Bawds and Brandy Balls – Session 2: Antonin Artaud and Harold Pinter

Have you ever played the red ball game? It’s one of those name learning games that takes concentration and awareness.  If you have, then you will know what I am talking about when I say it is utter chaos.  This group did abysmally at this game at our first session. We lost the red ball every single time. But I’m not ashamed to admit this, you know why? Because when we played again at the beginning of session two not only did we never lose the red ball, we never lost any blue bicycles, green blueberries, [Flinn: teal iguanas, orange turtles, black bats,] or vampire kittens either.  We kept track of every object every time we played. That means that in just one session this group gained the skills necessary to be successful at this game.  If they gain so much at every session, watch out! Are you excited? I am. This session we began with some abstract shape making, although, as usual some people were really holding onto using storytelling to decide how to shape. A discussion of positive and negative space and the instruction to only think about the dynamics of the space when making shapes seemed to do the trick and everything started getting really interesting.

Then we did a little move on exhale.  This is a great exercise for working on starting, stopping, and stillness. As I mentioned before, this group had slow sustained intense moving down disturbingly well from the get go, but actual stillness is still a bit of a challenge. As the game went on everyone made progress and the coordinated stillness and movement looked like magic.

The first playwright we studied in the readings was Antonin Artaud.  Artaud’s body of performance and performed work during his lifetime was relatively small, but his influence on theater ever after is almost immeasurable.  Artaud is most famous for his manifesto for a theater of cruelty.

The cruelty he is referring to is not a cruelty of direct attack on the audience but rather the creation of a theatrical experience so visceral that revelation becomes inescapable.  Artaud’s ideas for how to create such an effect on an audience are remarkable and exciting even after decades of artists attempting to incorporate them into their work.  We began by reading Spurt of Blood in which Artaud parodies the idealistic coming of age story using grotesque images of both comedy and horror.  [Flinn Note: There is a wonderful short comic by O Horvath based on Spurt of Blood. I will link it here, but be warned, it’s NSFW and contains as much disturbing and sexual imagery as the play. It’s quite good, but probably don’t click if you don’t like Artaud.] We also read some of Description of a Physical State with several readers choosing what they wanted to say in a free choral style and another group of performers using only what they heard to prompt noise making to enhance or work against what the readers were performing. The effect was fantastic with the sound makers adding a whole new level to the experience and creating a real feeling of menace. When asked to comment on what listening to it was like one participant said she felt as though she were standing on the edge of a cliff. I think Artaud would have been proud.

Our second playwright for the day was also famous for the menace and violence in his plays, but in his works the menace and violence simmer just beneath the dialogue and the constant presence of that threat of that violence is just as palpable as any outright attack could ever be. Why, it’s Harold Pinter, of course! We read some of his early review sketches, all of which are undeniably funny, but all of which also make you feel pretty uncomfortable about your laughter. Pinter believed we used language to cover up our nakedness and in his plays the silences are when the characters stand naked to the audience’s scrutiny, when they cannot hide behind their words.

These early sketches also deal with unexpected shifts of power and escalations to violence in everyday situations.  In Trouble in the Works a worker is called in by his boss to report on why the workers aren’t producing any more.  It turns out that the workers have gone off the products and by the end of the scene the worker has reduced his boss to a sniveling mess who meekly requests what the workers would like to make instead. “Brandy Balls?” Trouble, to be sure. This sketch is also the source of some of our most time honored diction exercises – “high speed taper shanked spiral flute reamers,” “bronze draw off cock with hand wheel and without hand wheel,” and the truly tongue tying “hemi uniball spherical rod ends.” Thank you forever and ever, Harold Pinter. After the readings we did a little work on some skills that Pinter’s work requires, focus and stillness.  Then we added some emotional states in to that stillness.  The fun really came when the participants were asked to isolate their faces and bodies and fill each one with a different emotion. When we released them from the stillness we transitioned wholly from Pinter skills to Artaud skills!

If you ever really want to terrify someone fill your face with love and your body with anger and walk towards them slowly, or vice versa. Terrifying. And extremely interesting. And that’s all we really care about, interesting. We ended the session with a little bit of a movement exercise where you simply say what you are doing as you do it. You have to be able to describe it completely so it pretty much forces you to break up any action into smaller parts and isolated movements.  Once they got the hang of it we instructed them to speak as though what they were saying were lines the audience needed to hear. The effect was so interesting that we’re already scheming ways to hopefully incorporate this exercise into our work some more.  So simple, so interesting. [Flinn: We finished up the night by having them work on starting and stoping in pairs and then as a whole group.]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X-Zz2OO_hk0