Physical Theatres: A Critical Reader

John Keefe, Simon Murray, John Keefe, Simon Murray

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN: 9780367632236
• eBook ISBN: 9781134230969
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre

Physical Theatres: A Critical Reader is an invaluable resource for students of physically orientated theatre and performance. This book aims to trace the roots and development of physicality in theatre by combining practical experience of the field with a strong historical and theoretical underpinning.

In exploring the histories, cross-overs and intersections of physical theatres, this critical Reader provides:

• six new, specially commissioned essays, covering each of the book's main themes, from technical traditions to contemporary practises
• discussion of issues such as the foregrounding of the body, training and performance processes, and the origins of theatre in both play and human cognition
• a focus on the relationship and tensions between the verbal and the physical in theatre
• contributions from Augusto Boal, Stephen Berkoff, Étienne Decroux, Bertolt Brecht, David George, J-J. Rousseau, Ana Sanchez Colberg, Michael Chekhov, Jeff Nuttall, Jacques Lecoq, Yoshi Oida, Mike Pearson, and Aristotle.

SECTION 1
Genesis, Contexts,
Namings

Letter to a young practitioner
Value the work of your hands and body

This physical body is the meeting place of worlds.
Spiritual, social, political, emotional, intellectual worlds are all interpreted through this physical body. When we work with our hands and body to create art, or simply to project an idea from within, we imprint the product with a sweat signature, the glisten and odour which only the physical body can produce. These are the by-products of the meeting of worlds through the physical body. It is visible evidence of work to move from conception to production. Our bodies are both art elements and tools that communicate intuitively.

Goat Island: C.J. Mitchell, Bryan Saner, Karen Christopher,

Mark Jeffery, Matthew Goulish and Lin Hixson

Theatre in Crisis? eds Maria Delgado and Caridad Svich,

Manchester University Press, 2002: 241.

Essay 1
Claire Heggen goes fishing

■ Dick McCaw

IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE WORD? For many people involved in theatre, the process begins with being given a script, the playwright’s words, which serve as the basis of the production. But what about a theatre which doesn’t rely on words? This used to be called mime, but the term started to lose its currency – in Britain, at any rate – in the early 1990s. Now if you leaf through the programme of the London International Mime Festival you will find many different theatres – physical theatre, theatre of objects, visual theatre – and maybe the one thing they all have in common is that they don’t begin with or rely upon the word.

In this essay I shall examine the work of Claire Heggen, co-founder of Paris-based Théâtre du Mouvement and an ex-pupil of the legendary French mime Étienne Decroux. I shall show how her creative process (i.e. the means by which she and her company create performances) starts not with words but movement. If she uses words it is to elicit movement from her fellow artists. For this reason her use of words, her terminology, is very precise – the wrong formula of words might not elicit the quality or type of movement that she is after. The words that I shall be quoting¹ come from a CD-ROM that Peter Hulton² and I made of a workshop given by Claire Heggen at the International Workshop Festival³ (IWF) in 2000.

I use a conversation with Clive Barker to explain how we used the CD/DVD-ROM format to document the work of (mostly movement-oriented) teachers invited to IWF. When Clive Barker (a great friend and mentor) and I were once looking at footage that Peter had taken of a workshop on his theatre games, he muttered that, ‘It is all very well seeing what I did, but you had no idea of what was in my mind as to why I did it.’ This is exactly what the DVD-ROM format allows for. The process begins by Peter editing an hour or so from footage of a workshop he has filmed. That hour will be of exercises or moments that Peter considers central to their teaching. I then take the edited footage to the workshop leader and we watch it together. When they want to comment on a particular moment, I record their comments and then we continue viewing. At no point during the first viewings do I ask any questions. I then transcribe the comments and at that point we discuss what we gathered. Very often the teacher will start to recognise certain recurrent preoccupations, or I will ask for an explanation of certain terms, and in this way we build up a very detailed commentary on the exercise. So, we do get a fairly close approximation of what that teacher was thinking when they chose to lead that particular exercise in that particular way. In these documentations the movement or actions come first, and the verbal commentary second. Only by examining a process in detail can one understand exactly how the genesis, terminology and realisation of a piece of physical theatre is different from that of text-based theatre. For this reason I propose to study passages from Heggen’s commentary on her workshop.

