it is only when I have not got access to it, that I realise how much I rely on it

Isn’t it great when technology lets you down. I’ve been without my laptop for a week and it is only when I have not got access to it, that I realise how much I rely on it.

A lot has happened since Wednesday. A chance to play with text as sound, an impro workshop with Cartoon de Salvo, and a clowning workshop with Jon Davidson. In which ever environment I was in, I was very conscious of the fact that I was being watched by others and it created an irrational fear. I perform and enjoy doing so. But in each of these situations I felt the need to perform well; in doing so, the contrary occurred. Tell somebody to ‘not look down’ and the opposite is true. The ReScen project speaks of the performers ability to revert back to craft when creating. An ability to work in chaos, but having ‘craft’ to ground the work in. I am conscious that my craft is not polished yet, and by trying to portray it as such instead shows its weaknesses. This paradox lives in the Psyche, my craft in my embodied self. The only way to stop smoking is to think about smoking….

Today in the workshop I was bad. I did things in halves, meeting half way. I neither collapsed on the floor as my chair is being pulled away, nor did I stop myself from falling. I did an odd bum shuffle. It was as if everything I had learnt I had forgotten. Look to the audience, still point. “Who are you? I don’t know who you are so I do not care about you?” “How do they do this” “I don’t know that’s there problem?!” Who are we and where are we, two obvious yet fundamental questions that pop up in actor training all the time.

I need to do to understand, I need to do to remember I need to do and fail to find what I know and what I don’t. I am a child that forgets and tries to pretend I don’t. I need to revel in this failure! What have I done badly today? I missed the urinal and some landed on my leg. I was late for my RMO meeting. I smoked too much. I misjudged somebody. I tripped down the stairs. I ate with my mouth open. I have a bit of BO. Perhaps this is the ideal material to start creating with, something that you know is not perfect?

Long days - Le Navet Bete Workshop, RMO session and then Sound

There is a point when you blur what you have done and what you are about to do. Today I reached that point, but today it didn’t matter. The people around me guided me to where ad when, and the how just came. Structures made, and a path starting to form. Today was a good day.

It is interesting how other clown companies interpret theories of clown. In essence, clowning all sings out of the same hymn book, where each page is an epitaph of Lecoq, or Gaulier. Where phrases of bouffon, the idiot and impro comprise the themes and rythems of the hymns. Yet the timbre, the quality of each song can be sung very differently. La Navet Bete, focus on the grotesque. What is your clown? Discover your clown? It suggests that I have one character that I boil down too. One base. But this is not what I am interested in. The clown I found today is much different to the one I play in my company: the Obelix strong, yet sensitive giant, clumsy and a fool. Today I was vulgar, lustful, dirty. It was a fun character to play, it was a clown character of mine, but it was not my clown character. I have many. I am multi faceted. I exist in all regions all at once and I can choose which facet I accentuate, what I make big. How we were guided to find each character, its voice, its movement, used many if not all of the exercises I know, yet the condensed structure in a day was simple, an d got results. I build with movement into text. Annabelle Arden says that the body is the bow and voice is an arrow that fires and hits to make something happen. You first have start withy the bow, before you can fire the arrow.

It alo interests me the merging of yoga, feldenkreist and capoieara methods in there warm ups and movement practices. It appears that this is a vocabulary that speaks to the clown, and I have been taught moments of each. An applied interdisciplinary practice becomes a tool for the clown, or the body. In clown, I am honest, stupid and vulnerable. I know everything and nothing all at once. A paradox. NB: Dave look at conflict between Defoe and Gaulier.

For the latter part of the day, things started falling into place. Our RMO seems now structured, has focus in something practical. Or sound project was led by practice. This is exciting. I do, therefore I think! (who said this?)

Extension in a soundscape?

Ok. So. Everything resonates. Everything moves, it vibrates. I respond to this. My body also has it own way of moving, its own rhythm which is directly affected by the world around me, and the world around me reacts to this. Ideas of impulse and the passing of energy. Somebody said (Probably dead) acting is reacting and the most important people on stage are the other people you are playing with. You offer; the more you offer the more you receive. We interact. None of this is new but perhaps something clicked?

