NEVER be the last one to volunteer, never sit back when I could *do something, anything*, I found that to be much easier than sitting back and worrying about what the hell I was going to do when my turn finally came to do something. Much more productive. But so then now I really can't remember where I learned the opposite - was it in butoh? - where I learned the value of not doing. But it's a different variety of doing nothing than my earlier one. When you work with impulses in butoh, you might say that you're perfectly ready to be active at any time, but you just become more choosy. You tap into your environment, not just your inner voice, for things to do. This is what makes a good clown as well - they use everything that happens around them. We also took this on in Viewpoints training. Like seeing yourself in a roleplaying game as a free jazz musician - it's the listening that makes it good, when it is good. Same with butoh - you can watch a dancer and all of a sudden it's not just the dancer that amazes you, but, well, everything. Somehow the situation is dancing the dancer, and the dancer is dancing you. Ad infinitum. Et cetera. All this.
Tower Room isn't meant to be a jungle gym, nor is it a piece you sit back and enjoy. You're meant to be engaged, but you're also meant to take your time in getting into the speed and rhythm of the piece. You'll talk, but first you must listen. So the main design challenge at the moment is that I know how to make "audience people" be quiet. I know how to make "performance art" people be quiet. I know, if not how to make gamers quiet, at least how to confuse them. But how to design a piece that will get everybody on the same wavelength?
Showing posts with label performance. Show all posts
Showing posts with label performance. Show all posts
Friday, May 28, 2010
Friday, March 19, 2010
Seven days in Villa Salò, uh, probably part 1
Everybody has to have their say about Villa Salò, performance group Signa's marathon of torture and despair, which just last weekend closed its doors in Copenhagen. I wish I could say this is going to be a carefully considered essay on the time I spent there. In actuality, this is a braindump, because I guess I want some thoughts out there and also because I can't seem to do any work before I just put something damned well out. To be honest, I saw and heard and thought enough to warrant the kind of output of text you could use as a doorstop. Be warned. I was there continuously (yes, I slept there, yes it's possible with permission from the Masters, and no, I slept alone in the Hall of Orgies) for the last 4 days of the Circle of Shit, and the last three of the Circle of Blood (the final Circle).
If you don't know what the heck I'm talking about, it was a 24/7 performance installation based on the Pasolini film Salò, set in a very large (and exquisitely decorated) house, featuring 33 or so performers, visited by 5000 members of the public, and running for four alternating weeks between January and March 2010. Five types of Characters lived there: Masters, who did whatever the fuck they wanted, Madams, who were responsible for the house and its staff, Fuckers, who were bodyguards with strap-ons down to their knees, Maids, who, predictably, maided, and Children, who were usually the object of the Masters' doing whatever the fuck they wanted. Guests entered, got a membership card, received an introduction from Madam Vaccari (which she must have performed nearly a thousand times and yet it ultimately failed to prepare anybody for the house, it seems—well, with the exception of the final introduction she gave, but that's for later), and were given a coloured ribbon denoting which of the types of character in the house was their host: black for Masters' guests, red for Madams, blue for Fuckers, yellow for Maids, pink for Children.
You would be amazed at how many people think a ribbon can change your personality, or entitle (read: excuse) you to act in a manner that, well, let's say civilised folk might call assholery. You'd be amazed at an awful lot of things people thought and said and did in Villa Salò, and I'm not talking about the performers. To me, it was the audience that was, after a while, the real horrorshow. Maybe that's because I spent so much time in the Villa that I felt my perspective had more in common with the performers than with the guests. But again, more on that later. In fact, the first thing to do is send you elsewhere to read other stuff, like:
If you read Danish or you know Google translate, you'll find no end of commentary and the odd blog post (including goddess of rum balls and burner of kitchen milk herself, Dukken), and of course it ranges from sources who never set foot in the Villa to peeps who were there even more than me (the aforementioned Dukken).
Not about me. Or, well, fuck, it is.
Ooohkay. To be honest, the hardest thing about writing about Signa is not being an asshole oneself, but if there's one thing the piece taught me is that I am as capable as anyone of laughing at misfortune—no, not misfortune, rape—and of acting (or more like not acting, which let's call it passing) in a way that keeps me in favour of whomever I want to be in favour of, even at the expense, humiliation, or torture of someone else, and possibly the worst thing, that I have a great capacity to lord it over other people, particularly when they're asking stupid questions. This is the thing. I really wouldn't like to make this about me. I am not a better or smarter or more compassionate person than others who were at Villa Salò but I have to keep telling myself that. I catch myself being selfish and superior all the time. Only Merry, glorious kitchen bitch that she was, took me down a notch from time to time. "You know, it's not all about you," she said to shut me up once over peeling an endless amount of carrots.
Oh sure, that doesn't sound like much of an admonition. But if you consider that a few hours before that I'd been in the Magistrate's room with the Magistrate, the Bishop and a few other guests when Merry came in to serve sandwiches and, in blatant trespass of the Masters' own rules, they raped her while I held the tray of sandwiches twenty centimetres away from her face and watched, then yeah, she didn't have to say much. In my defense, what else was I supposed to do? If I said stop, they would say "no" and continue. If I intervened physically, I would be subdued or restrained and, depending on my behaviour, allowed to stay or made to leave, and they would continue. If I left the room, the rape would continue. I know this because I saw it all happen again and again and again over days. In fact, any intervention was likely to prolong the torture. But you know that's not a defense, that "what was I supposed to do, I couldn't do anything" line. It is no defense at all. The point is there isn't a defense. Not for people like us, which is to say, people. Of course I feel horrible about not interrupting, of course I do. Or rather I feel horrible about not having been able to fix it. An interruption would have only made it more interesting, but a solution, a way to MAKE IT STOP, that I cannot forgive myself for not having.
And one should not forgive that. Because perhaps, one may hope, out of the realisation that in fact there is no way to stop people with money and power from doing whatever the fuck they want, that out of that realisation and in stupid defiance of it one might try to change things anyway. I find myself, in the days after the Villa, having a very short fuse as regards complacency. For ages I had accepted that CEOs would do what they liked but that really they were just people and in their situation anyone would act like that. Now I feel like a seventeen-year-old again with an oversized "fuck you I won't do what they told me" gland and no mercy whatsoever for the greedy. And, well, fuck this sounds dumb but. Haven't you ever wanted to feel like you did when you were young and and the world was completely unacceptable? Aren't you sick of the compromises you've made and the ones in others that you have let slide because fuck it, who cares, integrity is for people who don't have decisions to make? It's maybe a side-order to what Signa's intentions were, but I could never pay them back for the gift of uncompromising anger, I don't care if it only lasts a week.
Nothing to see here folks
Oh and by the way, it's theatrical, yes, by which I mean representational. Which means that Merry was never raped, not in a legal sense. That when Tonino nearly made me puke on the first day when I witnessed him being forced to eat shit, he was acting. When Bernadetta was deflowered by seven men, one right after the other, there was no real penetration. When Franchino got electric shocks on his balls, the it looked worse than it actually was. Actually, I'd need to ask Max Pross about that one, because it looked pretty bad. All of the miseries were acted exquisitely. It took me days to figure out what was "real" and what was not, and I'm left with more than a few uncertainties. I still wonder where the blood capsules are hidden, how they made the shit smell so fantastically shitty, where the hell they hid their real genitalia half of the time, or exactly how they managed to soften the whipping and slaps while making them look terrifically painful. Of course there are some marks and bruises. And I'm willing to bet a house on the claim that not a single one of those performers will ever be the same again. I doubt that any of them, however, if they had to choose again, would choose not to do Salò.
But the point is it was acted so fucking well that many guests mistook something representational for the real thing, which honestly says an awful lot about what people think about artists in general and Signa in particular. They're not torturing the performers, people. There's no need to risk STDs and infection and health in general any more than is required for such a show—the piece risks wonking the artists' view of the human race forever and that's quite enough risk already thank you. There is control, there is communication, and there is a fuckload of trust. After many days' observation, it was possible to see when things were whispered, or when the Children were fighting not to crack a smile at sadistic yet often hilarious dialogue outlining what was going to be done to them in the immediate future. I even saw it in the Duke, one of the most fearsome bastards known to man, woman, or child. And so but the next time someone (probably in performance art) tells me that representation is dead and presentation is the only way to make art... well.
And but so the thing is I have pages to write before I sleep, but this is at least a start.
If you don't know what the heck I'm talking about, it was a 24/7 performance installation based on the Pasolini film Salò, set in a very large (and exquisitely decorated) house, featuring 33 or so performers, visited by 5000 members of the public, and running for four alternating weeks between January and March 2010. Five types of Characters lived there: Masters, who did whatever the fuck they wanted, Madams, who were responsible for the house and its staff, Fuckers, who were bodyguards with strap-ons down to their knees, Maids, who, predictably, maided, and Children, who were usually the object of the Masters' doing whatever the fuck they wanted. Guests entered, got a membership card, received an introduction from Madam Vaccari (which she must have performed nearly a thousand times and yet it ultimately failed to prepare anybody for the house, it seems—well, with the exception of the final introduction she gave, but that's for later), and were given a coloured ribbon denoting which of the types of character in the house was their host: black for Masters' guests, red for Madams, blue for Fuckers, yellow for Maids, pink for Children.