Claire Heggen goes fishing

Towards the end of a week-long workshop Heggen proposes a 30-minute exercise, or, as she prefers to call it, a protocol. It begins with a very simple movement constraint (trying to explore all the movement possible whilst keeping one hand on the floor) and develops into an exercise of theatrical creativity and composition. Her protocol has no cognitive content as such – it is simply a very carefully constructed series of rules for movement. Terminology is important: she resists using the word ‘exercises’ because they ‘are treated as recipes. [. . .] One heaps up exercises one after the other but they lose their ultimate objective which is to make theatre.’ She goes on to explain that each moment of an exercise ‘can be a moment of drama. There is no such thing as an exercise – it is already theatre.’ Heggen echoes Grotowski in her rejection of training as an accumulation of skills (the actor’s performing capital), and in her insistence that the moment you start to work is already potentially a moment of theatre. Far from being a means of postponing the moment of theatre-making her training is journey towards it:

The aim is to experience a very simple journey, which will become progressively more complex and which will reach points of synthesis along the way. Beginning from simply touching the ground with one’s hand and from that contact, to move the arm around the shoulder blade, to find out that sense of pushing oneself back [se repousser] (according to Gerda Alexander’s method); then, through the repetition of this simple movement (using only one side of the body, one can discover the effect that it has on you as in the Feldenkrais method), to become aware of the body from this point. You can’t make a movement unless there is a point of support [point d’appui], a fixed point [point fixe]: for example, when you’re walking, you move from one point of support to another. All movements require a fixed point in order that they can be developed. The only rule in this particular protocol is to keep the hand on the floor, not to move it or to let it slide.

The nature and purpose of this exercise are implied in her calling this a journey which she is inviting participants to ‘experience’. The first level of experience is the physiological – exploring the sensation of rotating your shoulder blade through a movement of the arm; becoming aware of how you push yourself back from the floor.

She mentions the terms points d’appui and points fixes, but I don’t know that it is useful to think of these as terms that can be understood discursively. The only way to understand either the point d’appui or the point fixe is through the action of your weight in relation to the floor and your surrounding space – in other words these terms can even be fully understood in terms of Newtonian mechanics. The exploration in this early part of the protocol is precisely to grasp what they mean in terms of movement. Could one call them kinaesthetic concepts? Their value as terms is that they identify a particular form of relation between the actor and space.

So, the participant begins by re-confirming or rediscovering their sense of internal contact (sensing the connection of the hand with the shoulder) and contact with the floor, and experiencing the contradiction (an important word for Heggen) between being asked to discover a range of movement within the given limitation (one hand on the floor). The next stage of the protocol is to find a fixed point somewhere in the studio – another kind of contact and another level of difficulty: how to find the possibilities for movement whilst trying to keep your eye on one point and still keep your hand on the floor? It is a movement conundrum – an adventure you are invited to join in. The protocol has value because it enables – or rather obliges – participants to make discoveries about their physiology, about the nature of theatrical space, and, finally, to happen upon material that might be useful in a performance. She explains that this ‘is a process that I am increasingly developing in my teaching: I start with a little form or exercise, and shift gradually from the level of sensation to the level of metaphor’. In other words, you don’t tell someone what they might find out, but let them make their own discoveries: her whole approach is heuristic.

Heggen doesn’t give instructions for movement, she sets out parameters to be explored through movement, and then feeds in suggestions – in the nature of Viola Spolin’s side-coaching – that might help stimulate the participant to develop and define their discoveries as they journey along their path, helping them to take creative responsibility for what they are doing. They are being encouraged to be internally responsive to the feedback they are getting from the movement.⁴ The words aren’t instructions about how to do a movement, but relays by means of which you develop movements within the given constraints. In an article called The Rhetoric of the Image,⁵ Roland Barthes distinguished between photo captions that serve as a relay, and those that serve as an anchorage: the first develops upon the meaning of the image while the second merely enforces it by saying it again. Heggen, following her master Decroux, was emphatically opposed to tautology.

