Ah, the wonders of sleep deprivation. I’ve been noticing that the more long-term tiredness I cultivate, the more strange sounds seem to come out of my mouth with a sort of giddy frivolity. So if that carries over into my writing, I apologize. There is hope on the horizon though! Tonight I should be able to get a more appropriate amount of rest.
Tiredness granted, it didn’t affect me much this morning. Acting was absolutely incredible today, because after we warmed up with Name-Tag we spent the rest of class working through a long Michael Chekhov exercise in movement qualities.
(Michael Chekhov)
Chekhov’s contribution to modern theater is incredibly important, and a most basic explanation of the contextualization of Chekhov is that Chekhov (Stanislavsky’s “most brilliant pupil”) differed from Stanislavsky in that where Stanislavsky believed that calling up memories of past experiences and thus achieving naturalistic acting was the only reliable source for a performer, Chekhov strongly believed that the actor’s imagination was at least as useful a tool and should be cultivated and practiced like anything else. This imagination, he believed, could be just as reliable if not more reliable in achieving true sensation as Stanislavsky’s method of self-searching.
Chekhov’s four qualities of movement were molding, floating, flying, and radiating/receiving. In our exercise today, Matt Gray talked us through four imagined scenarios (mostly with our eyes shut) corresponding to these qualities. First we moved slowly as if through warm clay. Each movement required almost the entirety of the body to engage, to push through and mold our own shape and the indentation we made in the clay. (I should note that this seems to tie into Rudolf Laban’s idea of weight—which we are covering in Movement—it being an example of strong weight.) The clay became less and less solid until it was muddy water and then cleared. Now observing in our imagination that we were at the bottom of a lake, we suddenly realized that our flesh and bone was transforming into air bubbles, from our toes, up our body, until we were entirely composed of air-bubbles and began to float toward the surface. Up out of the lake we floated, up to the clouds. The sun warmed our skin and we observed the lake far below us. Then we floated down to the branch of a tree, grew talons, feathers, a tail, wings, and a beak. We became birds and opened our eyes, seeing other birds in other trees. Then we spread our wings and flew, soared, circled each other in the air and alighted again on branches.
Of the four parts to the exercise, this was the one that required the most conscious imaginative effort on my part. One part of this was certainly that our eyes were open and we thus had to blend the line between our imagined inner life and our actual physical presence in the room. But more troublesome than that and what was so interesting was that in the process of “flying,” I became extremely frustrated with the actual physical constraints of the room. I wanted to fly faster and further than the Checco’s walls allowed. There didn’t seem to be enough space for all us birds. I wanted to soar and knew that I could if only the walls were removed. Dealing with this frustration was when my conscious imaginative work had to come in, to keep that frustration from disengaging me. Nonetheless, it didn’t require too much on my part, and I was still very much in it when we alighted a final time and allowed the wind to blow our feathers away, returning to human form.
In the last part of the exercise, we closed our eyes again and stepped onto a metal plate, which raised us into the air, higher and higher, until we left the Earth’s atmosphere itself and stood in space. We still felt the sun warming us, but gradually we put our hands on our chests and felt our hearts beginning to glow, like miniature suns. As our hearts glowed hotter and hotter, our whole body glowed with heat as well. But it wasn’t painful. We simply radiated energy: heat and light and positive feeling. We opened our eyes and looked at each other and spread our arms and radiated through the whole room. We felt energy spreading out from us to others and in return we received the energy put out by our class-mates.
This was arguably the most emotionally evocative part of the exercise, which is natural considering it was the last quality we worked in. Looking around though, it was interesting to see how some people beamed smiles, and others openly cried. I myself couldn’t help smiling, though I found there were certain people who I couldn’t look at because their expressions threatened to bring me down… and others who I loved to look at, with whom I could radiate and receive energy with ease and joy. Finally, we lowered our arms and looked back at the Earth, still radiating energy. We chose a particular place on Earth, a particular state, or city, or house, and pointed down at it, and radiated all our heat and light towards that place. Then the metal plate lowered us back to the Earth, to the location we chose, and we stepped off the plate, our eyes closed once again, observing this location. That was when Matt told us to return to the Studio.
If I had doubted my engagement with the exercise before (which I actually hadn’t, a big step forward for me since I have a bad habit of second-guessing everything), all such doubts would have disappeared when I experienced the surprisingly visceral resistance I felt to leaving my chosen location, which was New York City. Stepping off that metal plate, I had felt exactly as if I had stepped off a bus onto the sidewalk in New York. Though intellectually I knew that I was, in fact, not in New York, the place I had put my senses in was so vivid that I was noticeably disappointed and irritated in the moment that I reluctantly pulled myself back into Studio A.
The exercise is powerful because it relies on sensory experience rather than emotional states. Matt tells us we are “radiating energy in space” rather than that we are “happy” and emotion, more specific and strong emotion, I might add, simply follows. We mold our bodies through clay and feel one thing, and if we had gone back to molding through clay after having been engaged in the exercise as long as we were, we probably would have found it much more evocative. Molding is a good thing to play when a tired character is just waking up, for example. Instead of indicating tiredness, one concentrates on the sensual experience of waking up and feeling like it takes a whole-body effort to move a single appendage. As if moving through thick mud.
All in all, it was a pretty fucking cool experience.
For Friday, and for our Private Moments, Matt wants us to focus on two things: 1) to see how specific we can get with our ‘where’s (note how important the ‘where’s were in the different parts of the Chekhov work today) and 2) what movement quality is most appropriate for our animal character?
Though I’m not sure I know where my Private Moment will take place yet, I think Florence is really more of a radiating person than anything else. Flamingos are very social; that’s really their primary behavioral characteristic. So in a way they’re all about giving and receiving. Radiating is a good movement quality for them.
That's all I've got in me tonight. My bed looks comfortable.
No comments:
Post a Comment