You would be amazed at how many people think a ribbon can change your personality, or entitle (read: excuse) you to act in a manner that, well, let's say civilised folk might call assholery. You'd be amazed at an awful lot of things people thought and said and did in Villa Salò, and I'm not talking about the performers. To me, it was the audience that was, after a while, the real horrorshow. Maybe that's because I spent so much time in the Villa that I felt my perspective had more in common with the performers than with the guests. But again, more on that later. In fact, the first thing to do is send you elsewhere to read other stuff, like:
Balancing on the edge of the black hole which I now call by the name of Salò, I wonder about the road that took us this far. Never in my decade of publicly mapping the shadowlands of human despair have I known a gaze like the gaze of Salò, this forsaken house which has grown with solemn brooding amongst the kindergardens, the cafés, the unknowing passers-by of snowy, clean Østerbro. This is not the faraway castle of Marquis de Sade´s libertine protagonists, nor is it Pasolini´s desolate palace of Italian war time fascists. This is here and now, and ”the four friends” invite everyone to enter. This is certainly no S&M party, and no funhouse either. Our Salò is no more a sex show than Pasolini´s Salò is a porn film.
-Signa, 15/1 - 2010
If you read Danish or you know Google translate, you'll find no end of commentary and the odd blog post (including goddess of rum balls and burner of kitchen milk herself, Dukken), and of course it ranges from sources who never set foot in the Villa to peeps who were there even more than me (the aforementioned Dukken).
Not about me. Or, well, fuck, it is.
Ooohkay. To be honest, the hardest thing about writing about Signa is not being an asshole oneself, but if there's one thing the piece taught me is that I am as capable as anyone of laughing at misfortune—no, not misfortune, rape—and of acting (or more like not acting, which let's call it passing) in a way that keeps me in favour of whomever I want to be in favour of, even at the expense, humiliation, or torture of someone else, and possibly the worst thing, that I have a great capacity to lord it over other people, particularly when they're asking stupid questions. This is the thing. I really wouldn't like to make this about me. I am not a better or smarter or more compassionate person than others who were at Villa Salò but I have to keep telling myself that. I catch myself being selfish and superior all the time. Only Merry, glorious kitchen bitch that she was, took me down a notch from time to time. "You know, it's not all about you," she said to shut me up once over peeling an endless amount of carrots.
Oh sure, that doesn't sound like much of an admonition. But if you consider that a few hours before that I'd been in the Magistrate's room with the Magistrate, the Bishop and a few other guests when Merry came in to serve sandwiches and, in blatant trespass of the Masters' own rules, they raped her while I held the tray of sandwiches twenty centimetres away from her face and watched, then yeah, she didn't have to say much. In my defense, what else was I supposed to do? If I said stop, they would say "no" and continue. If I intervened physically, I would be subdued or restrained and, depending on my behaviour, allowed to stay or made to leave, and they would continue. If I left the room, the rape would continue. I know this because I saw it all happen again and again and again over days. In fact, any intervention was likely to prolong the torture. But you know that's not a defense, that "what was I supposed to do, I couldn't do anything" line. It is no defense at all. The point is there isn't a defense. Not for people like us, which is to say, people. Of course I feel horrible about not interrupting, of course I do. Or rather I feel horrible about not having been able to fix it. An interruption would have only made it more interesting, but a solution, a way to MAKE IT STOP, that I cannot forgive myself for not having.
And one should not forgive that. Because perhaps, one may hope, out of the realisation that in fact there is no way to stop people with money and power from doing whatever the fuck they want, that out of that realisation and in stupid defiance of it one might try to change things anyway. I find myself, in the days after the Villa, having a very short fuse as regards complacency. For ages I had accepted that CEOs would do what they liked but that really they were just people and in their situation anyone would act like that. Now I feel like a seventeen-year-old again with an oversized "fuck you I won't do what they told me" gland and no mercy whatsoever for the greedy. And, well, fuck this sounds dumb but. Haven't you ever wanted to feel like you did when you were young and and the world was completely unacceptable? Aren't you sick of the compromises you've made and the ones in others that you have let slide because fuck it, who cares, integrity is for people who don't have decisions to make? It's maybe a side-order to what Signa's intentions were, but I could never pay them back for the gift of uncompromising anger, I don't care if it only lasts a week.
Nothing to see here folks
Oh and by the way, it's theatrical, yes, by which I mean representational. Which means that Merry was never raped, not in a legal sense. That when Tonino nearly made me puke on the first day when I witnessed him being forced to eat shit, he was acting. When Bernadetta was deflowered by seven men, one right after the other, there was no real penetration. When Franchino got electric shocks on his balls, the it looked worse than it actually was. Actually, I'd need to ask Max Pross about that one, because it looked pretty bad. All of the miseries were acted exquisitely. It took me days to figure out what was "real" and what was not, and I'm left with more than a few uncertainties. I still wonder where the blood capsules are hidden, how they made the shit smell so fantastically shitty, where the hell they hid their real genitalia half of the time, or exactly how they managed to soften the whipping and slaps while making them look terrifically painful. Of course there are some marks and bruises. And I'm willing to bet a house on the claim that not a single one of those performers will ever be the same again. I doubt that any of them, however, if they had to choose again, would choose not to do Salò.
But the point is it was acted so fucking well that many guests mistook something representational for the real thing, which honestly says an awful lot about what people think about artists in general and Signa in particular. They're not torturing the performers, people. There's no need to risk STDs and infection and health in general any more than is required for such a show—the piece risks wonking the artists' view of the human race forever and that's quite enough risk already thank you. There is control, there is communication, and there is a fuckload of trust. After many days' observation, it was possible to see when things were whispered, or when the Children were fighting not to crack a smile at sadistic yet often hilarious dialogue outlining what was going to be done to them in the immediate future. I even saw it in the Duke, one of the most fearsome bastards known to man, woman, or child. And so but the next time someone (probably in performance art) tells me that representation is dead and presentation is the only way to make art... well.
And but so the thing is I have pages to write before I sleep, but this is at least a start.
Wednesday, February 10, 2010
Vietti starts, the spirit is willing but the flesh is decrepit
I never thought I'd think this, but I have a real respect right now for the version of me that's stuck back in time three years ago. I trained a bloody lot.
We've just started rehearsing Vietti (ohj. Akseli Aittomäki, other performers Juha Sääski, Minja Mertanen and Elina Putkinen). We've been a very physical theatre company for quite some time now, and I've never had any tolerance whatsoever for the actor whose idea of a warmup is a cigarette and a change of shoes, but all of a sudden I am that actor and it's tremendously interesting. For me, I mean. This is the problem, basically, with everything in my life: I find really, really dreadfully dull things absolutely scintillating with the delightful promise of information in its most nuanced expressions. Well. What can you do.
So the point being that anyway my body is not happy with me, my calves are screaming, I think I actually may have lightly bruised the flesh on the bottoms of my feet on the concrete floor, my shoulders are complaining, each muscle group in its own little song of suffering, and then to add salt to it all, my brain hurts.
I've forgotten, in a way, how to perform. Or why to. Or something to that effect. For the past couple of years, in school especially, I've been attempting to work without all of those things that physical performers hold to be self-evident and sacrosanct: concentration. The use of the body in its entirety. Awareness of balance and figure and spatial relationship at all times. A sort of soft gaze that takes in the whole space without specific focus. Rhythm control. Breath control. Control control. These all used to be givens when I walked into a rehearsal space, and then too many people called me "theatrical" when I was studying performance art, and I got very, very interested in what the hell made me theatrical, and also got very, very interested in breaking the habit, playing with it, exploding it, fucking around with the methods of performance. The result, I am aware, is often messy, like someone who would have a great performance if they'd only bother to put in the extra bit of effort required. Or like someone who suddenly blanks onstage. I'm really into those moments. I want to know exactly what I'm doing when I'm performing and how I do it.
And but so I had very much thought that because it was so difficult to break theatrically trained habits, that I would never be able to lose them. Apparently I was wrong. I was really surprised in rehearsal to see my fellow performers go more or less directly to a kind of mode, a performance mode, because that is the tool you use in order to make a performance. It's like this: you want to put a nail in a block of wood. You don't even think about it; you go looking for a hammer. It's sensible, normal, and it has worked before. However, there definitely are other things you can use to put a nail in a block of wood, and they might be less efficient, uglier, slower or faster, but they are ways of doing it. Obviously, if any of them were fantastically efficient, they'd catch on and we wouldn't have hammers, and so it's reasonable to assert that the hammer is still the best tool--if all you want to do is get that nail in. However, if you're researching the act of putting nails in two-by-fours, you'd be missing something if you limited yourself to the hammer. And I find it very difficult to turn off, this tendency to treat performance as if it were a nail.
Which, this will basically only last until I have a clear idea of what I'm doing and why and how and to what end--and that's not nearly as daunting as it sounds, because it's also a fairly collective choice, with extra weight given to the director's input. I have gigs coming up next month with Kalevala dell'Arte, which is masked commedia, meaning it's one of the most stylized, set kinds of modes of performance you can ask for, but it's very easy to do because those questions of how and why don't need to come up anymore. You just train it and do it to the best of your ability. In the meantime, it's interesting to be stuck in an unpleasant place, which is how I feel--unpleasant--when in the middle of improvisations et al when I know for a fact that I'm following directions, and I also know (quietly but for a fact) that I'm breaking unspoken rules of theatre. As long as it doesn't hurt anyone, I don't mind.
And so but actually where I'm going tomorrow is to hell. Signa's Villa Salo is where I'm heading, to have my brain taken off and rewired for me again. I don't even know what to expect; last time I saw a show of theirs at PSI 2008 or so I'd never heard of them and had no prejudices or preconceptions whatsoever, so this is very different as I've bought a plane ticket and I'm not planning on leaving the Villa for four days. I'm not sure if I'm excited to be going or dreading it; they're just that disturbing. What makes it complicated is that I find things that disturb me greatly to be, on some level, the most valuable things I can find. The other complication is that I'm a total wuss.
