Exploring Physical Theatre
Exploring Physical Theatre is a resource that explores the many strands of this dramatic form. Though it credits the work of numerous practitioners and Theatre Groups where appropriate, it is more a hands-on how-to book for teachers to introduce and develop ideas with classes of all ages, though particularly for GCSE and sixth form level courses.
CONTENTS PAGE
INTRODUCTION: WHAT IS PHYSICAL THEATRE
PART 1 THE ORIGINS OF PHYSICAL THEATRE
a] HISTORICAL INFLUENCES
b] FOCUS ON COMMEDIA DELL'ARTE
c] MICHAEL CHEKHOV
d] VSEVOLOD MEYERHOLD
e] JACQUES LECOQ
PART 2 PRACTICAL EXPLORATION: PREPARATION AND TRAINING EXERCISES
a] WARMING THE BODY UP
b] TRAINING THE BODY
c] TRAINING IN ENSEMBLE WORK AND SPATIAL AWARENESS
i] Games that require working together
ii] Spatial awareness
iii] Group movements
d] MIME AND CLOWNING
e] MASKED AND UNMASKED
f] COMMEDIA DELL'ARTE
i] General Commedia training
ii] Some practical hints on the main Commedia characters
PART 3 PRACTICAL EXPLORATION: PUTTING THE TRAINING INTO PRACTICE
a] RHYTHM, SOUND VOICE
b] CREATING PLACE AND ATMOSPHERE
c] USING OBJECTS
d] CREATING CHARACTERS AND METAPHORS TO SURPRISE AN AUDIENCE
PART 4 PRACTICAL EXPLORATION: USING PHYSICAL THEATRE IN TEXT AND DEVISING
a] WITH TEXT
b] AS AN APPROACH TO DEVISING
INTRODUCTION
All theatre is physical - how can it not be, when the actor's body is involved in a setting which is also a physical space? The term 'Physical Theatre' is as absurd as 'polished improvisation', but both terms have come to mean particular things to artists and practitioners. Polished improvisation is not as fully developed as devising, but has been worked on from improvisational beginnings until it is some way towards a finished product. It may be a devised piece in miniature. Physical Theatre [which has also been called Visual Theatre in an attempt to pin-point it further - a definition which appears not to have stuck] is a style of theatre where the actors' bodies are given more importance than is usual in, for example, Naturalistic Theatre. It may be that the actor's gestures and movement are exaggerated, or certain features are emphasised. This might be to make a particular point, or for comedic purposes. In addition, the expectation of an audience watching a group who are performing a piece of Physical Theatre, is that the group should work together in a more extraordinary way, showing a unity, a refinement of group awareness over and above what is obvious from a piece of more conventional theatre.
In the next section, I explore the origins of Physical Theatre, those influences which have inspired groups and practitioners working today. Because I have not dealt with them elsewhere, there is some explanation of the working methods of Meyerhold and Michael Chekhov, neither of whose work have been more than brief mentions in other resources I have already written. As a more recent influence, I have also spent a little time on Jacques LeCoq, who taught so many of our practitioners working today, notably Stephen Berkoff, many members of Theatre de Complicité including Simon McBurney himself, Footsbarn Theatre and Julie Taymor [who staged The Lion King], to name but a few. Of course, major influences like Artaud, Grotowski, and Brook are given credit where appropriate, but I have not attempted to explore their theories fully. I have done that elsewhere. This book is more about the rich amalgation of all the influences - those whose sources we can trace and those which have just been picked up en route [via a workshop here, an exercise passed around till it becomes common practice there] into the modern melting-pot which we loosely call Physical Theatre.
Today there are many groups practising a physical or more movement-based style of theatre. Kaos Theatre, Frantic Assembly, Shared Experience, Told By An Idiot, Foursight Theatre Company and Kneehigh are just some of the more mainstream examples, along with Complicité as mentioned above. Then there are a whole realm of Dance Theatre groups from DV8 to Hofesh Shechter and on... too many to mention. There are amalgams of acrobatics, visual story-telling and movement like Cirque du Soleil or Fuerza Bruta. The field is vast.
