Session 3: Lesson I Bleed and EAT YOUR HEART OUT DIMITRI TIOMKIN

-by gwethalyn

We began our post warm up movement in session three by making a couple of machines.  In this exercise each individual player makes a rhythmic sound and repeats a physical action to go with the sound, the machine is built by one person starting and everyone else adding on with their sound and motion, so it ends up being one big moving machine-like image.  The real fun begins when you start throwing a few wrenches in, like changing the speed of the machine, or making it move across the floor.  These physical changes were well met by the group, so when they built another machine we threw in some emotional ones. They produced a pretty scary angry hate machine, but I was especially impressed when I gave them the instruction to be sad but then get desperate in their sadness, that maybe if the machine produced more they could be happy again, so that there was a desperate speeding up of the machine. It was an interesting mixture of emotion to be shown by a machine made of humans, but I feel fairly certain any audience member would have gotten the idea.  Go team!

In the readings portion of the session we began with Adrienne Kennedy, one of my all time favorite playwrights.  This year’s group picked up on the chant like effect of the repetitive language in A Lesson in Dead Language:

White Dog: Lesson I bleed.
Pupils (as a group): I bleed.
White Dog: The day the white dog died, I started to bleed, blood came out of me.
Pupils (as a group): Teacher, the white dog died, I started to bleed.  The white dog died, I started to bleed. Where are the lemons? I am bleeding, Mother.

Kennedy was obsessed from an early age by Roman Catholicism and her plays are filled with explicitly Catholic imagery, although it exists in Kennedy’s fragmented, surreal, nightmarish world where a devastating crisis seems to have disrupted all sense of normalcy and ability to understand or communicate things.  As we discussed A Lesson in Dead Language and A Rat’s Massthis group continued to comment on the language and rhythms they heard. I think the ideas of the rhythms really helped them get an understanding of Kennedy’s style as I asked them to imagine being obsessed with both Catholic Holy incantation and African tribal chant (as Kennedy has said she is) and then trying to reconcile those two obsessions on stage.

The second selection in the reader was the B Beaver Animation by Lee Breuer and Mabou Mines.  If you’ve ever read the B Beaver then you know he needs no introduction, but he might need a little assistance.  I had the good fortune to direct this play once upon a time, so I got quite intimate with the B Beav and hearing it read aloud always brings a tear to my eye.  This group really picked up on the humor immediately, which, hard to believe as it may seem, has not always been the case.  There was much laughter as we read. The Beaver continues his monologue trying to climb on board an abandoned boat he finds on the stream:

IT TACKS TO WINDWARD. I LIST TO STARBOARD. WE CLINCH. IT CLANGS. TEN BELLS. IT BRINGS UP ITS PORT AND WHAKS MY AFT. OVERBOARD FOR A MANDATORY EIGHT COUNT. IT DROPS ANCHOR IN A NEUTRAL CHANNEL. I THROW IN MY TAIL. WHAT”S THE PROBLEM. I PAT IT ON THE POOP DECK. YOU ARK. ME ANIMAL. WE’VE GOT A PRECEDENT.

This particular passage brought at least two group members almost to hysteria as they could not continue reading and had to wipe tears from their eyes.

Thank you, Lee Breuer.