An approach by the Galpon to do some workshops with their actors lead to four talleres on A Summer's Day.
The objective here was to look at the way in which Fosse's poetics operate. We used the long speech at the end of Act 2, where the woman looks back on the moment she and her friend's realised her husband wasn't coming back.
The events are all conveyed in reported speech, something that is almost anathema to contemporary ideas of drama, predicated by the demands of TV and film. The action of a human seen to be reflecting is generally considered to be dangerously passive (a word that is generally used in a pejorative sense in the script world I inhabit - ie - 'the lead character is overly passive'). At the same time, drama, from the Greeks onwards and presumably beforehand has always used the act of reporting events rather than showing them, something that goes against the modern mantra of "Show don't tell." Try telling Euripides. Or Shakespeare. Or Fosse.
A Summer's Day is a text which is very aware of the terrible power of that which is seen through the mind's eye. The Old Lady relives the day her life changed. Fosse employs the curious device of presenting her younger self and three other younger characters who interact with the 'present' of the old lady now, more serene, seemingly at ease with herself with the events described having occured decades ago. As such, this play is a meditation on time, as well as loss.
The exercises we used worked on 'presenting' the action which the old woman is recounting. The objective was not to discover a potential staging, but to find ways for the actors to get a foothold on the text, to "see" what they were telling. This is very much a rehearsal device; I doubt it would function in performance. Nevertheless it allowed the actors to access the large speech, and to connect with the emotion and drama which lurks within it. Ultimately these things have to emerge, to be conveyed, through the voice, and we were working towards this aim, with the actress reacting to the events as she saw them, and her voice thereby engaging with the complexity of the situation. In the end, it's clear that the lines she speaks are full of the storm and the anxiety and the fear of loss. Yet the trick is not to impose these things on the text, but to allow the words themselves to reveal the actress' emotions.
In the last workshop, we used the same technique, or 'presenting' the text, for Shakespeare's famous Seven Ages of Man speech, one which none of the actors knew.
The objective here was to look at the way in which Fosse's poetics operate. We used the long speech at the end of Act 2, where the woman looks back on the moment she and her friend's realised her husband wasn't coming back.
The events are all conveyed in reported speech, something that is almost anathema to contemporary ideas of drama, predicated by the demands of TV and film. The action of a human seen to be reflecting is generally considered to be dangerously passive (a word that is generally used in a pejorative sense in the script world I inhabit - ie - 'the lead character is overly passive'). At the same time, drama, from the Greeks onwards and presumably beforehand has always used the act of reporting events rather than showing them, something that goes against the modern mantra of "Show don't tell." Try telling Euripides. Or Shakespeare. Or Fosse.
A Summer's Day is a text which is very aware of the terrible power of that which is seen through the mind's eye. The Old Lady relives the day her life changed. Fosse employs the curious device of presenting her younger self and three other younger characters who interact with the 'present' of the old lady now, more serene, seemingly at ease with herself with the events described having occured decades ago. As such, this play is a meditation on time, as well as loss.
The exercises we used worked on 'presenting' the action which the old woman is recounting. The objective was not to discover a potential staging, but to find ways for the actors to get a foothold on the text, to "see" what they were telling. This is very much a rehearsal device; I doubt it would function in performance. Nevertheless it allowed the actors to access the large speech, and to connect with the emotion and drama which lurks within it. Ultimately these things have to emerge, to be conveyed, through the voice, and we were working towards this aim, with the actress reacting to the events as she saw them, and her voice thereby engaging with the complexity of the situation. In the end, it's clear that the lines she speaks are full of the storm and the anxiety and the fear of loss. Yet the trick is not to impose these things on the text, but to allow the words themselves to reveal the actress' emotions.
In the last workshop, we used the same technique, or 'presenting' the text, for Shakespeare's famous Seven Ages of Man speech, one which none of the actors knew.
No comments:
Post a Comment