We've just started rehearsing Vietti (ohj. Akseli Aittomäki, other performers Juha Sääski, Minja Mertanen and Elina Putkinen). We've been a very physical theatre company for quite some time now, and I've never had any tolerance whatsoever for the actor whose idea of a warmup is a cigarette and a change of shoes, but all of a sudden I am that actor and it's tremendously interesting. For me, I mean. This is the problem, basically, with everything in my life: I find really, really dreadfully dull things absolutely scintillating with the delightful promise of information in its most nuanced expressions. Well. What can you do.
So the point being that anyway my body is not happy with me, my calves are screaming, I think I actually may have lightly bruised the flesh on the bottoms of my feet on the concrete floor, my shoulders are complaining, each muscle group in its own little song of suffering, and then to add salt to it all, my brain hurts.
I've forgotten, in a way, how to perform. Or why to. Or something to that effect. For the past couple of years, in school especially, I've been attempting to work without all of those things that physical performers hold to be self-evident and sacrosanct: concentration. The use of the body in its entirety. Awareness of balance and figure and spatial relationship at all times. A sort of soft gaze that takes in the whole space without specific focus. Rhythm control. Breath control. Control control. These all used to be givens when I walked into a rehearsal space, and then too many people called me "theatrical" when I was studying performance art, and I got very, very interested in what the hell made me theatrical, and also got very, very interested in breaking the habit, playing with it, exploding it, fucking around with the methods of performance. The result, I am aware, is often messy, like someone who would have a great performance if they'd only bother to put in the extra bit of effort required. Or like someone who suddenly blanks onstage. I'm really into those moments. I want to know exactly what I'm doing when I'm performing and how I do it.
And but so I had very much thought that because it was so difficult to break theatrically trained habits, that I would never be able to lose them. Apparently I was wrong. I was really surprised in rehearsal to see my fellow performers go more or less directly to a kind of mode, a performance mode, because that is the tool you use in order to make a performance. It's like this: you want to put a nail in a block of wood. You don't even think about it; you go looking for a hammer. It's sensible, normal, and it has worked before. However, there definitely are other things you can use to put a nail in a block of wood, and they might be less efficient, uglier, slower or faster, but they are ways of doing it. Obviously, if any of them were fantastically efficient, they'd catch on and we wouldn't have hammers, and so it's reasonable to assert that the hammer is still the best tool--if all you want to do is get that nail in. However, if you're researching the act of putting nails in two-by-fours, you'd be missing something if you limited yourself to the hammer. And I find it very difficult to turn off, this tendency to treat performance as if it were a nail.
Which, this will basically only last until I have a clear idea of what I'm doing and why and how and to what end--and that's not nearly as daunting as it sounds, because it's also a fairly collective choice, with extra weight given to the director's input. I have gigs coming up next month with Kalevala dell'Arte, which is masked commedia, meaning it's one of the most stylized, set kinds of modes of performance you can ask for, but it's very easy to do because those questions of how and why don't need to come up anymore. You just train it and do it to the best of your ability. In the meantime, it's interesting to be stuck in an unpleasant place, which is how I feel--unpleasant--when in the middle of improvisations et al when I know for a fact that I'm following directions, and I also know (quietly but for a fact) that I'm breaking unspoken rules of theatre. As long as it doesn't hurt anyone, I don't mind.
And so but actually where I'm going tomorrow is to hell. Signa's Villa Salo is where I'm heading, to have my brain taken off and rewired for me again. I don't even know what to expect; last time I saw a show of theirs at PSI 2008 or so I'd never heard of them and had no prejudices or preconceptions whatsoever, so this is very different as I've bought a plane ticket and I'm not planning on leaving the Villa for four days. I'm not sure if I'm excited to be going or dreading it; they're just that disturbing. What makes it complicated is that I find things that disturb me greatly to be, on some level, the most valuable things I can find. The other complication is that I'm a total wuss.
Friday, October 19, 2007
Rehearsing and going insane, not necessarily in that order
First week of actually rehearsing Alice ad infinitum. What's sort of on the menu at the moment is that we've done a year and a half of developing ideas and characters and texts and scenes and situations, none of which are in any way causally related to each other or form any kind of plot, and now it's time to select the lucky winning content and string it together to form something.
It appears we're telling a story, but I mean that in the Lynchiest possible way, as in we're telling a story in a similar kind of way that Inland Empire tells a story. I can't even say if it's close to that or not at this point; it's so loose.
The first day Eki showed up with a 78-page script, which we read through, an activity that made us all giddy because it's not something that usually ends up being part of the process at N&H. The second day we worked a couple of beginning scenes, and that was fairly easy. The third day all hell (okay, small hell) broke loose with at least most of the actors. I wasn't able to get a hold of anything and was, in very good form, blaming the others for not giving me what I needed. Even when I realized that that was what I was doing, it was really hard to curb it.
Sometimes I wonder if, as performers, some of us are almost too attuned to each other. I mean, it's immediately clear to me when either Juha or Akseli are having even a 10% off day, and I know that they know when I'm not having a good day either, often before I'm even aware of it myself. Usually this is part and parcel of a very close working relationship, but it means you share a lot of the negative as well as the positive. Basically, we were doing a scene where everyone was together (not something we'd done before), and the characters were more from the classical Alice in Wonderland universe, including a dreadfully stereotypical Alice stereotyped by yours truly. We were lost and unable to give each other anything to go with. It wasn't pleasant.
But it's gone through that and has come out the other side. It's weird that we didn't really have a linear story or a main character before, and now at least in the first act we have an Alice, and her whole way of being is somewhere between the aforementioned stereotype, blank slate, and whatever else pops into my head. It's been very uncomfortable, actually, standing around trying to feel like I look like an Alice, and automatically my body was reverting to some kind of stiff caricature. Eki mentioned today that my body was way more interesting when I was just standing on stage, before I started "acting," and I realized that that zone of awful discomfort was where I was really supposed to be. This didn't make it any more comfortable at all, it just meant that if I felt kinda awful in a lost and squirmy sort of physical way, I was probably doing something right.
These are the kinds of realizations in acting that make no rational sense, and are probably not interesting to read about unless you're going through it yourself. I know I had teachers in school who tried to encourage us to find the discomfort and work with it, but the funny thing is that usually it's so glaringly strong and obvious that you can't "find" it. You just put on an attitude, feeling significantly better in the comfort department except that you know that what you're doing is completely fake and you somehow can't shake the feeling that it's not helping the piece at all, but don't know what else to do. But not knowing what to do is a very rich source.
I remember reading in Anne Bogart that stereotypes exist for a reason, and that for many actors it's a good thing to run into stereotypes instead of fleeing them, because you'll have to go through it anyway to find a way of doing a character that's actually got your real stamp on it. This worked for me in Kalevala dell'Arte (when we were building the piece, Carlo Boso called my acting "Disney commedia") and I'm inclined to think it could be a necessary phase for something like Alice. Alice is a world of stereotype, archetype, classic heroine herself. She's got more layers put on her than a Black Forest cake.
And the panic comes from the fact that three weeks ago we were happy as Larry to be playing around with perverse rabbits and queens with chainsaws, and all of a sudden there's a "real" Alice, a real Rabbit, Caterpillar, Mad Hatter, and Dormouse. And it's funny how thrown we were by trying to jump in and getting it all wrong, when we should have known that this would fuck us up, but we were still surprised.
This has to be one of the things I keep noticing these days: how I really, really keep getting surprised by things that shouldn't surprise me any more. I wonder if my artistic process is horribly inefficient. Or if that could be a good thing.
So today, here comes another loop - I've started to take on Alice in my own thinking, which is at once really encouraging and a bit sickeningly worrying. You see, Alice is confused at every turn and her identity and reality put into question. I got a direction that I completely misunderstood, and when I finally got on the boat with the others, saying, "But..what do you mean?... Oh! Now I get it," Juha burst out, "That was an Alice reaction." And from there I started to feel that Alice is more like a kind of behaviour, a state of confusion, the activity of constantly negotiating what is real and what is not, and not like any one little girl. But then I noticed I was answering questions directed at me, the actor, as Alice, the character; or as "myself through the filter of Alice the behaviour," and I started all at once to lose the sense of who exactly was answering the question. All of a sudden I didn't know where the thoughts were coming from, or to whom the question was addressed. And right after that, Juha's William S Burroughs line "Madness is confusion of levels of fact...Madness is not seeing visions but confusing levels," just about made my brain shiver.
Which is great, because this is what the heart of the project was always about: where does a character end and where does the actor begin? What are the limits of personality? Is psychology infinite?
It's one thing to be in a very physical or technically demanding performance and have to monitor yourself all the time; it's another thing entirely to do something more akin to performance art, where there is no representation or confusion of levels but you can be very attuned to your own emotional state or whatever; it's yet another thing to have the experience where, for perhaps a moment or two, you get the sensation of having merged with a character, or you feel a character start to melt with you, or you momentarily forget what you're doing, or you notice in your real life that you're picking up a character's way of responding to situations. Traditionally that's quite Method. Somehow I have the feeling that it relates more to naturalistic acting than to anything else. But whether or not it makes for a good performance, it is a real experience for the performer. I think most actors who come from a more "physical" school aren't so interested in pinpointing the place where their character separates from their own personality because that's just not terribly relevant, but for any devoted Method actor, this should be a very rich place of study, no? To try to discover what nuances make you tick, in order to make another, created personality tick in a very lively way?
I'm not making a judgement call on which kind of acting is better; obviously, there's a time and place for everything. And Eki's style isn't naturalistic at all; he uses the term "transparent acting," which I kind of have to think about a bit more before expanding on it. But now what I find interesting is that I'm consciously noticing this "melting" as a part of the process. What would happen if you could play with that even more? Consciously? With a great deal of control? Can anyone control that kind of thing? What part of me is Alice, and to what extent is Alice in everybody? To what extent am I in everybody, or everybody in me? Should I, in this performance, constantly be looking for the spot where Alice begins--is that the key to acting this time?
