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.