Heggen encourages the actor to start looking beyond and through the bodily sensation of movement: ‘Be aware of different states within the body: postures, different states of breathing, different states of muscular tonicity.’ She asks them to ‘Taste the movement’, to ‘Take the time to experiment’, ‘Be satisfied with what the body gives you, let it make its own actions, let it happen to you.’ The actor has a double engagement: first finding out what movements are possible within the given limitations – a problem-solving and active role; second, listening out for what happens as a result of making or finding out these movements – feedback which she invites participants to savour.

It is a body that thinks, it is as though movement develops exploration. It’s not just that I am moving to make movements, I move with a savour for the movement, savour in the sense of savoir.

(In Leçon⁶ Roland Barthes notes how he prefers to engage in the bodily intellection of saveur (which translates as ‘savour’) rather than the purely cognitive knowledge of savoir (which translates as ‘cognitive knowledge’).) You are asked to use your senses to find out what is happening, rather than trying to make sense of what is happening: ‘Feed yourself from the situation itself and don’t add things: the situation is already there: that is enough, you don’t need any supplementary comments.’ Her commentary contains useful warnings: ‘You mustn’t have a preconceived idea of what your body will give you when moving within this constraint. You must allow yourself to be astonished by what happens to you as you follow the path set out by the exercise.’ (The late Barney Simon of the Market Theatre Johannesburg called one of his workshops ‘The Astonished Eye’.)

I’ve noted that Heggen delights in contradiction, and this peculiar mixture of activity and passivity might seem to an English reader just another example of the perversity of French thinking. However, it is neither perverse nor alien to English practitioners. Think of Clive Barker, who talks about ‘body think’ in Theatre Games,⁷ and is always watching out when an actor’s or student’s centre rises to their head – when they self-consciously think about an exercise rather than engage in and take information from the exercise itself. In the two workshops I’ve attended by Phelim McDermott he has asked participants to look after and to listen out for ‘what the exercise needs’. In 2001 he began a workshop with an exercise by Viola Spolin:

Turn your palms towards each other and have an idea that there’s some space in between your hands and you don’t know what this is yet, but you’re going to play with this stuff in between you. Remember that it’s a game. Find out. Start feeling what it feels like. What is its texture, its temperature? Is it thick or thin? [. . .] For the moment, concentrate on what is between your hands. Has it got colour? Is it soft or hard? If it changes, let it change. Notice when you go into your head and say to yourself, ‘Oh, it’s . . .’ Then come back to what’s out there.⁸

Once again we are dealing with invitations to discover through your senses what is actually happening. McDermott is sensitive to the problem of ‘going into your head’ and makes no big deal of it – simply take note of where you’ve gone and come back out again ‘to what’s out there’.

Later in the workshop he notes ‘that this process involves waiting and giving over to something. We can’t make a good scene happen. I’m talking about tricking your brain into doing something really good.’ Elsewhere his advice is even simpler: ‘Don’t get in your own way.’ The problem is that our impatient, analytic brain wants to get on with the process, and this stops us listening. Heggen notes that, ‘Normally, we are sensorially handicapped but if you open the door to this kind of information, the universe which is thereby discovered can be a very rich source of nourishment for the actor.’

It must be clear by now that Heggen’s protocol operates entirely via bodily movement. As McDermott observed above, the cons...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• List of Figures
• Notes On Contributors
• Thanks, Acknowledgements and Permissions
• Introduction
• Section 1: Genesis, Contexts, Namings
• Section 2: Roots: Routes
• Section 3: Contemporary Practices
• Section 4: Preparation and Training
• Section 5: Physicality and the Word
• Section 6: Bodies and Cultures
• Afterwords