It appears we're telling a story, but I mean that in the Lynchiest possible way, as in we're telling a story in a similar kind of way that Inland Empire tells a story. I can't even say if it's close to that or not at this point; it's so loose.
The first day Eki showed up with a 78-page script, which we read through, an activity that made us all giddy because it's not something that usually ends up being part of the process at N&H. The second day we worked a couple of beginning scenes, and that was fairly easy. The third day all hell (okay, small hell) broke loose with at least most of the actors. I wasn't able to get a hold of anything and was, in very good form, blaming the others for not giving me what I needed. Even when I realized that that was what I was doing, it was really hard to curb it.
Sometimes I wonder if, as performers, some of us are almost too attuned to each other. I mean, it's immediately clear to me when either Juha or Akseli are having even a 10% off day, and I know that they know when I'm not having a good day either, often before I'm even aware of it myself. Usually this is part and parcel of a very close working relationship, but it means you share a lot of the negative as well as the positive. Basically, we were doing a scene where everyone was together (not something we'd done before), and the characters were more from the classical Alice in Wonderland universe, including a dreadfully stereotypical Alice stereotyped by yours truly. We were lost and unable to give each other anything to go with. It wasn't pleasant.
But it's gone through that and has come out the other side. It's weird that we didn't really have a linear story or a main character before, and now at least in the first act we have an Alice, and her whole way of being is somewhere between the aforementioned stereotype, blank slate, and whatever else pops into my head. It's been very uncomfortable, actually, standing around trying to feel like I look like an Alice, and automatically my body was reverting to some kind of stiff caricature. Eki mentioned today that my body was way more interesting when I was just standing on stage, before I started "acting," and I realized that that zone of awful discomfort was where I was really supposed to be. This didn't make it any more comfortable at all, it just meant that if I felt kinda awful in a lost and squirmy sort of physical way, I was probably doing something right.
These are the kinds of realizations in acting that make no rational sense, and are probably not interesting to read about unless you're going through it yourself. I know I had teachers in school who tried to encourage us to find the discomfort and work with it, but the funny thing is that usually it's so glaringly strong and obvious that you can't "find" it. You just put on an attitude, feeling significantly better in the comfort department except that you know that what you're doing is completely fake and you somehow can't shake the feeling that it's not helping the piece at all, but don't know what else to do. But not knowing what to do is a very rich source.
I remember reading in Anne Bogart that stereotypes exist for a reason, and that for many actors it's a good thing to run into stereotypes instead of fleeing them, because you'll have to go through it anyway to find a way of doing a character that's actually got your real stamp on it. This worked for me in Kalevala dell'Arte (when we were building the piece, Carlo Boso called my acting "Disney commedia") and I'm inclined to think it could be a necessary phase for something like Alice. Alice is a world of stereotype, archetype, classic heroine herself. She's got more layers put on her than a Black Forest cake.
And the panic comes from the fact that three weeks ago we were happy as Larry to be playing around with perverse rabbits and queens with chainsaws, and all of a sudden there's a "real" Alice, a real Rabbit, Caterpillar, Mad Hatter, and Dormouse. And it's funny how thrown we were by trying to jump in and getting it all wrong, when we should have known that this would fuck us up, but we were still surprised.
This has to be one of the things I keep noticing these days: how I really, really keep getting surprised by things that shouldn't surprise me any more. I wonder if my artistic process is horribly inefficient. Or if that could be a good thing.
So today, here comes another loop - I've started to take on Alice in my own thinking, which is at once really encouraging and a bit sickeningly worrying. You see, Alice is confused at every turn and her identity and reality put into question. I got a direction that I completely misunderstood, and when I finally got on the boat with the others, saying, "But..what do you mean?... Oh! Now I get it," Juha burst out, "That was an Alice reaction." And from there I started to feel that Alice is more like a kind of behaviour, a state of confusion, the activity of constantly negotiating what is real and what is not, and not like any one little girl. But then I noticed I was answering questions directed at me, the actor, as Alice, the character; or as "myself through the filter of Alice the behaviour," and I started all at once to lose the sense of who exactly was answering the question. All of a sudden I didn't know where the thoughts were coming from, or to whom the question was addressed. And right after that, Juha's William S Burroughs line "Madness is confusion of levels of fact...Madness is not seeing visions but confusing levels," just about made my brain shiver.
Which is great, because this is what the heart of the project was always about: where does a character end and where does the actor begin? What are the limits of personality? Is psychology infinite?
It's one thing to be in a very physical or technically demanding performance and have to monitor yourself all the time; it's another thing entirely to do something more akin to performance art, where there is no representation or confusion of levels but you can be very attuned to your own emotional state or whatever; it's yet another thing to have the experience where, for perhaps a moment or two, you get the sensation of having merged with a character, or you feel a character start to melt with you, or you momentarily forget what you're doing, or you notice in your real life that you're picking up a character's way of responding to situations. Traditionally that's quite Method. Somehow I have the feeling that it relates more to naturalistic acting than to anything else. But whether or not it makes for a good performance, it is a real experience for the performer. I think most actors who come from a more "physical" school aren't so interested in pinpointing the place where their character separates from their own personality because that's just not terribly relevant, but for any devoted Method actor, this should be a very rich place of study, no? To try to discover what nuances make you tick, in order to make another, created personality tick in a very lively way?
I'm not making a judgement call on which kind of acting is better; obviously, there's a time and place for everything. And Eki's style isn't naturalistic at all; he uses the term "transparent acting," which I kind of have to think about a bit more before expanding on it. But now what I find interesting is that I'm consciously noticing this "melting" as a part of the process. What would happen if you could play with that even more? Consciously? With a great deal of control? Can anyone control that kind of thing? What part of me is Alice, and to what extent is Alice in everybody? To what extent am I in everybody, or everybody in me? Should I, in this performance, constantly be looking for the spot where Alice begins--is that the key to acting this time?
Tuesday, October 02, 2007
Too much theory, confusion, and Abramovic (thank god)
Apparently I've been steeped far enough in theatre not to know certain things in other fields, such as the fact that the universe is expanding, there's a country out there called Iran, and Marina Abramovic's performance House with the Ocean View, in which she lived and fasted for twelve (!) days in an art gallery, living on top of three platforms, where there was a shower, toilet, platform for a bed, table and chair. She did not speak or write or read, and spent most of her (rather meditative) time looking at the audience, who would look at her. I mean to say she would give her gaze to one person at a time, and that person would gaze back, and anybody else in the room would be witnessing this exchange. Apparently it was even featured in an episode of Sex in the City, but I'm TV-less so I can't really be blamed for that. Here's something on it for more: the amazing Laurie Anderson interviewing (read: chitchatting with) Marina Abramovic.
What's really lovely about this piece is its spirituality. I have been feeling for a long time now that the general push in the artistic world, or my world in general, has been towards a spiritual direction. I grew up mostly atheist or at least agnostic; I went to church because I had to but didn't put any energy into it. I thought when I was a teenager that essentially religion, at least in the West, was pretty much dead. I don't know when the turnaround happened, but I'd wager not too long ago. Somehow it's even started to feel less cliche to mention it as a post-9/11 phenomenon. And I guess if I'm going to mention my own experience, I have to frame everything from the point of view of a white, middle-class, North American, politically left-leaning girl. The politically left-leaning is important: religion (Christianity at least, now often Islam as well) was always for the right-wing crowd, and the lefties were saddled with crystal-toting spiritual fanatics who, for all their wonderful intentions and energy, have not always been the most credible lot. When I was in high school, the vast majority of my friends were both intellectual and at least agnostic, if not atheist. I still do not have many friends who attend organized religious services, but more and more I find out that they're closet meditators, or pray, or are interested in Zen, or what have you.
Here's something wonderful I read tonight. Peggy Phelan's essay Marina Abramovic: Witnessing Shadows got me right at the end:
This is the kind of thing I really want to work on.
Aside from all that loveliness, I just have too freaking much theory in my head. All of the E-opiskelijät (Performance students) were literally having to force ourselves awake in class today, not because of the subject matter, but because, as I discussed with most of us afterwards, our heads are so full of an overdose of -isms and -alities and yadda yadda that we suddenly feel like we really can't take in any more. I was trying to find sensitive yet sturdy parts of my hands to bite in class, hoping that the pain would force my eyelids to their upright and locked position, but to no avail.
What's really lovely about this piece is its spirituality. I have been feeling for a long time now that the general push in the artistic world, or my world in general, has been towards a spiritual direction. I grew up mostly atheist or at least agnostic; I went to church because I had to but didn't put any energy into it. I thought when I was a teenager that essentially religion, at least in the West, was pretty much dead. I don't know when the turnaround happened, but I'd wager not too long ago. Somehow it's even started to feel less cliche to mention it as a post-9/11 phenomenon. And I guess if I'm going to mention my own experience, I have to frame everything from the point of view of a white, middle-class, North American, politically left-leaning girl. The politically left-leaning is important: religion (Christianity at least, now often Islam as well) was always for the right-wing crowd, and the lefties were saddled with crystal-toting spiritual fanatics who, for all their wonderful intentions and energy, have not always been the most credible lot. When I was in high school, the vast majority of my friends were both intellectual and at least agnostic, if not atheist. I still do not have many friends who attend organized religious services, but more and more I find out that they're closet meditators, or pray, or are interested in Zen, or what have you.
Here's something wonderful I read tonight. Peggy Phelan's essay Marina Abramovic: Witnessing Shadows got me right at the end:
The condition of witnessing what one did not (and perhaps cannot) see is the condition of whatever age we are now entering. Whether we call this period "the post-postmodern age" or "the age of terrorism," it is characterized boy by an intimate reawakening to the fragility of life and a more general sense of connection to one another that exceeds simple geophysical, ideological, or other cultural proximity.