So what do they all have in common? What all Physical Theatre groups share is collaboration between all the members in the creation of the product, whether working with a text as the base or devising. The creativity of the actors is of paramount importance. And this creativity comes from the actors' bodies. From the start of rehearsal, the impetus is from the physical - the bodies' ways of telling a story, or expressing emotion. Companies are experimental and playful in approach, seeking for the accidental discoveries that they make which will create a link with the audience's imagination.
There is a demand on the audience to, as it were, fill in the spaces with their own imaginations. Just as some works of art, notably that from the Far East, will leave a large part of the canvas bare so that from the painted branch of cherry-blossom our minds fill in the tree, the sky, the mood, so too the Physical Theatre group will supply the images made by their bodies and the links with our own experience are filled in by ourselves. It is a two-way process. In Physical Theatre the energy created by the live relationship with an audience is essential. For this reason I often call Physical Theatre the poetic form of theatre because , like poetry, where the poem is often a starting point for a journey into the reader's own experience, Physical Theatre images are suggestive, not tied down by verbal or logical explanation. This is different from Naturalism where our imaginations are left sleeping, where all the details are supplied and where what is woken in the audience is satisfaction at the recognition of life or of a character's reality. We may feel sympathy for a character on the Naturalistic stage, but we do not experience the sensory frissons, the kaleidescope of emotions and sensations supplied to us by the best of Physical Theatre.
In the end, the field of Physical Theatre is so vast, so varied, that there are no real definitions one can give which will embrace all that is out there. The attempt I have made above will be clarified, I hope, by the explanations within this resource, and the many practical exercises throughout. By the end, especially if you and your students seek out some of the excellent companies around, you will come to your own understanding of the term.
Above all, by giving routes into practice for a teacher to follow, this book attempts to demystify what, to some teachers, is still a source of anxiety. Pressure is on to incorporate more Physical Theatre practices into examinations. Teachers are aware that examiners applaud and are excited by physical ideas that work. Hopefully, the large range of practical exercises, and the section on Physical Theatre uses in devising and in the approach to text will prove helpful in encouraging teachers to experiment further with their own students. Be brave! The results can be electrifying!
Excerpt from The origins of Physical Theatre:
d] Vsevolod Meyerhold
Vsevolod Meyerhold [1874 - 1940 - shot in prison, a victim of Stalin's purges] was the other one of Stanislavski's students to break away from the restrictions of Naturalism and work towards making the actor's body more physically expressive.
His first disagreement with Stanislavski is about attitude towards the audience. For Stanislavski, the actor's attention must never stray beyond the edge of the stage. Much of his System is devoted to keeping the actor's attention on the stage and the illusion he is creating on it that this space is a real place. For Meyerhold, this was a sticking point. He felt that something magical happened between audience and actors that was the very essence of theatre. Peter Brook also talks of this magical act of creation which is a kind of two-way process between the active participation of the audience and the active participation of the actor. This does not mean that the audience has to get up off his seat - no, the participation is one of concentration. Both the actor and the audience focus so completely on what is happening that something electrical and wonderful happens that is unforgettable theatre. And though it doesn't happen always, it should always be aimed for. Peter Brook calls this 'netting the golden fish'; Meherhold calls it 'the fourth dimension.' If the other three dimensions are the playwright, the director and the actor, the vital fourth dimension - without which the spark of theatre is not ignited - has to be the spectator.
This creation of that magical, theatrical dimension, the active inclusion of the mental energy of the audience, takes Meyerhold away from Naturalism and propels him all at once into something else: the beginnings of a 'poetical' form of theatre, what we now call Physical Theatre. Interestingly, Meyerhold was even more delighted if an audience became more actively involved, by shouting, catcalling, whistles and so on. He was so pleased the first time this happened to one of his productions, the symbolist playwright Blok's The Fairground Booth, that forever after he sought to bring out this kind of active response in an audience - the response of people watching something at a fair, music hall or circus. This takes him closer to Brecht's approach to audience [which Brook in his early days also emulated] and away from the idea of 'magic', which the later Brook seeks through his creation of rituals in which audience and actors participate together.
