Session One: The Symbolists & The Futurists

by Gwethalyn

The first few moments of the first session are always accompanied by a certain amount of incredulity from my unrelentingly skeptical brain. Is it really possible that we have all gathered here to do this work that I so love? Have we really managed to make this work again?  For 24 (TWENTYFOUR!) years now (only 9 of them under my directorship), the answer has been yes: YES, here we are gathered together to do this work.  As we begin those first few perennial breathing exercises that signal the start of our work together all my anxieties dissipate as the work just takes over.

As usual –early on we discussed the importance of warm ups, and therefore, being on time so you don’t miss them – neutral position and its usefulness to our work – the importance of the diaphragm and why we want to start building up its strength from the get go –and our one and only rule in the workshop: the respect rule.  It was like being in a room full of sponges soaking up every word. This group’s focus is already intense when they are fully engaged, and engaged they were! Hallelujah!

We did some shaping right off the bat and they exceeded day one expectations with very interesting shapes, my speech about using the dynamics of positive and negative space seemed a little superfluous in light of their already dynamic shapes, but it always good to talk about these things to make people aware of why what they are doing is working so well.

In the readings we began with excerpts from “Pleasure” and “The Transparent Doll” by Madame Rachilde, a playwright of the Symbolist movement in France in the last two decades of the 19^th century.  In both plays a seemingly urbane scene, two young lovers courting (Pleasure) or a mother mourning the loss of her stillborn baby (The Transparent Doll), is infused with the terror of underling forces.  The young lovers shudder at sensations they find mysterious as they try to understand the things that give them pleasure and the things that give them pain. The dangerousness of this exploration is symbolized by the revelation of a woman’s corpse in the pond by which they sit that only the girl sees and the vision of which nearly kills her, as she insists the boy not look as he carries her away.  The young mother explains to the doctor, that has come to visit her on behalf of her husband, that while her baby’s body may have been born dead, his soul lives on and she must be mother to him since the rest of the world, and especially her husband’s, failure to acknowledge his existence is diminishing him. Instead of the doctor declaring her crazy, he becomes infected by her otherworldliness and also begins to see her transparent son.  He leaves in a hurry saying he cannot treat crazy people who can prove their case. In comparison to some of the other authors we read the Symbolists’ techniques may seem a little tame, but they were the first movement to imagine a subjective theater where no one interpretation was possible or expected and therefore broke wide the gates of experimental theater.

We then got a little taste of the Italian Futurists, those crazy guys who worshipped speed and mechanization above all things, especially the established cannon.  They called museums abattoirs and called on their followers to reject worship of the past masters.  We read some of Marinetti’s ”Founding and Manifesto of Futurism”  and the participants were appropriately shocked at their 9^th tenant of futurism: “We will glorify war–the world’s only hygiene–militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for woman.”  But while the futurists’ political views were, by their own design, self-destructive, their ideas and experimentation in the theater are undeniably interesting.  One of their theatrical methods was to create what they called theatrical synthesis, which condensed a plot down to one climactic moment or idea. They also introduced the idea of simultaneity on stage, causing a scandal by staging two seemingly unconnected scenes at once. They often tried to replicate the workings of machines using bodies on stage, and used direct onomatopoeia in lieu of intelligible dialogue.  They even eschewed the accepted form of the script and included shapes and words at angles on the pages of some of their scripts.

At the end of the day we gave small groups of the participants one of the Futurists’ wildest scripts: “3nomial Voices Whirlpool Destruction” and let them loose to interpret it however they pleased.  Each group offered a very different interpretation, all of which focused on mechanical type movements and improvised delivery of some of the words that appear in the script, proving they were paying attention to our discussion of the Futurist’s techniques.  My favorite moment was when one performer moved between the rotating blades of the other performers’ arms. The timing appeared perfect, but the image seemed to contain the potential for violence if she had missed her timing and been caught in the blades. Very cool. A promising start to be sure.