01/11/10 by Smyra Yawn
Today I attended the first Shortcuts class. The general introduction to the class and the principles of devised theater I was already familiar with. Afterward, each director did an introductory exercise with the entire class. It gave me a pretty good idea of what each director's starting point is in terms of themes they drew from their text or were hoping to explore.
Candace is very interested in acts of rebellion, a theme which plays heavily into The Bacchae. The first thing she did with her cast was to ask them what sort of visual images they associated with the story. This lead into a discussion of the themes and ideas which they had interpreted. The group began to pose questions about the nature of freedom, literal and socialized prisons as well as ideas of oppression and what they mean for men and women.
Anne discussed mostly logistical issues with her cast, such as scheduling. She asked everyone who had not read Frankenstein to do so by the next class. She discussed with me her starting point for her process, focusing on physicality and ensemble building.
I came in at the end of Joel's class, but I was able to talk with him about his process. Before beginning any sort of creative work, he's going to carefully go through the entire text with the cast so that they are all on the same page about what Shakespeare was trying to say/do with his text. Then he's going to start a discussion about what the cast feels/thinks about these ideas, whether they agree, ect. They will then begin the process of responding. He's drawing some of the inspiration for his processes from Artaud, Brooke, Pina Bausch, and Robert Wilson. I'll be looking into these names before the next rehearsal.
The statement of principles by Grotowski was extremely useful in helping me better understand the fundamental ideas of this process. What I found most interesting was the statement that, "Theater only has a meaning if it allows us to transcend our stereotyped vision, our conventional customs, our standards of judgement . . . " I really love the idea of questioning the most basic and fundamental of standards, to question reality itself, presenting the idea in such an honest and simple way that a spectator would be forced to at least consider it.

The Artistic Manifesto for the course:

Modern, postmodern, and post-postmodern art tends to focus on the process, not the product. Jackson Pollock’s action painting, John Cage’s environmental music, the phenomena of performance installations, performance art, happenings, paratheatre, and improvisation are examples of the artistic interest in the now, the ephemeral, the ambiguous, the accidental, the unplanned, which manifest itself in a creative process that tries to reveal the nature of living itself, Life itself, the phenomenon of being alive, liveness. As performers, we try to touch the intensity of living as fully as possible.

And yet, even as performers, we tend to hook onto the idea of art as a product. Performance is not a product; it is a production, i.e., it is always being produced, i.e., it is always in the process of being made.

And life is not a product, no matter how much you convince yourself that you are making your life to be something or to mean something. It becomes many things and it means a plentitude, but when it is truly lived, when you are fully present in it, life is remarkably dense – richer than any self-assigned concept of ourselves.

In theatre, in performing arts, we are captivated by the notion of life as process, and art as process. Again, not a product, for the product is just a trace of the process, or a key to the process. And process always means movement, mobility, becoming. And theatre particularly is an artform that becomes itself through disappearance.

This forces us to always ask, How to work? What is theatre? What is art? Why should we care? Why do we care? Why are we attracted to it so much? In this pragmatic society, product-crazed world, why do we study, create, and develop theatre? These questions should be answered by thought and by practice, but the best answers are those that keep the questions at work – alive, active, ongoing. Because the moment you forget to ask what is theatre is also the moment of theatre’s death – and of deadly product. We must remember that theatre is an art. Stanislavski brilliantly reminds us about it by naming his theatre, Art Theatre, Moscow Art Theatre.

So how to work? Part of the answer is in the craft of theatre. Methods of working. You study them all the time. In fact, that is what you study. And another part, the part that keeps the methods alive, is in the art of theatre. And this cannot be studied in the traditional sense of studying. The art of theatre comes from what you already have, but need to know how to access. The best methods are the methods of discovering methods – those keep the process of art-making alive. Stanislavski’s method is really that – a method to discover methods. So is any good method. And if you truly ask, with your work, if you ask questions, if your work is an investigation, a research, then there is no failure. If something doesn’t work, it is a lesson. And a university setting, particularly a research university, is the place to do it.

In this class-workshop-laboratory we will approach three texts and engage them in an artistic dialogue through practice and discourse, with primary focus on the former. For guidance and inspiration, we will reach out to Jerzy Grotowski’s Poor Theatre. Indeed, our circumstances will be elemental: the meeting of the actors and the director through literature. But the meeting must be real, here and now, open. Perhaps the most important question is: how to meet?

Kris

Day One

Day One: 11 January 2010, Liz Harbaugh

[My observations are in bold; notes from the day are in regular type.]