...
[Communicating under these conditions] will require practice, patience, humility, and the recognition that the social body, like our own all-too-human body, is both stronger than we guessed and unbearably tender.
...
[Communicating under these conditions] will require practice, patience, humility, and the recognition that the social body, like our own all-too-human body, is both stronger than we guessed and unbearably tender.
This is the kind of thing I really want to work on.
Aside from all that loveliness, I just have too freaking much theory in my head. All of the E-opiskelijät (Performance students) were literally having to force ourselves awake in class today, not because of the subject matter, but because, as I discussed with most of us afterwards, our heads are so full of an overdose of -isms and -alities and yadda yadda that we suddenly feel like we really can't take in any more. I was trying to find sensitive yet sturdy parts of my hands to bite in class, hoping that the pain would force my eyelids to their upright and locked position, but to no avail.
Tuesday, September 18, 2007
Stuff I managed to sorta learn this week
- A lot of lectures make a head full, especially in your second language
- Qi gong is one of those things you have to fight your will to fight in order to get
- You (I) can't go to bed at 02:00 and be up at 07:00 all the time
- You can not perform something for 3 months and then pick it up again with only really minor glitches in memory and in fact find that the role has deepened while you ignored it
- That my bike and I have a twisted relationship; or rather, I do and I'm not so sure what Betty thinks, but I'll bet she wants me to oil her chain pretty soon. I started to notice that no matter when I ride (it's only 14 minutes to school), I ride really hard. I can't seem to stop myself from hovering at an intensity that is just short of eyeballs-rolling-back-into-skull, and just on the edge of ecstatic discomfort (torture, if you like). I make noises when I ride, like basic animal ones. And I'm all like, why on earth am I like this? With myself?
- Dramatic theatre and performance, while on a kind of continuum, really are different
- I really, really want to find out where that border is
Lost Persons Area on Thursday, Kalevala dell'Arte on Sunday! Both at Stoa! Come see!
Monday, September 10, 2007
Welcome back, Alice
Cheshir Cat can has cheezburgr? (sorry)
We've been trying on each other's characters and the results are terribly fun. It's somehow very satisfying to dress up as your colleague would do and try to use their character rules to build your own thing. The only problem is that if you have the same pants, you can't both be wearing them at the same time.
At the moment the main tasks are rather space and time related. As in, building new areas in the Höyhentämö (our space on Korkeavuorenkatu in Helsinki), putting up curtains, thinking about mirrors and lights, and then organizing things in order, some kind of dramaturgy, for lack of a better word. If it's not a drama, what kind of urgy are we supposed to have? We have a whole slew (and I mean a really really large number) of characters, and thankfully a smaller number of places where they exist, including places like New York, Wonderland, outer space, and in the mirror. We're still building new characters but none of them really has anything like a story attached to them, or a through-line. Everyone's leaving all the time, never to return. They kind of have encounters or situations, and then that's it. Poof, they're gone.
Attempting to organize
In Beyond the Red Room, a piece from 2004 at Naamio ja Höyhen and also directed by Eki Vuori, there was a small space with rather tight and simple rules. Colours (created by light) indicated what kind of a world the audience was in. It wasn't the only indication, but it was a consistent throughline, and it took me many viewings of the piece (I ran lights, or colours if you like) to actually clue in to the logic. The more inconsistencies you have in a piece, the more an audience appreciates a strong, simple throughline. Films like Mullholland Drive operate with these principles. MH is disorienting enough to keep you from hoping after a watertight story, but it's not so disjointed that you can't follow or get involved in what's going on. I rather think that complete anarchy on the stage is annoying and doesn't give an audience all that much aside from the potential for a few brilliant moments. We're people. We need something to hang on to while we're shown something beautiful.
On the other hand, I'm also kind of aware of the fact that me even discussing the process in pieces like Elektra and Alice sounds a bit stupid from time to time. I don't want to explain things away, obviously, but when I say "Filthy Rabbit" I have a very clear idea of what that is and how it got into the performance, but you peeps don't. Or if I talk about Looking Glass Land or "Me-ness" in the context of this show... I feel a bit idiotic, as I know I'm not really communicating, but I just feel I have to carry on like that. I've noticed in devising theatre that some kind of common language is always developed. A group will never be able to work exactly the same way as they did last time, because the people have changed and the aims of the work have changed. So we make stuff up as we go along and because we also need to talk about it, we name it when we make it up. Which is fine for those of us working on the thing itself, but woe to anybody who has to listen to me talk about it. :)
Characters have speeches, but they're not terribly fixed. Many of them have even only been improvised once, scribbled down, maybe gone over a couple more times if they're lucky, with a bit of feedback, and that's pretty much where they are. The all-out freshness even reminds me of working with clown: you have your character's basic outline of behaviour, and then you simply pay attention to (and meticulously, lovingly, gratefully capitalize on) all the accidents that start to happen as soon as you present the character.
Juha puts on the silver queen
I know I mentioned this before in an earlier post. I wanted to come back to it because it showed up again so strongly when we tried on each others' characters. And it's a fascinating question, when you think that actors can spend their entire lives training physically and vocally, practicing and thinking endlessly about a role, even rehearsing for weeks or months in rehearsal clothes, not a costume at all, and then an experiment like this comes along and makes you wonder about your previous rehearsal process. Mind, I can also sense that I'm much more sensitive to whether characters switch themselves on or whether I'm working to bring them out, because I happen to be paying attention to the process.
I'm aware that after 10 years of training, this may sound hopelessly naive. Just imagine as you wake up one day and you start to notice the mechanics of the process by which you move from sleeping to awake, and from then on you keep finding yourself waking up from time to time and noticing something new about that process, until eventually you can't wake up without observing yourself.
Friday, September 07, 2007
Back to school, back to work
So I took a few months off after all but burning myself out with Elektra, but I'm back and intend to be badder than ever. :)
An interesting thing about physical burnout: it takes a long time to recover. Like two months even. I wouldn't say that I was really mentally burnt after last season, but I really had pushed my body to its limit. While Elektra closed in mid-May, I noticed during Kalevala warmups (it ran until June 20) that I was never even able to get my body to run properly. With jumps, balances, and basically especially stuff that involved the legs, I felt vaguely like I was in one of those dreams where the more you will yourself to run away from the knife-wielding, goalie-masked Jason, the more cemented your feet become to the ground. Eventually I learned to just take this as what was available to me now and take it easy until I got my power back, no matter how long that might take. Started taking some ballet lessons in July, and by the time August rolled around and Juha and I enrolled in a three-week intensive Afro dance course, the body was right as rain. I'm deliriously happy to be training again.
So I got into school
And it's been two weeks since my first day of a Master's program at Teatterikorkeakoulu, in Performance art & theory (Esitystaide ja -teoria). There are six of us in the class (3 foreigners, 3 Finns; 3 carnivores, 3 veggies; 3 PCs, 3 macs; so far we've been having a game out of finding all the ways we split down the middle), and the program is known around the school for being academic to the point of nerd-dom, but we're also doing a lot of practical work. I'm looking forward to the mix, becuase it's what I wanted. On this blog I've noticed a tendency to start thinking more methodically about what I do; in this program I'll have the opportunity to officially concentrate on that much. But the practical work is also essential.
My two-year project, at the moment, is basically a study of "stage presence" and how it relates to the body and mind of the performer.
That's a very, very nutshell version. I'm looking at biomechanics as a form of physical, theatrical training. I'm looking at Zen as a form of mental attention/concentration training. Technology in our lives as a source of interruption of our natural moment-to-moment presence. The audience as a source of presence itself, and how that might interact with the peformer. Presence as a trainable skill. The concept of interruption, the idea of control, and the link between what we believe we can/cannot control and our own sense of well-being. All of these things (which now make the project sound like it's branching out like a Lorenz Attractor) are sort of stuck in my head as interesting points of contact for research.
The research itself is quite the process. How does one document stage presence exactly? Video, photographs, writing? How can it be measured, if at all? Of course I'm not expecting to come up with any mathematical formulae, but it's interesting to assess the value of such subjective research. Obviously what I learn will be fairly personal and in many ways known only to me, both in my mind and body, but if I manage to communicate what I find well, I suppose that is the Big Idea. Performers aren't scientists in the way that you worked in high school chemistry, where the answers were all fixed and knowable; but when someone goes deep into an area of their artistic work, their projects can be helpful and inspiring for others. And when that person manages to communicate, at least partially, what they've found, it can really resonate with another. Quite a beautiful thought. When I pick up Peter Brook or Kristin Linklater or Anne Bogart at the library, I really cannot have any hope that they will have an easy solution to my performance questions, but what I find from time to time is a paragraph or even chapter that blows my mind, clears out a few cobwebs, and helps me point my work somewhere new. Is that what art research is really about? Is it really secretly more for creative than informative purposes?
MasQue festival in Helsinki, 20-23.9, Stoa
Bringing back some of the older work. Davide and Soile and Sanni have been working like crazy to get a mask theatre festival up and running, and it's looking way more promising than they'd ever thought when they first came up with the idea. We at Teatteri Metamorfoosi will be bringing back Lost Persons Area, a silent, full-face mask play about old people and death, which premiered in February 2006 and I'll be damned if I remember the choreography (or acting, or whatever you might call it, but you see silent mask acting is incredibly technical, requiring precise isolation of body parts and continuous attention, and it feels very much like you're choreographed). We'll also do another round of Kalevala dell'Arte, which combines Kalevala characters and stories with the Commedia dell'Arte style, and I'm all like hip-hooraying about that one because I just love to do it. I'm Louhi, the leader of the northern lands and the evil character, and I never knew how much I enjoyed being evil before this. It's a great show, with music, acrobatics, fighting, gags, and a couple of touching moments too.