Characters also have there own rhythm, a character can lead with one part of the body and that will create a way of speaking, laughing, moving. What does my body want to do when I am in this position with my centre lowered and my arms bent. Well at that moment I wanted to be lustful, I wanted to be somehow dirty, and because of the way I was standing I became this odd perverted character, I pass on this energy and it changes, that body is not in that poition. That person has not had my day, and so it reacts differently. The energy transforms, so then when I get the energy back, it has changed and thus my impetus changes; my body shifts, and suddenly I am somebody else, a new character.

I made a pre-judgement at the beginning of a session that I don’t usually do. I believed, arrogantly, that was I was being asked to do was masturbatory. Go where you body wants to go move where your body wants to move. I rub my foot, it hurts, I rock back and forth because I need to massage something of loosen something. I attended my body. But I couldn’t grasp the framing; we’re doing soundscapes? I usually don’t get it at first and so I just accept. Usually it does not disturb me. In fact, my training is from a school that did not explain things, and that you had to find out for yourself. This is your path. But what was being explained to me was something that I new, yet could not connect. Why do I focus on this is? Because there was a clear movement arc. Where I ended up at the end of the session, a rocking, an unbalance, was where I started, yet this time I found the play in it. The ability to find laughter and joy not because I was embarrassed, but because laughter was as much an impulse as touch.

Harmony suggests a blending of things. And in theatre the idea of putting different stuff together is not new, we have a chair and a stool, a light that seems disco like, and somebody bopping away on a light up dance floor and we see a disco. They blend, they make a picture, a landscape that we experience bodily, yet is constructed semiotically. What if the picture was not constructed as such. What if the blending of theatre merged from what our body wanted to do with the space.

We tell stories, we create stories, but first and foremost; we communicate. There is a dialogue between actor and audience. How can we create an environment that speaks from our bodies with our bodies. How can environment play our bodies and then how can we relate this to an audience?

Its interesting that I found complicites new show Shun-kin more engaging than a disappearing number. It allowed an audience to see the construction of an image, see how it begins and ends. There was a clear impulse to start, and you could see the energy being passed on, transforming the space. It is this transformation that something happens that is exciting. I have my quarms with Shun-kin, but there ability to find an extension in a movement or phrase creates atmohphere and is truly engaging.

The Structure of Science

The Science Museum, on the 3rd floor, in South Kensington, in the corner, made me smile. I played with tempo, echo and waves. I saw sound jump, and swim and move. It was all explained on small white plaques, by each ‘exhibit,’ at child height. It was all so simple. As I did it was fun and I found out why sound does things. Yet I walk away and I am not hungry to find more, I do not need to solve those mysteries anymore.

‘Stoned’ at the Royal Court was the same. It was very clever, structurally slick, moving across three generations in one space. The sounds of the past coming to haunt each generation. It is an hour long, and you are thrown into the mix, and you enjoy working out who is when and where and why they bicker. But by the end it is all made clear. I know the story. I knew it in the first half hour. It was fun to work out, but once that is done I just sit. I do not need to solve the mystery any more.

Sound as shape

I described the sound of the text as the movement of the muscles in a horse race. A race that didn’t end. At first the horse travels with ease, yet soon, lactic acid builds up. The horse does not slow, yet it hurts. The horse knows there is no point in running anymore, but it can’t stop. Something won’t let him stop.

The text had a song, and it stuck on my head. The song of the horse. Why?? I have no idea. Sound for me has a shape, a picture, a story. I get carried away by it. I tell a story, or I see images dance.