The mood in the room is nothing short of exuberant. No one seems to be left alone – everyone has found someone with whom they are bonding, and several of the cast members are ecstatic to see each other. A few people have drifted towards the outside, but the greetings seem to show real affection. This will be a good group, I imagine. Kris is basically a celebrity. It is sort of extraordinary and inspirational to see these young actors so excited about doing avant-garde work. Especially after flipping through BFA applications and seeing essays about people who just love the applause, it is exciting to see young people who love each other and want to do really great work. Not work that everyone will understand or appreciate, but work for the sake of work.

There are so many of them, too. And though most of them sort of belong to a little club of folks who spend all of their time together, it is thrilling to see the freshmen who are joining and enjoying this circle.

Kris begins by trying to organize the young actors. The directors and I are sort of towards the back, watching. As Kris says “This is Shortcuts and you never really know what it is.”

A class and three different projects. Addressing the problems of devised theatre. Two platforms – a meta-project and the smaller devised pieces; we are looking at three different artistic processes. A combination of unpredictability to the scale of unknown. Stealing knowledge from each other and trying to understand what the heck is going on. – K. Salata.

Smyra Yawn – perhaps an ideal spectator. An objective person who is looking at stuff.

The machine is large here.

The business of the syllabus – a moment for laying down ground rules which may be ruptured or broken. The machinery of self-awareness. Grotowski’s approach to working on devised theatre via major texts – the texts are present, but not staged. What is actually staged is your creative reply to these texts. A process in which you are an active reader and part of an ensemble whose aim is to create the reply in confrontation with the text. An inspiration, not a method of working. Actor = key creative contributor in the work. Sincerity and depth are essence of the performance.

Grotowski quotation 2 “translation”: He was a classically trained director who went through an MFA program and was trained in staging plays and found that not to be really satisfactory. He slowly learned that any intellectual understanding of the classics that he might be prepared to execute was not going as deep and successfully as the actual work in the room with the actors in the situation of the text. Trying to understand the forces in theatre that build a performance have less to do with the intellect and more to do with the artistic response with what is happening in the room. Start with one text and sometimes a year later he would find himself dropping original and going to another, working with no text; texts are less important than what happens in the room. Way you build the shortcut will evolve – all the work is about the way the text is going to be read. How will your theatre piece employ the text? Autonomous performance apart from text.

All roles are multi-faceted. Student-actors, teacher/director/leader. No one is only one thing. Dramaturg/spectator, perhaps?

Read these quotes and write a short response (1-2 pages and email to Kris). Try to address already your ideas about the text you are working with, based on the reading of your handout. Try to find the way your own first reply to your own text and be inspired by the way Grotowski is formulating his ideas. Let’s see where we are intellectually.

Statement of principles – rules of the company – teaches us about in what way a theatre company can approach the ethics of its existence? How can we live outside of seasonal hiring? We in the US live without an acting company – this is not a business transaction. We will discuss thoughts about what everyone read next week. First write the paper, then read the Grotowski text and we’ll talk in class.

Directors – tell us a fable based on your text. A story about the way you want to tell the story of your text. Doesn’t have to have a concept of directing in it, but what urged you to choose this text – it already exists in the way you want to tell the story. Like a bedtime story of your piece. There will be blood. You will never sleep again. With the way you wish to tell the story it reveals something about the reason why you chose this text, some things that you were pulled by, hearing the story itself. Comes from Brecht. The fable changes, the way you tell it changes, through the discoveries you make when you work on it and through your telling. In Lear, used fragments from other places as well – in the work, they discovered that other Shakespeare texts were necessary to bring in. That’s why we do the work – we are trying to find something authentically necessary for our work, and it can change and evolve and switch.

Rehearsals intensify when we get closer to the time of sharing. The work has to go steadily, patiently towards that goal that at one point we will be showing. You will be exploring things. Don’t treat your April performance as a deadly destination in which to be or not to be is going to happen. Explore your work all the way to the end. At one point the door will open and the audience will see it, but it will not be finished. It will not be a polished product. With the work we want to open doors – not spray paint something that doesn’t really have walls. We will show what we have, whatever it is – hoping you will show some honest work. There’s no failure in this class – the only failure is if you cheat yourself out of your own process, if you don’t allow your personal confrontation to let you confront yourself. It is about inner growth. It will be valuable for you and for those who come watch you – if it doesn’t happen in you, you are not worthy of our attention. You have to have something to share. It is a particular gift.

Directors’ short intro work – a 5-minute thing – the way you want to begin, introduce yourself. Something that is a hello from each director and a gesture of recognition, a gesture of some direction, a something.

JOEL: The activity that Joel prepared is from Brook’s work with Theatre of Cruelty. Groups of 4-5. I chose this activity because Titus is a hyper-violent piece, specifically focusing on the violence, vocabulary about animals and humans, and exploring issues of gender and race – all things academic we’re going to explore. Starting with violence and pain. Each person in the group is going to go in front of the rest of the group and speak and perform and only allowed to use voice and words; describe a kind of physical pain. You say words but you are in neutral. Don’t be afraid of using anything vocal. Can emote with your voice, can’t move into the face. Purely vocal. Choose a specific type of physical pain that you as a character are going through right now.