The whole programme at metamorfoosi.com
Plus Alice, oh Alice
And tomorrow starts Alice ad infinitum in earnest. We've knocked down a wall at the Höyhentämö, taken out the auditorium, repainted, thrown half of our storage space contents away, cleaned the rest, archived, inventoried, and put away all manner of theatre stuff, and we're ordering red velvet curtains.
It feels like we've just let a whole bunch of air into the space. Well, it's bigger, and there's more work to be done, but it's great even now just to think of the space in a different way. We open on November 28.
Rest up
An interesting thing about physical burnout: it takes a long time to recover. Like two months even. I wouldn't say that I was really mentally burnt after last season, but I really had pushed my body to its limit. While Elektra closed in mid-May, I noticed during Kalevala warmups (it ran until June 20) that I was never even able to get my body to run properly. With jumps, balances, and basically especially stuff that involved the legs, I felt vaguely like I was in one of those dreams where the more you will yourself to run away from the knife-wielding, goalie-masked Jason, the more cemented your feet become to the ground. Eventually I learned to just take this as what was available to me now and take it easy until I got my power back, no matter how long that might take. Started taking some ballet lessons in July, and by the time August rolled around and Juha and I enrolled in a three-week intensive Afro dance course, the body was right as rain. I'm deliriously happy to be training again.
So I got into school
And it's been two weeks since my first day of a Master's program at Teatterikorkeakoulu, in Performance art & theory (Esitystaide ja -teoria). There are six of us in the class (3 foreigners, 3 Finns; 3 carnivores, 3 veggies; 3 PCs, 3 macs; so far we've been having a game out of finding all the ways we split down the middle), and the program is known around the school for being academic to the point of nerd-dom, but we're also doing a lot of practical work. I'm looking forward to the mix, becuase it's what I wanted. On this blog I've noticed a tendency to start thinking more methodically about what I do; in this program I'll have the opportunity to officially concentrate on that much. But the practical work is also essential.
My two-year project, at the moment, is basically a study of "stage presence" and how it relates to the body and mind of the performer.
That's a very, very nutshell version. I'm looking at biomechanics as a form of physical, theatrical training. I'm looking at Zen as a form of mental attention/concentration training. Technology in our lives as a source of interruption of our natural moment-to-moment presence. The audience as a source of presence itself, and how that might interact with the peformer. Presence as a trainable skill. The concept of interruption, the idea of control, and the link between what we believe we can/cannot control and our own sense of well-being. All of these things (which now make the project sound like it's branching out like a Lorenz Attractor) are sort of stuck in my head as interesting points of contact for research.
The research itself is quite the process. How does one document stage presence exactly? Video, photographs, writing? How can it be measured, if at all? Of course I'm not expecting to come up with any mathematical formulae, but it's interesting to assess the value of such subjective research. Obviously what I learn will be fairly personal and in many ways known only to me, both in my mind and body, but if I manage to communicate what I find well, I suppose that is the Big Idea. Performers aren't scientists in the way that you worked in high school chemistry, where the answers were all fixed and knowable; but when someone goes deep into an area of their artistic work, their projects can be helpful and inspiring for others. And when that person manages to communicate, at least partially, what they've found, it can really resonate with another. Quite a beautiful thought. When I pick up Peter Brook or Kristin Linklater or Anne Bogart at the library, I really cannot have any hope that they will have an easy solution to my performance questions, but what I find from time to time is a paragraph or even chapter that blows my mind, clears out a few cobwebs, and helps me point my work somewhere new. Is that what art research is really about? Is it really secretly more for creative than informative purposes?
MasQue festival in Helsinki, 20-23.9, Stoa
Bringing back some of the older work. Davide and Soile and Sanni have been working like crazy to get a mask theatre festival up and running, and it's looking way more promising than they'd ever thought when they first came up with the idea. We at Teatteri Metamorfoosi will be bringing back Lost Persons Area, a silent, full-face mask play about old people and death, which premiered in February 2006 and I'll be damned if I remember the choreography (or acting, or whatever you might call it, but you see silent mask acting is incredibly technical, requiring precise isolation of body parts and continuous attention, and it feels very much like you're choreographed). We'll also do another round of Kalevala dell'Arte, which combines Kalevala characters and stories with the Commedia dell'Arte style, and I'm all like hip-hooraying about that one because I just love to do it. I'm Louhi, the leader of the northern lands and the evil character, and I never knew how much I enjoyed being evil before this. It's a great show, with music, acrobatics, fighting, gags, and a couple of touching moments too.
The whole programme at metamorfoosi.com
Plus Alice, oh Alice
And tomorrow starts Alice ad infinitum in earnest. We've knocked down a wall at the Höyhentämö, taken out the auditorium, repainted, thrown half of our storage space contents away, cleaned the rest, archived, inventoried, and put away all manner of theatre stuff, and we're ordering red velvet curtains.
It feels like we've just let a whole bunch of air into the space. Well, it's bigger, and there's more work to be done, but it's great even now just to think of the space in a different way. We open on November 28.
Sunday, May 27, 2007
Thursday, March 29, 2007
Merde
It's opening night. I just picked up my notebook and thought, because every once in a while I can be frivolous, I'd share some of my notes from the last two runthroughs. Apparently I need to remember:
Aittomäki flying
- pick up one of the cloths if no monkey blindfold
- tie yr damn shoelaces
- he's got a gun
- monkeys keep going, back to suitcase wild energy
- exit on humiliation
- cleaning
- no scissor gesture
- black is the colour immediately. no flowers
- bang them in the water
- silent emergency
- ophelia drowning fixed by going back w/ weight, turning R leg out, hands frozen out. sit on L leg
- just open the baby
- suitcase malfunctions
- davide needs a finger for akseli
Friday, March 23, 2007
One week to Elektra
No time. No time. No time.
I am actually looking forward to performing this show; this from a person who usually prefers the rehearsal period to performing. No time. No time. Rehearsing, and when not rehearsing, designing the poster or flyer. Or programme. Or helping build lights. Or helping find costume bits. Or thinking about my application for school due in one week. Or the grant application due three days after that. And on top of that there's something in the Guardian blogs by Laura Baggaley, entitled Does it matter if we don't get paid for theatre work? and I'm all like, hell yes it does! Because if I go on like I'm going now for another thirty years, you'll have a burnt-out husk of a creative person left. I don't need to have enough for a house in Spain, but something, just something to help pay the rent has got to be there. Somehow her blog post seems like it was supposed to be a reminder of why you got into this non-paying beautiful life in the first place, which is nice to remember, but on the other hand her post is just not developed far enough and it comes off as rather hopelessly romantic.
One commenter commented well: "Having money frees you up in your thinking in that a certain level of worry ( how am I going to eat, pay the rent etc ) is removed. This level of worry has nothing to do with creating work and really only hinders it. Your ability to make good work depends on your ability to transcend your situation. Of course being over-funded can turn you into a bloated complacent so and so but let's face it being over-funded is not a situation any middle/small-scale theatre company is going to be in."
Yes, thank you.
I am actually looking forward to performing this show; this from a person who usually prefers the rehearsal period to performing. No time. No time. Rehearsing, and when not rehearsing, designing the poster or flyer. Or programme. Or helping build lights. Or helping find costume bits. Or thinking about my application for school due in one week. Or the grant application due three days after that. And on top of that there's something in the Guardian blogs by Laura Baggaley, entitled Does it matter if we don't get paid for theatre work? and I'm all like, hell yes it does! Because if I go on like I'm going now for another thirty years, you'll have a burnt-out husk of a creative person left. I don't need to have enough for a house in Spain, but something, just something to help pay the rent has got to be there. Somehow her blog post seems like it was supposed to be a reminder of why you got into this non-paying beautiful life in the first place, which is nice to remember, but on the other hand her post is just not developed far enough and it comes off as rather hopelessly romantic.
One commenter commented well: "Having money frees you up in your thinking in that a certain level of worry ( how am I going to eat, pay the rent etc ) is removed. This level of worry has nothing to do with creating work and really only hinders it. Your ability to make good work depends on your ability to transcend your situation. Of course being over-funded can turn you into a bloated complacent so and so but let's face it being over-funded is not a situation any middle/small-scale theatre company is going to be in."
Yes, thank you.
Saturday, February 17, 2007
Six weeks to Elektra
"This is your captain speaking...
I forgot what I was going to say."
So we're working now, about seven hours a day including break, until the show opens. The material is starting to gather form but it's still loose enough that anything can happen, and still doubtful enough to throw us (actors, probably director too but he doesn't show it so much in front of us) into wild rants of wtf are we doing here. This is like: the joy of devising.
Some of our elements include:
The previous week was our last "workshop" session, tomorrow marks the end of our first week of rehearsals proper. During the workshops I still had a day where I felt absolutely awful about the whole project (for reasons that are not clear even to me), but it seems that the feeling was some kind of entity itself, hanging around in the cellar air and infecting each one of us one day at a time. I have a feeling it's again just one's own artistic fear or ego or what-not making a mountain out of a molehill, where you start to question what the hell you're doing in this project and why does it have to, have to be that way when this way would be far superior, &c. I suspect what's really going on in times like those is that you just really, really secretly want the show to be great and you're building up an arsenal of excuses in case it isn't, so you won't have to go anywhere near your own personal soul's worth when your heart breaks. Maybe that's extreme. Well. It's been part of this process for sure. But this week's been an absolute giggle-fest (from hell, from Davide's POV sometimes). We've got comedy coming out the wazoo, and the project is so much fun it barely feels like Elektra.
