I have written briefly about SUA here. We had always been due to give the Montevideo presentation there, but rehearsing there as well was a fortuitous accident, made possible by the support of Sergio Mautone.
We rehearsed in the basement. SUA is in the process of being upgraded as a rehearsal space. As a result it has a slightly scrappy unfinished feel, with graffiti on the walls which have yet to be re-plastered. From our point of view, this was perfect. I already felt as though the play needed an unvarnished, home-made feel. My thinking is that, within this play, if you try to elevate these two characters into something too serious or tragic, the characters run the risk of not being ridiculous, and therefore are all the more ridiculous.
To explain. The protagonists of Winter are both, to a certain extent, damaged. Their flaws are completely apparent, from early on. Some of the things they do, including their repetitive tropes are needy, even ridiculous. I wanted to embrace this ridiculousness, so that the actors would have no fear of it. Hence, for example, when the Woman collapses in the opening scene, this is not so much a Victorian swoon as a self-conscious, Chaplinesque pratfall.
We will return to Chaplin in a while. But before that we needed as a company to embrace the notion of gesture and repetition.
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One of the attractions of this project was that, initially, the intention was clear it was a process of investigation, or research. What tools does the actor possess in order to communicate the status of his or her character?
We live in a stage world, particularly the Anglo-Saxons, within which naturalism is paramount. Even Shakespeare seems to be treated on the whole as a naturalistic, psychologically determined text.
I have been lucky enough to have seen a little bit of German theatre of late, in the work of Nubling's Three Kingdoms. The tension in that production between a British naturalism and a more stylised, "European" form of acting was beautifully explored. In addition I came across this clip from Ostermeier's Hedda Gabler, which opened a door.
In the clip, we see the actor leave the stage and perform a curious, mannered movement, before returning to the stage. I don't think this is signalled by Ibsen in his text. Yet it opens up and reveals so much about the actor's state of mind, in a way that strict naturalism could never do. This was the direction in which I wanted to head with our version of Winter. To use the text as a stepping stone towards an exploration of the interior world of the actor.
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In order to achieve this, the first thing we needed to do was develop a vocabulary of gestures for the actors, something they supplied themselves.
I am not sure how large this vocabulary or lexicon ever was, because when the actors found things that worked for them, they swiftly integrated them. I have a list here:
gesto vocabulario
falling backwards
wink/ gignada
1 forward diagonal 1 across 1 back 1 back
bailerina
princesa - brazos extendidos y 'ting'
officia - hand across chest
wife - hand over mouth
We rehearsed in the basement. SUA is in the process of being upgraded as a rehearsal space. As a result it has a slightly scrappy unfinished feel, with graffiti on the walls which have yet to be re-plastered. From our point of view, this was perfect. I already felt as though the play needed an unvarnished, home-made feel. My thinking is that, within this play, if you try to elevate these two characters into something too serious or tragic, the characters run the risk of not being ridiculous, and therefore are all the more ridiculous.
To explain. The protagonists of Winter are both, to a certain extent, damaged. Their flaws are completely apparent, from early on. Some of the things they do, including their repetitive tropes are needy, even ridiculous. I wanted to embrace this ridiculousness, so that the actors would have no fear of it. Hence, for example, when the Woman collapses in the opening scene, this is not so much a Victorian swoon as a self-conscious, Chaplinesque pratfall.
We will return to Chaplin in a while. But before that we needed as a company to embrace the notion of gesture and repetition.
+++
One of the attractions of this project was that, initially, the intention was clear it was a process of investigation, or research. What tools does the actor possess in order to communicate the status of his or her character?
We live in a stage world, particularly the Anglo-Saxons, within which naturalism is paramount. Even Shakespeare seems to be treated on the whole as a naturalistic, psychologically determined text.
I have been lucky enough to have seen a little bit of German theatre of late, in the work of Nubling's Three Kingdoms. The tension in that production between a British naturalism and a more stylised, "European" form of acting was beautifully explored. In addition I came across this clip from Ostermeier's Hedda Gabler, which opened a door.
In the clip, we see the actor leave the stage and perform a curious, mannered movement, before returning to the stage. I don't think this is signalled by Ibsen in his text. Yet it opens up and reveals so much about the actor's state of mind, in a way that strict naturalism could never do. This was the direction in which I wanted to head with our version of Winter. To use the text as a stepping stone towards an exploration of the interior world of the actor.
+++
In order to achieve this, the first thing we needed to do was develop a vocabulary of gestures for the actors, something they supplied themselves.
I am not sure how large this vocabulary or lexicon ever was, because when the actors found things that worked for them, they swiftly integrated them. I have a list here:
gesto vocabulario
falling backwards
wink/ gignada
1 forward diagonal 1 across 1 back 1 back
bailerina
princesa - brazos extendidos y 'ting'
officia - hand across chest
wife - hand over mouth
However the truth is that this was amended rapidly. The other point to note before going on to discuss the use of gesture in more detail is that for each gesture, we also sought to integrate a sound.
None of this is particularly sophisticated. It is also worth noting the connection of this work with Boal's machine of Sound & Rhythm. However, the aspect that was challenging and (perhaps) innovative was the integration of a strong, hyper-naturalistic text with these architectural non-textual additions.
Subsequently I'll try and explain what is meant by the glib-sounding phrase 'hyper-naturalistic" and then comment in more depth on the gestures themselves.
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