When I dance in a night club I become high. I was almost kicked out of the Punch Drunk after party in Wapping Lane, and was asked what I was taking at the Reading Festival. I come at it like an energetic child who just needs to do, to move. I sweat. I sweat a lot. In fact it is probably quite unattractive. But I do not want to stop. People laugh, or stare, or want to join in. They try to mimic, but the can’t. I don’t want them to mimic, I want them to take what I am giving and dance with me, not at me. I want a harmony. Not a chorus, the two step in the corner that barely finds the rhythm. I find it occasionally. It makes me smile

Perfomativity Workshop

The BA DATE students at Central were great, throwing them selves into my performativity workshop with Gusto. Because of the very open atmosphere, students were able to feed back in real time how the various exercises could be useful for them as practitioners. The connections they were (unknowingly) bringing up with NLP, as well as the ways in which certain exercises could be used to generate material has somehow developed from the acquired knowledge of my BA, my TA position at St Mary’s, and the beginning of my MA a Central. I question the ownership of the exercises that I used, as the majority had been adapted from those taught to me, although I doubt there is a need to reinvent the wheel. Performativity for me is an acknowledgement that our body and surroundings perform continuously, intentionally or not. If we can harness this performative state for performance, then we already add to a performance creative landscape.

Body Project, a body of work.

This extract makes me angry, because I have been instructed to write it. Somehow this entry feels like a chore, and the other entries haven’t. I have reflected on this project through an email in order to help me understand the structure, as well as the last blog entry which was an immediate reaction. This entry tries somehow to associate the work within a fictional context. What if the group were to continue working. This is not logical. We are not. It reminds me of Piagets fish in the tree that breathes air and the lets pretend exercise. So with this in mind lets pretend….

This project only forms a beginning, an introduction to an idea. We somehow defined presence as an ‘attitude’ to a space and those within it. We created an idea as ‘the body as vessel’, a body that needs to be reorganised in order to perform, not themselves as an individual, but a performative persona. To further develop this work we would look at his vessel through the eyes of Grotowski’s theory of embodiment, as well as continuing with ideas from Lecoq’s neutral mask. We might suggest that presence is the process of embodiment, in order to create a method / methodology to enable an actor to become free from themselves. It would be interesting to see how these methods differed from those already practiced.

This is the interesting bit!

If Piaget suggests meta-cognition is a way of learning for children, and it appears that meta-cognition is a method of how to approach researched based practice, perhaps this would be an interesting method to adopt in my practice. Furthermore, as this process comes instinctually to children, can we creatively learn from children?

‘I am structurally special.’

So I said a few rude words and then I got over it.
I So I said a few rude words and then I got over it.
I love structure that is clear, that informs; where I find this lacking I need to create a structure that is clear for me. But in doing so it still needs to make sense to others. I need to start taking ownership over the language that I choose to use to explain ideas; to define for myself terms and be able to justify the definition in order to talk with authority. In doing so, my structuring of spoken sentences needs to be concise. Anything less suggests that I am a fraudster, even if I know the theory and practice inside and out. Presentation is performative. If I frame a toilet I can call it art because of the attitude in which we look at it but if the toilet is not framed, it is just a functioning part of a WC, no more, no less.

The written word differs from the spoken, because it disassociates from the authors bodily attitude towards the text. It is content and fails to reveal the immediate context of the time of writing. It is therefore necessary to explain how you are using words in footnotes or parenthesis. The act or writing forces you to slow to the speed of typing, or of placing pen to paper. It is an action that has a physical limit to its speed. It has visible structures that can be edited. The immediate spoken word differs. With it comes the context, the facial expressions, the conscious and unconscious bodily movements that stresses and adds importance to words. Yet with this, my mind races and finishes sentences before they have started. The result is a mess.

If Dr Joesephine Machon suggests that a synaesthetic play text is one that joins the word with the visceral body, then can the structures used to create this joining be adapted to real time speech and would this be useful? I don’t know. My mum used to say that you should engage brain before speaking, slow down and enunciate but what if it is not this that I need to achieve from speech? What if words quantify meaning instead of qualify meening. And yes I mean quantify. To quantify I assert a definite meaning, a limit to the possibilities of what it could mean. Quantify suggests numbers. I have one conker. This cannot be misinterpreted to having two conkers. But by saying conker you could imply a number of metaphoric things that you do not mean. Meaning is not qualified it is quantified. If speech acts in this manner, is this the most effective way to communicate?