But a porn dress! How do you go wrong? Aside from the fact that I can't really move in it and that we need to build a new one every night, you can't go wrong at all!
At the moment the way we work is that the first hour is warmup and training exercises, which are either led by me (biomechanics and working on the etude) or Juha (afro warmup plus his choreography based on movements from our old show), plus a wee bit of work on singing. This is really hard to get through in an hour; I usually find that once you've warmed up the brain and the body sufficiently to do an etude at all, you've got ten minutes left. Which ten minutes, if you know the etude really well, is kinda sufficient since you'll kill yourself if you do it more than thrice in quick succession, but we're still hashing out the shifts of weight and the exact body positions, so it's a bit harried.
Oh, rewind. What's an etude? To make it an extremely short story, it's a training sequence developed for actors, in a similar vein as a kata would be in karate training: an exact sequence of movements to be executed over and over again, striving towards their perfection (which, being impossible, let's just say their improvement). You wouldn't ever use a kata in a fight: you would apply the principles you learn in it. It's the same with a biomechanical etude: you study the etude to learn, very deeply, the principles of balance, weight, mime, rhythm, breath, sensitivity, precision, and visual interest. It's not an aesthetic; it's like a barbell for your actor's body.
The shitty thing about studying biomechanics right now is that there's only a handful of people who teach it, a handful of people who use it, and they're really not in Finland at the moment. So unless I have time and money to travel to a workshop, it's kind of a self-study thing. The really brilliant thing about that is that with Juha and Akseli especially, I've taught them all I know and have quickly come to the end of my expertise, and so doing things like creating etudes for ourselves is an incredibly valuable way to challenge the principles.
And challenging the principles is, like, ridiculous. Here we are, four grown people arguing about the precise angle of a shoulder in a movement called "presenting the passport," and the angle of the shoulder really matters. Or we come up with a brillant movement only to analyze it and discover it's actually two movements, so in the interests of efficiency we have to modify its brilliant self. Or spending twenty minutes on whether a foot should be off the ground or not, and really going at it with ruthless logic. You learn an awful lot that way. So that's keeping me pretty darn happy, although you also have to truncate your learning somewhat when you're in a rehearsal situation where you actually have to produce some kind of show.
I think the fastest I've ever led the warmup was 30 minutes, and I pulled a leg muscle that day. It's amazing how long it takes us. On the other hand, we do have a lot of bits in the show so far where the idea is to push a movement beyond our capacity: to work towards complete loss of power or balance, for instance, and that requires pretty much going all out in a way that spells instant injury if your body isn't prepped like a greased pig. The choreography we made with traffic symbols is one of these. We created movements corresponding to the signs, but the movements had to be too difficult to perform properly every time—more like you stick it once every ten tries. While the movements themselves can be quite pretty, what's way, way more compelling to watch is the look on the actor's face as they will every cell in their body towards stability in a given impossible position, and it's fabulously entertaining when they crash.
What that has to do with drama per se, I can't really say. We're wondering ourselves what the dramaturgical topography is like in Here speaks Elektra, and not so much even like are we looking at a relief map or a political map or whatnot, but what the hell hemisphere is this? Is it drama, theatre, performance art, dance, dance theatre, physical theatre, does it matter as long as you can hold it together? Can you hold it together if you don't really know what it is?
By the way: we finally got a grant. Like, our first real one. We are unbelievably happy about this.
I forgot what I was going to say."
This is what's happening
Some of our elements include:
- airports
- choreography to music as well as to traffic symbols
- a made-up biomechanical training etude called "emergency at the airport," which needs work
- a problem in dealing with stylized vs quotidien movement (i.e. when to use which and whether combining both at all will work)
- spanish tragicomedy (which is sorta like commedia pre-masks)
- a dress made out of a porn mag
- great electro soundtracks created from such sources as purring cats and a washing machine
- images, images, images, images... taped on the body, projected on the body or the set, taped to the wall; they're a total mess
- objects, objects, objects... another logistical mountain. What do you do with all the objects when you finish with them? Every single thing needs a solution. I now understand what I had thought was just a rather trendy "gradual pile-up of complete mess" stage design that seemed to be in a lot of shows that have a kind of kinship with performance art as well as theatre; they save themselves the headache of finishing with the objects.
- the order to develop a combined biomechanics and afro-dance warmup (!)
- seriously, these things just pile up
- The line "before rising to a new level of humanity, please read all instructions and comply with them"
- many beautiful moments and a lot of cheesy ones that need to (perhaps) settle into their stereotypes even deeper so they can become beautiful too
- Not really a clue as to what the costumes or staging are like
Suprisingly excellent source material
for choreography/movement
for choreography/movement
Porn dress! Made of porn!
But a porn dress! How do you go wrong? Aside from the fact that I can't really move in it and that we need to build a new one every night, you can't go wrong at all!
At the moment the way we work is that the first hour is warmup and training exercises, which are either led by me (biomechanics and working on the etude) or Juha (afro warmup plus his choreography based on movements from our old show), plus a wee bit of work on singing. This is really hard to get through in an hour; I usually find that once you've warmed up the brain and the body sufficiently to do an etude at all, you've got ten minutes left. Which ten minutes, if you know the etude really well, is kinda sufficient since you'll kill yourself if you do it more than thrice in quick succession, but we're still hashing out the shifts of weight and the exact body positions, so it's a bit harried.
Oh, rewind. What's an etude? To make it an extremely short story, it's a training sequence developed for actors, in a similar vein as a kata would be in karate training: an exact sequence of movements to be executed over and over again, striving towards their perfection (which, being impossible, let's just say their improvement). You wouldn't ever use a kata in a fight: you would apply the principles you learn in it. It's the same with a biomechanical etude: you study the etude to learn, very deeply, the principles of balance, weight, mime, rhythm, breath, sensitivity, precision, and visual interest. It's not an aesthetic; it's like a barbell for your actor's body.
The shitty thing about studying biomechanics right now is that there's only a handful of people who teach it, a handful of people who use it, and they're really not in Finland at the moment. So unless I have time and money to travel to a workshop, it's kind of a self-study thing. The really brilliant thing about that is that with Juha and Akseli especially, I've taught them all I know and have quickly come to the end of my expertise, and so doing things like creating etudes for ourselves is an incredibly valuable way to challenge the principles.
Akseli doing an old statue
I think the fastest I've ever led the warmup was 30 minutes, and I pulled a leg muscle that day. It's amazing how long it takes us. On the other hand, we do have a lot of bits in the show so far where the idea is to push a movement beyond our capacity: to work towards complete loss of power or balance, for instance, and that requires pretty much going all out in a way that spells instant injury if your body isn't prepped like a greased pig. The choreography we made with traffic symbols is one of these. We created movements corresponding to the signs, but the movements had to be too difficult to perform properly every time—more like you stick it once every ten tries. While the movements themselves can be quite pretty, what's way, way more compelling to watch is the look on the actor's face as they will every cell in their body towards stability in a given impossible position, and it's fabulously entertaining when they crash.
What that has to do with drama per se, I can't really say. We're wondering ourselves what the dramaturgical topography is like in Here speaks Elektra, and not so much even like are we looking at a relief map or a political map or whatnot, but what the hell hemisphere is this? Is it drama, theatre, performance art, dance, dance theatre, physical theatre, does it matter as long as you can hold it together? Can you hold it together if you don't really know what it is?
By the way: we finally got a grant. Like, our first real one. We are unbelievably happy about this.
Tuesday, December 12, 2006
One point five rehearsals to go
I'm flying back to Canada for Christmas; I can't wait to finally meet my niece and see everyone I haven't seen for two and a half years. Just a couple more rehearsals before I go, of course. Stuff I'd like to expand on:
The Projects
Today's rehearsal is for Kalevala dell'Arte, mixing the Finnish epic with the Commedia dell'Arte style. The poetry is beautiful but none of us has a very rigorous approach to poetry (with my Shakespeare background, I seem to be the poetic text expert in the group and that's scary since I'm a total tenderfoot in the field). A few of us have a strong-ish background in Commedia, so that's at least a start. We have a musician, a dancer/choreographer, an acrobat, and a bunch of mask actors. So basically it's ambitious as hell and the training is daunting, but it could be a real hit.
Here speaks Elektra continues in the new year. We had a good discussion about why this particular last workshop segment was so difficult and painful when we all like the project and we all like working with each other. In some ways the content is responsible; you can't do a piece about torture and humiliation and expect it to have no effect on your mood whatsoever. Also we're working very personally and we keep finding that we distance ourselves from the work rather automatically, as a kind of protection. It's very frustrating to watch yourself shut down creatively in order to avoid some discomfort--you can really see it happening and have no idea how to not do it. I'm taking this as material; as a phenomenon that should be worked into the performance itself.
And then Akseli and Juha and I met on Sunday to discuss our upcoming project, with the working title Katsoin kun sinä katosit / I watched you disappear, which, if it happens in front of an audience, will happen next fall. The basic idea is for the three of us to work without a director. We have a common experience, we three, of things like butoh, biomechanics, modern dance, improvisation, and working with directors like Eero-Tapio Vuori, Atro Kahiluoto, Davide Giovanzana, Jani-Petteri Olkkonen, and choreographer Ken Mai. In a sense, their work has a unique combination in us, even though the directors themselves have little to no common artistic dialogue. And we want to crystallise what it is, exactly, that we know. How, exactly, we work as a group of actors, analysing what we have in common without having anyone else come in with new styles or ideas. To begin with, we're just planning workshops where we each take responsibility for a method/style/question and work with it for a couple of hours, and then another one takes a couple of hours, and after a few sessions we can say "I want to combine what you did with this exercise I did the other day and see what happens," and that's our beginning. We also have lots of general interest questions, from application of Laban's movement theories to the relationship between concentration in the actor and concentration in the audience, and the relationship between control and non-control between the performer and the performance. I mean, that's a start. I'm also interested in how people start to "become" each other when they work together a lot or hang out a lot or whatever. So that, in a nutshell of a nutshell, is the starting point for a project. We start training and research in January.
