Session 2: Kokoschka & Brecht

By Gwethalyn

We started session two with some vocal work. We used the surprisingly hard to articulate but truly tasty sentence: “Breathing dark things became clear to me.” Taken from one of our readings later in the day. We only did about ten minutes of work with this sentence, but by the end it was apparent that everyone had made strides. When you’ve got fourteen people in a room all doing vocal work at once and you can hear each individual separately though all that noise, then you know they’re doing something right. We also threw around vampire kittens and spotted hippos in the red ball game. Our newest member of the directing team, Donnert, lead the group through the blossoming and withering of some truly ugly plants. The ugly ones are always so much more interesting than the pretty ones. I enjoyed this chance to go up to the top of the seating risers to look down on a room filled with a growing forest of ugly things. The effect was quite pleasing. Especially since with fourteen people participating they can really fill the stage space. Hooray for higher enrollment numbers and good attendance!

In the readings we began with what is usually referred to as German Expressionism, although both pieces we read are by the Austrian artist Oskar Kokoschka. The evocatively named “Murderer The Women’s Hope” is a nightmare landscape of a battle of the sexes writ large and violent with choruses of men and women rallying around their warring leaders. The far more lighthearted, but just as surreal, “Job” is a portrait of a man trying to come to grips with his relationship with his wife, who is ambiguously/not so ambiguously named Anima. She literally turns his head and he is unable to ever get it to sit right on his shoulders again. Later he literally grows horns as he witnesses a tryst between his wife and “The Rubberman” who first appeared to him as a poodle and offered to give him advice. Instead of sealing the deal with The Rubberman Job’s wife jumps on Job’s head, separating it from his body. At the end of the piece Adam leads a chorus of gentlemen who appear a stalking heads on tiny bodies in judgement of Job. Anima asks Adam if Job is dead. “No!” Replies Adam, “only his head and heart and other things are gone.” The two pieces pair nicely to show how the heightened physical techniques the expressionists employed to try and represent the subconscious in real images on the stage could be put to use towards a terrifying end or a zany one – take your pick.

Our second reading for the day was “The Elephant Calf” by Bertolt Brecht. Last year we read one of Brecht’s lerschtuke, but this year we delved into one of the earlier clowning inspired pieces created while he was first beginning to explore the ideas he later articulated as his theory of Epic Theater. Brecht intended “The Elephant Calf” to be performed in the foyer during intermission of his full length play Man Equals Man. In this interlude the characters from Man Equals Man put on a theatrical production for an audience of their fellow soldiers, apparently with the goal of making money. In their play the protagonist of Man Equals Man, Galy Gay, portrays an elephant calf accused of murdering its mother and Polly directs the production and plays the banana tree that proves the elephant’s guilt to the judge, the Moon, who is played by another of the soldiers. The main witness for the banana tree’s case is the elephant calf’s mother herself. Some of the soldier performers seem to think this doesn’t make much sense, but we’re willing to go along with it because Brecht’s subtitle for the play is “The provability of any and every contention.” Brecht’s ideas about the tools of the theater always being on display for the audience to judge is literally enacted as the soldiers in the audience of the play lose interest in the haphazard performance and begin singing their own songs, place bets on the outcome of the elephant calf’s trial, and in the end even challenge the guilty verdict outcome of the play.  This final challenge results in the entire company and its audience retiring to a boxing ring to prove what should have happened. The Elephant Calf is practically a how to manual for the way Brecht hoped his performers would perform and his audiences would experience his plays, plus it’s hilarious.

After the readings we continued with the basic building blocks of our physical work by exploring qualities of motion and static shapes and transitioning between states with precision. In pursuit of this precision we ended with the exercise where you must be still as you inhale and you can move only as you exhale. I know I have discussed some of the merits of this exercise in at least one previous entry, but as exercises for our purposes go, this one always amazes me with its usefulness to the performers. It begins by centering the performer in the body by establishing an audible breath, but since this breath is shared by everyone else in the room it also immediately provides a connection between all the performers. The early part of the exercise where the performer focuses on moving only one body part at a time and really being absolutely still on the inhale helps establish the level of precision we like to strive for in all of our work, but attaches it to something naturally easy to conform to, the rhythm of the performer’s own breathing. Once the restriction of moving one body part at a time is lifted and the performers can experiment with all kinds of movement and speeds and qualities of movement the necessity of the stillness breaks up any logical plan the performer has for moving, causing all movements to be more spontaneous. Even if the performer is working towards a goal, such as getting across the room, the goal is broken up by the stillness into pieces the performer cannot entirely anticipate. Once the performers are instructed to interact with each other the power if the connection established by the shared breath assists the performer’s ability to sense what is happening everywhere else in the room just by listening, one of the key skills for the improvised group movement we do. The whole exercise takes only 10-15 minutes but always brings the whole group to a higher level of movement improvisation skills.