RE: Joel’s exercise. I am confused. This seems almost to be antithetical to what Grotowski wants. It is an elevation of a word, a removal from the body, a denial of experience. I wonder if the idea for this has come out of a weird sort of reading of our violence text and this is somehow an idea that physical pain can be vocalized – or perhaps the very removal from the body is supposed to lead the way into a new understanding of the body. This young woman seems to be describing depression, rather than a physical pain. One group in particular seems to be devolving into hysterical laughter, which suggests to me that the exercise is not engaging what it ought to be. It is hard to embrace the work and be honest and self-reflective when you are so busy performing how wonderful you are. And it seems to be rubbing off. This could be the fault of the exercise, of course, and we’ll see as the class goes on. I wonder, though, if this isn’t the sort of class that can perhaps only be experienced once. Perhaps you can really only access the sort of life-changing emotional energy that is the purpose of these meetings and communities; well, perhaps you can only make that transition once.

Joel’s explanation: Do you feel like the words conveyed what you wanted to say? Everyone says no. As a speaker, how did it feel when you were up there? I felt like a moron. It feels improv-y. Putting so much effort into not using my body that I wasn’t telling my story anymore. Focused on limitation. What about just using words that popped into my head – good point. I like it – I think that is an exciting insight. Feeling very upset because of the emotional pain. The idea of sounding like a robot and it being a really troubling issue. Almost lost words from not being able to express yourself. Everyone seems to be gravitating towards an emotional pain, and so what does that mean – because, as we are learning in violence class, there aren’t the words. One says the actual, physical pain: she started to re-feel it – body in neutral could recreate the pain. Body memory – super interesting. Unable to really explain it, couldn’t connect the sensation with the story. Primal pain. Repeating the words, became muddled and such. JOEL – there’s only so much you can do to convey a physical experience.

ANNE: Everyone applauds. The idea of Otherness – at what points is the Other rejected and when is the Other accepted? Victor creates what he thinks will be a paragon of beauty and it turns out to be what he thinks is a monster. Everyone walk around the room in your own space, passing other people. As you walk, slip into soft focus (VP). Aware of bodies, gaze level, don’t push at things, see the space around you as positive space, inhabited by people, and negative space that you can move between. Keep pace up – 1 is the slowest, 10 is fastest, keep pace at a 6 – good brisk walk. Be aware of how you are walking and how everyone else is moving – come to a place where everyone is walking basically the same way. The walk gets a little hippier – I suppose because there are so many women, still performing. Ben, Jasmine, Cameron, Nicole – you are watchers. They will start to watch other people – if you see someone who is not in harmony with the group, speed, etc., go to them and adjust them correct them help them, very gently, show them what they should be doing. If someone comes to help you, follow them. The goal is harmony. Lukas – rebel within the community. You have ideas of your own. As you walk, start to incorporate new things into your body. New movements, nothing that harms or panics, OTHERS: you can choose to adopt the new or you can help Lukas understand the right way to do things. Danielle is also a rebel. Watchers – as you see people doing what the rebels do, you too can choose if you want to rebel or if you want keep correcting. Cassie is a rebel, too.

The group seems to ebb and flow. Everyone wants to be a rebel at first. The ideology of rebellion is encouraged by people joining. But now with the power of removal, what will happen. Do we wish to stay in. The first removal is out. Jasmine enforces. But the rebels will not stay out. There is a flock that moves around. Everyone drops back into neutral. It seems that there are formations of communities – we look for the conflict – we want the other, and need it, and need the power and the community and the possibility of both rebellion and conformity. Because the rebellion becomes conformity, does it not, as the community is invited into it and it becomes permissible.

CANDACE: Groups of four, something verbal. Interested in different forms of communication; sound not recognizable as text. Two actors in each group. Two interpreters. Actors will tell a story without words, can use gibberish, use physicality. Cannot share the story. Interpreters will tell the story. How do we perceive communication nonverbally? Interpreter will speak the story and lines for you.

Actors need to pause for interpretation – the idea that an audience needs a space for that? A space for processing? Is there a way to do so not intellectually? Can we process emotionally, and is that perhaps what we ought to do? The idea of putting the words, does it take away? Or does it show us the limitations? I think there’s a story about sex. And then there is all the planning. What does the planning give us.

[This is such an interesting community, I think. They are all together, a jumble of hormones and feelings and insecurities. I can read them in their bodies. And at the same time they are confident and talented and confident in their talent.]

