Day one started out with the usual stuff, stretching, breathing, exploring the space, shaping and moving, discussions of the work we’re about to embark on and the respect for each other and for the work needed among the group to be successful.
We read “The Transparent Doll” by Madame Rachilde. Rachilde was a member of the Symbolist movement in Paris around the turn of the century. The Symbolists were reacting to the theatrical trend of extreme realism and thought that theater should be used to explore the exact opposite, the uncanny things we all experience, but can’t explain. Rachilde was a scandalous figure whose works were considered pornographic at the time, although she always insisted her works were more cerebral than sensual, and by today’s standards this is definitely true. While male playwrights of the Symbolist movement were obsessed with death, Rachilde was obsessed with power and sexuality. Most of her plays have one character that seems to be in touch with “the other,” as the the symbolists referred to it, which slowly infects the other characters around them with horror. Most of Rachilde’s plays are available in beautiful translations by Kiki Gounaridou and Frazer Lively in a book called Madame la Mort and Other Plays. I highly recommend you check it out. Rachilde’s techniques may seem subtle compared to some of the other authors we read but more and more I find myself identifying ways in which they become useful in other theatrical work I do. Very cool.
Next we read “The First Celestial Adventures of Mr. Antipyrene, Fire Extinguisher.” Ah, Dada. Most people are familiar with the concept of Dada from the continuing influence of the Dada visual artists, but Dada infiltrated the theater too. In the 1920s the Dadaists, confronted with the unprecedented violence, suffering, and destruction of WWII, decided that logic had deserted the world. They felt that everything that they had known from the old artistic institutions had deserted the world and so those institutions needed to be challenged and destroyed. They decided that old ideas about what art could be were false and that art could be anything. Their performance styles often involved simultaneous improvised action and their relationship to the audience was antagonistic. After reading the piece we tried to make some Dada performances of our own. In pairs the participants took a chunk of text from the piece we had just read and used that to come up with a Dada moment. In true Dada style, as a surprise to the performers, we also had one of the directors accompany each performance with a drum. We had three performances and all three turned out completely differently. One involved a sort of dance and call and response of the nonsense words. One group had a speaker that kicked around a mover, and the third group took the drum away from the director and one person held it while the other person beat on it whenever their movements brought them close enough together to do so. In this last piece the director was forced to find a new way to accompany the performance with sounds, so she used her chair, knocking it over, dragging it along the floor and banging it on the ground. All three pieces we nothing short of Dada brilliance.
In the exercises we continued in the dada style with a mover/sounder style game where one person makes sounds and their partner moves in any way they want prompted by the sounds the sounder is making. The mover can stop moving and sound at any time and then the person who was sounding becomes the mover. This game is actually a lot harder than it sounds. There was a wonderful moment in the whole group version of this game where we had a sounder who was doing some lovely Disney’s Little Mermaid type singing and got interrupted by one of the movers who took over as sounder with a series of giant snorting noises. This, of course, caused a drastic change in all the movers who did a great job of keeping their focus on the game at this surprising turn of events. Hard core!
We also did some move on the exhale. This is an exercise where you establish a breath cadence together and then you can only move on the exhale, on the inhale you must be absolutely still. This exercise is great for a number of reasons. First off, the shared breath causes an almost automatic deep focus and concentration. Secondly, it very quickly gets you working on stopping and starting (the most important skill for a performer, according to JoAnne Akalaitis). And thirdly (if that is a word) once you get the hang of the rhythm it it really gets you out of your head and into a natural flow of movement that does not need to be planned in advance, so your logical planning brain gets a rest and you just m o v e. The real magic though, happened when we had them start interacting. The whole group came together and the feeling that they were creating one thing out of their many bodies that were completely tuned in to each other was immediately evident, even palpable, in the room. This was one of those moments that makes the workshop what it is.
Day one, fantastic!
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