Meyerhold began to be interested in the old forms of theatre that encouraged a raucous and active kind of audience: those very same travelling troupes of players who included amongst the actors, acrobats, jugglers and showmen of all kinds. To fit with his investigations, he began to formulate an actor's training which involved the kind of plasticity of the body of clowns, acrobats and the like. Amongst other things he turned to Commedia for inspiration, admiring the technical ability that both drew an audience along into its world of make-believe whilst at the same time 'entertaining him ... with the brilliance of his technical skill' [Meyerhold on Theatre, ed. Braun].
Meyerhold's students learned an extraordinarily wide set of skills, including gymnastics, dance, fencing, music and juggling, as well as theatre history, a variety of styles of acting, Commedia and, of course, what he called Bio-mechanics, of which more later. The students were expected to end up proficient in at least one instrument. They did many 'études' in which the bare bones of a scenario would be set and they must improvise with it. And the voice was not neglected either, depite his emphasis on the body. Meyerhold tried to train all-round actors, good at anything and able to perform playfully and at once, as the Commedia artists did.
So what is Bio-mechanics? The truth is, that Meyerhold himself failed to give any one adequate explanation. He contradicts himself often. Certainly it is not just a set of exercises; it is also an acting philosophy. At first it was about teaching the actor economy of movement, awareness of his own body in space, and rhythmic expressiveness. Then, attempting to define his ideas further, Meyerhold talked about movement as action and reaction; mood can create action, but also, more importantly for the physical theatre student, action can create mood. A clear example is one that Meyerhold gave: if the actor is put into a slumped, sad position on a chair he begins to feel sad. Mood is affected by externals and works from outside in. This is the opposite of what Stanislavski had been teaching him, though to give Stanislavski credit - the old master spent his entire life learning and adapting his ideas on theatre - towards the end of his life Stanislavski came round to this thinking too.
The final 'definition' of Bio-mechanics included Meyerhold's fascination with the art of Far-Eastern acting techniques. Japanese Noh Theatre, for instance, takes place physically close to the audience and uses a series of calculated gestures, along with rhythmic movement to create an alternative language for the theatre that goes beyond words - that stands instead of words - to create poetic and visual symbols.
You can see how this chimes in with Artaud. This calculated and precise language of gesture also inspired Brecht, who, with Meyerhold, had an enduring admiration for the visual language of Far-Eastern drama. It forms part of the background to his theory of Gestus.
If you watch a Noh play, you will notice how expressive it is. The acting is full of grotesque grimaces, strong, economical movements, repetitive actions. The actor is a combination of dancer and acrobat, along with the expressive skills of feeling and story-telling. He creates visual symbols, such as repeated shrugging of the shoulders to indicate crying.
Training in Bio-mechanics was devised through a series of exercises or 'études', starting with ones for solo actor and proceeding to exercises for two or more, ending up with full-blown improvised productions. The simplest movements were broken down into units which allowed the actor to investigate exactly what was happening to his body when, for example he reached to pick up an object. The actor observed how his balance changed from one moment to the next, the tiny adjustments that he was making all the time. Movements were broken down into moments of action and reaction, as well as moments where pauses were sandwiched between movement. This awareness of pacing and pausing contributed to the rhythm which Meyerhold exposed in every movement. And of course the rhythms of a movement and the length and variety of the pauses would also be affected by mood and character. It is a complex system which analyses the fine details of every move an actor makes. It, of course, creates a kind of super-awareness in the actor - a self-consciousness [not in the bad sense] which Meyerhold called 'mirror-gazing'. This awareness of what you are doing at all times is not unlike Brecht's insistence that the actor stands outside himself. With Brecht as with Meyerhold too, his insistence on this is a reaction to the immersion of the actor in his inner self which Naturalism encouraged. The actor should calculate at all times the effect he is having on an audience.
The extreme of this calculative approach is at odds with some of modern Physical Theatre practice which, following LeCoq and the later work of Brook encourages a more accidental approach through playfulness. The idea with both of these practitioners is to see what happens when objects and ideas are played with, only 'fixing' them into a performance when it becomes clear that an exciting symbol has been happened upon. Though, of course, after that, more calculation has to come into play, to give a cohesion to the final production.
