Session 4: The Motion Alone is Not Enough

In session four we got a little more deeply into some vocal work. We used a line from Beckett’s Footfalls: The motion alone is not enough. Get it? Anyway, the whole room saying “the motion alone is not enough” as though they were chainsaws was pretty interesting. When we asked them to say it as though they were big giant bell tower bells there was a lot of rocking back and forth. When we told them not to use their bodies the bells got quite a bit smaller, as is usually the case. If you’ve never tried to talk like a bell, give it a try, I guarantee you will rock back and forth on the first go. Same goes if you try to talk like a sweeping broom. Talking like a bell or a broom is remarkably harder if you have to concentrate on standing still in neutral while you do it, that’s why we practice.

In the readings portion of the meeting we began with Beckett. Ah, Beckett. How do I love your late minimalist works, let me count the ways: Total control of exactly what the audience sees and hears. Broken stories that cannot be told in any recognizable form but swim up from the depths in fleeting impressions. Meaning that comes from the structure of the plays, as much as by what is said or done in them. Exquisite economy of expression in terms of what is said, even if the speaker is rambling. Lives crushingly near the end of their existence trying to make sense of it all. It all. It all.

not a sound only the old breath and the leaves turning and then suddenly this dust whole place suddenly full of dust when you opened your eyes from floor to ceiling nothing only dust and not a sound only what was it it said come and gone was that it something like that come and gone come and gone no one come and gone in no time gone in no time
                                                 -That Time

Our second reading was new this year (always so exciting!). We looked at The Other Side by Nobel Prize winning Chinese playwright Gao Xianjian.  Gao wanted to present plays that broke from the rigid plot driven style of Chinese drama after the Cultural Revolution. He describes his play as non-restrictive for the actors. He expected them to be trained in all aspects of performance: song, dance, vocal, physical, and improvisational methods and showcased all of these in The Other Side. The play includes serious language and physical play as a group of travelers attempt to cross a river to the Other Side (a reference to the Buddhist concept of the Other Shore as an expression of reaching nirvana). The band discovers the river they have crossed is a river of oblivion, and encounter a total loss of language and must rediscover it. They then turn in violence against their teacher, one man emerges as willing to admit he is culpable as a member of the group and the piece follows his journey from then on out as he encounters many obstacles. The group continues to follow him despite his protests and their dislike of his independence. Needless to say, Gao wasn’t allowed to actually mount a performance of The Other Side in China in the 80s and fled the county to continue his work in France. The play begins with the following line:

“We’re going to play a game, a serious game, the way children play.”

By the time we were ready to play games in the serious manner Gao championed, our group was diminished by several participants leaving to perform in a choir concert. The smaller group that was left did some work in partners shaping and reshaping, adding resistance, and sustain, and eventually working without prompting to make shaping transitions together as partners. After this warm up, I gave each pair a ribbon and gave them the instructions that they were to play a silent scene with each other where they had a relationship to the ribbon and each other and when the ribbon was on the floor they could move however they wanted, but when one of them was holding the ribbon they could only move in very slow sustained movements, as though the air was resisting their every move. I had used this exercise for a show I directed last year, but it was a show with only two people in it, so I only ever saw how one pair of people solved this problem and played the game. Having four different pairs playing the game meant seeing four different ways of solving the problem at the same time and they were all strikingly different. I always love to be surprised by what happens when we just get out of the way and let them go! One clever participant asked me to clarify the rules about the ribbon and whether it was important it was being held or just that it wasn’t touching the ground, not touching the ground, I decided, and shortly after they began I looked over to see he had tied the ribbon to his wrist, in slow motion of course, and had to remove it in slow motion as well. Tricky tricky.