But first, it's back home for a bit of turkey and TLC!
The Projects
Today's rehearsal is for Kalevala dell'Arte, mixing the Finnish epic with the Commedia dell'Arte style. The poetry is beautiful but none of us has a very rigorous approach to poetry (with my Shakespeare background, I seem to be the poetic text expert in the group and that's scary since I'm a total tenderfoot in the field). A few of us have a strong-ish background in Commedia, so that's at least a start. We have a musician, a dancer/choreographer, an acrobat, and a bunch of mask actors. So basically it's ambitious as hell and the training is daunting, but it could be a real hit.
Here speaks Elektra continues in the new year. We had a good discussion about why this particular last workshop segment was so difficult and painful when we all like the project and we all like working with each other. In some ways the content is responsible; you can't do a piece about torture and humiliation and expect it to have no effect on your mood whatsoever. Also we're working very personally and we keep finding that we distance ourselves from the work rather automatically, as a kind of protection. It's very frustrating to watch yourself shut down creatively in order to avoid some discomfort--you can really see it happening and have no idea how to not do it. I'm taking this as material; as a phenomenon that should be worked into the performance itself.
And then Akseli and Juha and I met on Sunday to discuss our upcoming project, with the working title Katsoin kun sinä katosit / I watched you disappear, which, if it happens in front of an audience, will happen next fall. The basic idea is for the three of us to work without a director. We have a common experience, we three, of things like butoh, biomechanics, modern dance, improvisation, and working with directors like Eero-Tapio Vuori, Atro Kahiluoto, Davide Giovanzana, Jani-Petteri Olkkonen, and choreographer Ken Mai. In a sense, their work has a unique combination in us, even though the directors themselves have little to no common artistic dialogue. And we want to crystallise what it is, exactly, that we know. How, exactly, we work as a group of actors, analysing what we have in common without having anyone else come in with new styles or ideas. To begin with, we're just planning workshops where we each take responsibility for a method/style/question and work with it for a couple of hours, and then another one takes a couple of hours, and after a few sessions we can say "I want to combine what you did with this exercise I did the other day and see what happens," and that's our beginning. We also have lots of general interest questions, from application of Laban's movement theories to the relationship between concentration in the actor and concentration in the audience, and the relationship between control and non-control between the performer and the performance. I mean, that's a start. I'm also interested in how people start to "become" each other when they work together a lot or hang out a lot or whatever. So that, in a nutshell of a nutshell, is the starting point for a project. We start training and research in January.
But first, it's back home for a bit of turkey and TLC!
Thursday, November 16, 2006
Kajaani teatteritapaaminen, to summarize
Kekrijuhlat: we burn the goat
Sauna! In! Hotel room!
- 10am-4pm Thursday Alice rehearsal, then go pack
- 19:00 train to Kajaani, cannot sleep sitting up, write some work stuff on laptop
- 1:30 at the hotel, in which the rooms all have SAUNAS! OMG!
- 8:30 friday up, breakfast, go to the theatre
- 10:00 set up and rehearse in totally unfamiliar space
- 13:00 lunch-ish
- 14:30 warmup
- 15:30 perform
- then a wee break, watching Toistoisin (another show), going outside to scream at that giant straw goat for exactly one minute while photos are taken that will appear on tomorrow's front page of the local newspaper, and then go inside for a four hour discussion about political theatre. In Finnish. After that, my brain being painfully full, we went to the bar, after picking up the päiväraha (money! to perform! enough to keep us in beer far too long!).
Saturday involved waking up too late for the first film unfortunately, just catching Markus Ohrn's perverse films (feeding a blow-up doll and fisting a watermelon... hard to explain, but sometimes hilarious or awful or both), watching a beautiful dance video from Teemu Määttänen and then Paula Tuovinen's excellent dance piece REvenge, and then off to another theatre to see Opetusnäytelmä, or lesson play (based on the Brecht concept), which was again highly entertaining and with great performances. The quality of the work presented at this festival was surprisingly good, which definitely helped the discussions. After this second show, it was time for the local children to scream at the goat for one minute, after which with drums and torches we led the pukki down to the river, set it on fire--no, wait, we wait a bit for the fire brigade to come. Let's just wait a bit longer. Boy, good thing we have these drums so I can dance and yell "burn the goat" slogans and forget for a moment here and there that my feet are blocks of ice. No fire brigade? Fine, fine. Just let me fish this bottle of kossu out of my inside-out jacket (dress code) pocket... and but so finally they showed up, we set it on fire, and let it go its merry way on the river until consumed. Then back to the hotel for sauna, and to the theatre again for a party, which ended with me, Juha, Akseli, and Toistoisin's Linda in Akseli's hotel room at 5 in the morning arguing about the death penalty.
Juha, when hungover, will take a taxi in a small town
Hats off to the organizers, though -- when we got there, they had a car to pick us up and take us to the hotel, a good 10 minute walk away, and in general the whole thing was expertly planned, if a little tight on the schedule. While there wasn't exactly much in terms of concrete plans for future collaboration, I think many people would be open to working with each other after meeting in that kind of environment. And the town: cold, snow-covered, quiet, peaceful, and lovely. Ignoring the fist-fightingly bleeding specimens getting chucked out of the nightclub on Friday night (and that's just the women), Kajaani is perfectly idyllic.
Wednesday, November 08, 2006
There's only Alice ad infinitum
So we've finished day two of workshops for Alice in infiniteland, an Eero-Tapio Vuori directed piece with Teatteri Naamio ja Höyhen, coming up one year from now.
At the moment, there are five bathroom-mirror-sized mirrors dangling from the theatre ceiling, complementing our other collection of reflective surfaces around the lobby, toilets, and dressing rooms at the theatre. We've been, for the last two sessions, experimenting with the idea of performing in a mirror. To a mirror. Performing as though nobody else is there, and then performing exactly the same thing (or similar) to an audience. You know how you're at home brushing your teeth and all of a sudden your eyebrows become interesting and fifteen minutes later you've done an eyebrow opera to nobody but yourself? That's related to this kind of thing.
When these cats did Beyond the Red Room (I just took over lights at some point) I thought it looked easy, what they were doing. It was simply a matter of presence. You switch it on, there it is. After watching it again and again I rather lost a sense of how delicate it was. Yesterday for me trying to be fully in the here and now felt like squeezing a lemon through the eye of a needle. My voice went fake, I censored myself, etc etc. Today I had a much nicer session. This probably sounds all wonky to someone who hasn't tried it or seen it, but if you've tried meditation, you'll have an idea of what it's like. It's vaguely like performing in a meditative state; it's far more active than just sitting and breathing, though. It's more the performative embodiment of the principle of Only This Moment Exists. And as with meditation, there's a profound freedom when you slip into the moment of now. In a way, other training styles like the Lecoq neutral mask also develop a similar faculty in the actor. For now in this project, it's more about gurning in a mirror and really meaning it. If that makes any sense.
These are beginning experiments in transformations--where does a character begin, and where does it end? When do I say I am me, and when am I the character? If ever? Where is the limit, or if there isn't one, what does that say about acting?
I don't really want to ruin the surprise of the process, but I also rather like recording it; we did some work getting into a character with full costume and makeup, and then getting back out into "normality", and then repeating the process with an audience. It's all terribly easy or ridiculously hard depending on how you look at it, but it at least is interesting to watch. With themes like parallel universes, the psychology of an actor, Alice in Wonderland, and sexual perversity, how can you go wrong, really? Or do I need to get out of this place?
At the moment, there are five bathroom-mirror-sized mirrors dangling from the theatre ceiling, complementing our other collection of reflective surfaces around the lobby, toilets, and dressing rooms at the theatre. We've been, for the last two sessions, experimenting with the idea of performing in a mirror. To a mirror. Performing as though nobody else is there, and then performing exactly the same thing (or similar) to an audience. You know how you're at home brushing your teeth and all of a sudden your eyebrows become interesting and fifteen minutes later you've done an eyebrow opera to nobody but yourself? That's related to this kind of thing.
When these cats did Beyond the Red Room (I just took over lights at some point) I thought it looked easy, what they were doing. It was simply a matter of presence. You switch it on, there it is. After watching it again and again I rather lost a sense of how delicate it was. Yesterday for me trying to be fully in the here and now felt like squeezing a lemon through the eye of a needle. My voice went fake, I censored myself, etc etc. Today I had a much nicer session. This probably sounds all wonky to someone who hasn't tried it or seen it, but if you've tried meditation, you'll have an idea of what it's like. It's vaguely like performing in a meditative state; it's far more active than just sitting and breathing, though. It's more the performative embodiment of the principle of Only This Moment Exists. And as with meditation, there's a profound freedom when you slip into the moment of now. In a way, other training styles like the Lecoq neutral mask also develop a similar faculty in the actor. For now in this project, it's more about gurning in a mirror and really meaning it. If that makes any sense.
Reetta's Alice
These are beginning experiments in transformations--where does a character begin, and where does it end? When do I say I am me, and when am I the character? If ever? Where is the limit, or if there isn't one, what does that say about acting?
I don't really want to ruin the surprise of the process, but I also rather like recording it; we did some work getting into a character with full costume and makeup, and then getting back out into "normality", and then repeating the process with an audience. It's all terribly easy or ridiculously hard depending on how you look at it, but it at least is interesting to watch. With themes like parallel universes, the psychology of an actor, Alice in Wonderland, and sexual perversity, how can you go wrong, really? Or do I need to get out of this place?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)