I have used a number of Meyerhold's exercises later in the resource, though they have sometimes been adapted and updated. The influence of his work is enormous.
excerpt from TRAINING THE BODY
b] Control
The second part of body training is about control. Controlling your movement is the hardest part of these activities.
Start with a simple yoga position. Grotowski was fond of yoga positions as a training. This one is easy but needs good balance to hold the position still.
Put your right foot up against the outside of your right knee. If possible, the foot should be above the knee, but being against the knee will serve. Then fold the palms of your hands together on prayer position. Hold still as long as possible, or for the length of a count of ten, and then swap legs.
Practice walking and running movements with a smooth loping movement that would not spill a glass of water if you were carrying it. To help you with this, start by using canes balanced longways on the top of the head. Focus the eyes on the tip of the cane ahead of you. Now walk from one end of the room to the other. Try this with single people and then with the whole group. Finally, remove the cane from the top of the head but remember exactly how you walked to keep it still. This is the kind of walking the exercise requires. End by keeping that rolling movement of the feet, but speed up the pace until you are able to do a Meyerhold 'lope'.
Shooting from the Bow and Throwing the Stone are very famous bio-mechanical études. They are classic Meyerhold training exercises, using forward actions balanced by what he called 'rejects'.
In the mime of shooting the bow, the actor holds an imaginary bow in the left hand. He runs towards the prey with smooth loping strides, as you did in the last exercise, and jumps, landing two-footed, to a halt when the prey is spotted. Then there are a couple of forward actions balanced by rejects: the forward action of the jump is balanced by the reject action of drawing the arrow from a quiver on his back. Loading the arrow against the string is a forward movement balanced by drawing back the string - a reject movement. The étude ends with the actor firing the arrow and leaping forward to land in a two-footed jump, accompanied by a loud cry.
Try this out,slowly at first, observing the rhythm of the movements. Repeat it until the whole sequence is clear and rhythmical.
Throwing the stone is a similar étude. It too breaks down an action into units of forward or reject actions. Try it out: run - as with the bow-shooting étude - smoothly, a controlled loping run. Stop. Feel the weight of the body transferring as you move through the following sequence. Meyerhold wanted the actor to feel the reverberation of every movement vibrating through his whole body. After stopping, crouch down, then lean backwards to pick up the imaginary stone. Stand back up again and lean forward to take aim. With the imaginary stone in the right hand, sweep your arm backwards in a wide curve, pause and balance, then throw, finishing, as with the bow exercise, with a leap forward to land on both feet, with a cry.
As you did with the bow étude, try out the whole sequence very slowly at first, feeling what your body is doing at all times. Then play with different speeds until the whole sequence is smooth and rhythmical.
Try out a bio-mechanical -style exercise for yourself. It is about deconstruction of movement and seeing every set of movements in a sequence as a combination of forward actions and rejects. In pairs, deconstruct a short sequence of moves in a game of tennis. A typical game shows a variety of rhythms - the attacking forward moves of a run to the net, the brief reject as the racquet is prepared to smash the ball, and so on. Or the slower rhythm of a long lob shot from the back of the court, the series of reject retreating movements to get there, and so on.
A useful tool for control is slow motion. Having practised loping walks and runs, you will have an idea of how to do a slow motion walk. For this exercise, though, to practise controlling your balance, you need to lift each leg high - the foot up to knee-level - before placing it down in a rolling motion on the floor. Try doing this first as a whole group, and then have half the class show the end of an Olympic sprint in slow motion.
Canes or a rope on the floor indicate the finishing line and beyond the finishing line the other half of the class cheer on the runners in slow motion too. This results in sounds like a record or tape being played at the wrong speed, accompanied by slow motion punching of the air, etc.
When one half has run, swap places.
two excerpts from TRAINING IN ENSEMBLE WORK AND SPATIAL AWARENESS
from b] spatial awareness
You need to be aware of space as a physical thing. An easy exercise proves how solid the invisible air is.