There is a drug deal. Perhaps? Are we reacting to the storytelling as the actors? Does it change the story? How is storytelling influenced by the idea of the audience? Does the story change? Violence, movement, inflection, language – we need the language, perhaps? Is there a tendency, I wonder, to use the language to show off for our peers? I think perhaps that the performativity, before the community, prevents. So interesting. It is so interesting to watch these bodies move and be exciting and then to watch these stories change, to see bodies move. I guess that is the question, yea? What are the limits of communication? When does vulnerability prevent us or inspire us? How can we create a community both without and with words. How fascinating when the fallback is sort of a throwback to popular culture. We communicate nonverbally by using the old stereotypes of our cultures and our humanity. Sex, violence, conflict, love, etc. It is the idea of the intimate relationship that comes out. Theft, even. Possessions? I’m not sure there is really a trend – it feels a little like a throwback to improv in my Acting I classes. Now there are high monkeys? It certainly forms a sense of community, I suppose. They bond and laugh and enjoy each other. But it is easier to make a joke than to be vulnerable, I guess. Cannibalism? Wow. Perhaps that is the best lesson of the day – every one of these exercises has sort of evolved (devolved?) into humor of a sophomoric type – and perhaps that is because we all need to meet as children before we can grow? Or perhaps it is because we undervalue the idea of comedy and unity as essential criteria for the creation of an artistic community. And then even when we do Odysseus! And the Sirens, we turn it into something else.

CANDACE: how many of you were able to interpret exactly? The more expressive, it is hard to judge what the audience is actually seeing? Interpreters act as the audience. Some of them are on point. The use of tension and attention is important for Candace.

Breaking into groups. I cannot possibly follow all three. But they are now all together in separate groups. No meeting on Monday. Ugh! KS still wants responses so he can read and comment on them. He will visit rehearsals next week. So will I.

Confronting the Text

[Liz Harbaugh]

Today I want to talk a little bit about one of Grotowski’s central tenets, which is that it’s critical to confront the text on which you’re working. I want to start with a quote, not from Grotowski, but from Anne Bogart.

“Inside every good play lives a question. A great play asks big questions that endure through time. We enact plays in order to remember relevant questions; we remember these questions in our bodies and the perceptions take place in real time and space.” – Anne Bogart

Anne Bogart is what I might call one of Grotowski’s inheritors, in that she has been highly influenced by his ideas. Here, we get a glimpse of what Grotowski thinks of as “confronting the text.” Bogart talks about texts through time and space and wants us to seek out the questions that live within them. Particularly, I think, in this class, it’s important to think about the texts we use in terms of their usefulness for moving us beyond them. That is to say, the texts are not the product, but instead they are the way into the project.

Grotowski is looking for a really specific confrontation with the text. He says that “We want to confront the text…to confront the text means to test it, to struggle with it, to come to grips with its meaning in terms of our own modern experiences, and then to give our own answers.” Furthermore, when working with classic texts, Grotowski suggests that actors are building a bridge between the past and the present. So, in other words, we take a classic text, like the ones we’re confronting in this class, and we search within it to find its questions and our own answers to them.

We might say that Grotowski is searching for a method of communication that allows us, as contemporary artists, to experiences timeless questions that can be read across cultural boundaries. So, essentially, Grotowski is asking us to look inside of our bodies and emotions in order to find connections to each other, because it is the actor who must be in confrontation before the audience is able to do so. It is the actor’s confrontation that paves the way for a spectator to understand the confrontation as well. It is through confronting the texts, by finding the moments in the text, the questions in the text, that resonate with us individually and collectively, and then sinking deeper into those moments to find the impulse behind the moment, and deeper again, and again, that we come to the most pure, elemental, physical-emotional experience.

But how else do these texts help us? If we tried to seek out “the most human moments” of our experience, we might be looking too hard. By using a text – by confronting a text and asking it and what? What more? What else? From where? Why? How? Embedded in that confrontation is the constant pursuit of the defining experiences and communications and communities that make us human.

So when we confront texts, we are actually confronting questions about what it means to be a human being relating to other human beings; taking texts not of our contemporary period, those outside of our recent recollection helps us to distill the text down to the most elemental qualities of humanity. So, Grotowski’s international theatre community, and those communities inspired by his work (like this one), are looking to connect a written text with actors’ bodies – in that confrontation, we as artists are able to see ourselves afresh as humans.

Therefore, the questions we need constantly to be asking of these texts, and ourselves, go something like this: what threads, what connections, what experiences and relations still happen for, to, and because of us – how have humans stayed the same, how are we different, how can we see ourselves simultaneously anew and ancient through confrontation with a text?

Welcome to the FSU Shortcuts Blog

Welcome to the FSU Shortcuts Blog. As the semester goes on, we will find all kinds of things to share here. For now, welcome!