Heading home for the break, battered and bruised but happy. The past couple of weeks have been focused in large part on stage combat, which is one of those paradoxical things in which the person who is apparently getting beaten up on stage is (supposedly) the one who is safest, and the one who’s doing the beating or making the sounds that make the whole thing convincing is the one who gets bruised up. Of course, tumbling around after having just apparently gotten the punch to the face or the knee to the groin leads to some bruises and scrapes, too. So I’m heading home with sore knuckles and bruises on my legs, hands, and arms, but little worse for wear.
We prepared fight scenes for two classes—Creation and Acrobatics. And each group of 3 or 6 or 7 set, developed, and choreographed their own scene, so fights were set in dining rooms, offices, emergency rooms, rec halls, laundromats, tea shops, county fair pie judgings, bakeries, even ballet studios and Lamaze classes. Some were comical, some terribly unsettling.
We also did final presentations of closely observed animals in Movement class, with even more variety, each person choosing whatever animal interested them. Noah might not have had such a variety. Elephant and giraffe, yes, and snow leopard, goat, and horse. But also starfish, komodo dragon, osprey, sloth, and amoeba. And on and on. A classmate and I were iguanas, and thank God for YouTube. (OK, maybe not God directly, but…) It’s amazing how much stuff you can find videos of online—I’m talking educational stuff here, by the way—and it’s fascinating to pay really close attention to how an animal moves. And often frustrating to try to make a human body move the same way. So the goal becomes (and here comes a favorite Lispa verb) to transpose it, to give the essence of your animal through a human body. So much of it, and so much of this term, has been about specific details. With all the mask work we did, again and again the goal was to boil down the movement, to find that essential detail and surround it with enough focused stillness that it has the impact that a lot of movement never could. At one point I was reminded of a phrase from E.B. White’s classic little book on writing The Elements of Style: the point is to make “every word [or here, every movement] tell.”
This week also included continuing work on passages that we’ve memorized from whatever source. Some were dramatic monologues, some were poems, some passages from novels. First the process of working with the text to memorize it was fascinating. I think I wrote something about that previously. And it got even more interesting when we moved into the speaking phase. One week we split into groups of three, and first we reacted silently to where each other was in the space. No script, no agenda, no words. Just three people starting out about a meter apart from each other, and our entire vocabulary for responding to one another was to stand, sit, lie down, walk, run, or stop. After a few minutes of moving around the space in reaction to the other two people, we started speaking our lines to one another. Contexts emerged as if out of nowhere. The second time we did it (in our final class this week), we stared in our groups of three and eventually were interacting as a whole group of 20 or so, each bearing our our own text in mind. Then each would choose the moment to speak their lines. Usually it came in response to what someone else had spoken, often a text we’d never heard before, and so it became this ever growing dramatic piece that had its own logic and probably could never be the same again. I’d memorized a passage from Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead that I ended up speaking after a classmate did a monologue about a madwoman from Cork. Others who are more theatre-literate than I am can probably identify the madwoman piece, but I didn't know it. A short speech by one of Lear’s daughter’s (from near the end of the play) came in response to my little part of the drama.
I guess I’m ever the old guy in this group, but there are worse things to be, and much worse characters to be compared to!
In the first term we focused on closely observing nature. In this term we were closely observing animals. Next term we delve more (among other things) into building characters through close observation of people. At times the progression of themes at Lispa isn’t apparent, but at times I can glimpse the grand arc.
As I write this I’m in the Philadelphia airport, waiting for my connecting flight. It’ll be good to be home for a couple of weeks, to reconnect and heal up a bit. I’m sure the next term will fly by.
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