Have the group gather at the far end of your hall or studio. A larger room is best for this. Then all together they run as fast as they can towards the wall at the other end of the room. Stop dead just before colliding with the room and feel the wave of air bouncing back from the wall. If you have a good size room and have been able to move fast, the wind created is enough to stir the hair on your head. You can certainly feel the effect even in a smaller room.
Standing in a space, cleave the air with hands and arms with strength and energy enough to move the air so that you can feel the wind you make.
Imagine the air as thick and glutinous, something you have to push and pull aside to move through it. Try what it is like to walk through this substance. Engage your whole body in the fight to get through.
Next imagine the air is pulling and tugging at you, as if you were light as a feather and liable to be pulled in any direction the air wants you to go. Be playful with this, imagining the air is tweaking at a foot, an arm, the top of your head, a shoulder ...
Imagine yourself very big, a giant. All around you are huge structures that fit your size. Hold yourself and move around as if you fitted this large size landscape you have created in your mind. It is not a matter of striding about with huge steps; it is more a matter of the whole body thinking big.
Now try yourself as very small. Again, this is not a matter of crouching or taking tiny steps, but the whole body behaving as if you are a tiny person surrounded by tiny things your own size.
Analyse how your body copes with both these ideas. Which part of you 'led' - the chest perhaps when you were large, the shoulders, hands, top of the head when you were small?
Try altering the perceived size of your surroundings so that you are a giant surrounded by small things, and a tiny person surrounded by huge ones. How does this alter your body?
from c] Group movements
In this exercise the group mills around the room at a calm slowish pace to begin with. As you mill you pass by others in the group. Every time you come close to someone you greet them in a friendly way. Instead of speech, use the sounds and intonations of greeting through gobbledy-gook language. Gradually however the friendliness grows and becomes more obsessive; at the same time, the pace steps up a little. The aim is to reach a state of obsessiveness, where people cannot leave the person they are with - they are in a frenzy of excitement, hugging, jumping on shoulders in their joy, and so on. The noise level at this point is tremendous!
Really experienced groups can hear when the level has reached as high as it can go: number 10 on a scale of one to ten. At that point everyone stops dead, goes silent, and moves to the outer edges of the room facing the walls.
To do this exercise successfully, for each step up in pace and in obsessiveness the students need to remain aware of the whole group all the time; they need to be listening to the sound levels around them all the time so as to stay in tune with what's going on; they need to be watching, using that peripheral vision, to make sure their pace and the size of their movements correspond with everyone else's.
If you think your students have had no previous experience of gobbledy-gook, you may need to precede this exercise with some quick pair-work. I usually ask for volunteers and give them a situation:
neighbours gossiping;
someone bullying or teasing another;
a shy person plucking up courage to approach a confident one he/shefancies;
someone complaining about a faulty product to a bored sales assistant;
a person nagging another for failure to do something they were askedto do;
someone outraged at the behaviour of another, and so on.
Those who have difficulty inventing a rich gobbledy-gook language [some are very good at it whilst others struggle] suggest a particular sound-word they can use like 'enna', or 'fala'. Stress it is the intonation that is important in any case. Often confidence grows quite quickly and they start to be more inventive. Finish with an argument in which they are invited to use sounds rather than gobbledy-gook - clicks with the tongue; 'whee's up and down the scale; raspberries; na-na-na-nana's; tch's and so on. Berkoff used a similar idea when Mr Samsa and the Lodger[s] fall out in his production of Metamorphosis. Gobbledy-gook and intonational/sound exploration is very useful anyhow to cross the language barriers in a way which Artaud hoped for.
excerpt from MIME AND CLOWNING
The following happens after quite a lot of training in mime work.
Try performing the following actions:
pulling
pressing
lifting
throwing
crumpling
coaxing
separating
tearing
touching
brushing away
opening
closing
breaking
taking
giving
supporting
holding back
scratching.
Now try them with different Qualities [as Chekhov would call them]:
violently
quietly
surely
carefully
staccato
legato
tenderly
lovingly
coldly
angrily
superficially
painfully
joyfully
thoughtfully
energetically.
Make the movements broad, wide and beautifully executed - larger than life - and keep them rhythmical, with a feeling for the tempo of the movement, which will depend upon the Quality you are using.
This is a slightly adapted Chekhov exercise. Note the similarity with some of Meyerhold's work - the emphasis on rhythm, for example and on making the movement beautiful.
Add emotions/ Qualities to some of the following activities. Try the Qualities of:
care
tenderness
anger
carelessness
joy
with
playing a piano
laying a table
writing a letter
eating a meal
reading a newspaper
Use some of the skills you have learned already: establishing surfaces and 'bounce back' to establish solidity.
Now, choosing any of the activities you have done, build in something going wrong:
the wind blows your letter away;
the food is disgusting or someone else is picking the chips off your plate;
you drop the pile of plates when laying the table;
the newspaper has reported something terrible about yourself - and there is a photo of you in it which the people around you might recognise.
Once again, it is a case of starting with something recognisable, making sure the audience is with you - they are understanding what you are doing. Clock them again when something goes wrong. Build in a moment when you think everything is going to be all right after all - a clock of relief or triumph - but then a final disaster, also shared with the audience. Changes of mood are essential with clear body language and facial expression to communicate each change.
Some solo mimes.
Remember clocking, remember sharing moments of change of mood, apprehension, etc. with the audience. remember to carry the audience with you by starting with the familiar.
You are practising your juggling skills and are rather pleased with yourself. Share your pleasure with the audience. You become more and more daring, but then ...
The buckets of water. A man has to fill a hole in the ground with a bucket of water. The bucket has a leak so that by the time he reaches the hole, little or no water is left. He examines the bucket. He tries ingenious ways to fill the hole so as to complete his task. He shares each idea with the audience.
A man is sitting reading. The book is a horror story. He is absorbed by it and terrified. Sometimes he can hardly bear to read on. He starts to hear a sound somewhere nearby. Dare he investigate? If you like, make this a pair exercise and have someone providing the sound or sounds.
There are a number of solo mimes with supplied sound effect you could try, such as the person driven mad by a dripping tap. He goes to turn it off. It seems to have worked, but every time he settles to do something else, like read or sleep, the drip starts again.
A similar one with the woman with her baby is also effective. It becomes a game between sound effect provider and actor. Every time the woman creeps away, thinking the baby has at last settled, baby cries again.
Pair mimes:
Try flying a kite in pairs. It is a windy day. Unfortunately, a number of other pairs are also flying their kites on the top of this windy hill. What happens?
In pairs - one is an imperious lady, the other a porter. The lady has a number of cases. She looks around for someone to carry them for her. She beckons the porter, who is lounging around and generally keeping a low profile. He approaches and seeing the huge mound of bags, he tries a number of reasons not to do it [not hearing, not understanding, very urgent need to go elsewhere, etc.] all of which are fielded by the increasingly annoyed lady. He sighs; he'll have to move those cases to the taxi rank as asked. The lady watches throughout the following, sharing with the audience her exasperation and impatience. Establish the different weights and awkwardnesses of the luggage, e.g. having to drag the heaviest in short bursts, balancing one or two on his head, one is maybe unexpectedly light and he overbalances and falls over, etc. Find a conclusion, such as the lady pummelling him with one of the cases.
Group mimes:
Have the whole group walking around the room. First of all they are walking with dogs on leads. Establish the reality of the dog first: pet it, communicate with it, be consistent with its size! Next, using the presence of the rest of the group with their dogs, take your dog for a walk in this park where a number of other people are also walking. Allow all sorts of incidents to happen in this walk in the park.
You are a group of children who have each bought a balloon from the balloon seller. It is a gas-filled balloon. First of all, establish your pleasure in feeling and seeing your balloon bobbing along on its string. Without choosing who is going to create the drama that happens next, one person in the group will find that they are too small to be carrying such a big balloon. There are one or two alarms - you almost leave the ground once or twice but settle again and all seems all right. But then you take off completely. The rest of the group notice and behave as if this person is up above them. What happens next?
