Week 6: Filling The Space
Despite a flood-hit Shire this week, and after various check-ins, flood warnings, and road reports; we successfully brought together a company of actors who battled the conditions to make it to the Powerhouse Studios on a cold, wet January night.
Considering the focus on floods, the company could perhaps be forgiven for the lacklustre offering of objects they brought (or didn’t bring) to the session this week. Jack, in true improviser’s style, managed to grab a road cone from outside just before the session. Kama brought a minuscule Rubik’s cube.
This week was all about filling the space.
…How we as actors have a duty to send these words out across the space, not only to our fellow actors but to each and every audience member who share that space with us each night.
Beginning at the Beginning
Act One Scene One.
Ben stepped into the role of Horatio.
We started with a simple exercise where I asked the speaker to remain in a central position of the space without moving around, and to use physicality and voice to really send those words out across to all corners of the room.
Everyone spaced their chairs out to the outer extremities of the studio, so that each actor had as much distance to speak across.
The challenge: for the actors to focus less on their own internal thoughts, their own navel-gazing, their own internal pontifications –but for now, at all times, to send each thought out to an individual.
As the company continues to rely on reading from the page at the moment, there is a higher propensity to be locked into that slightly disconnected actor’s bubble…looking at the page rather than sending the words out for another to receive them.
And so, taking each line at a time, the challenge was to find someone new at each moment, in each thought, and communicate it as directly, clearly and as energetically as possible to that person across the space. And then find another. And then find another.
Instead of Horatio speaking to the ghost, he would speak directly to an audience member.
When he requested something of the ghost, he would request it of someone sitting in their chair across the room.
Speak To Me
We explored the triplicate of lines where Horatio requests the ghost to “Speak to me.”
I asked that those lines adhere to the stressed position of the iamb–where the word “to” is hit, rather than the more natural, modern expected way of saying “speak-to-me,” which may allocate stress to the word “speak” or “me.” But very rarely would it feel natural to hit the word “to” as the iambic pentameter is requesting of the actor.
This particular phrase often feels, for actors, a pain point of delivery.
It feels so jarring to allocate the stressed emphasis within the iambic structure.
This conflict was one that Ben felt and grappled with, leading to a fruitful discussion and exploration of the dynamic, energy, and forward momentum that can be achieved by adhering to that stressed position.
Almost driving the words to the ghost. Sending out to the recipient.
My offer to the group: our job is not to normalise or sanitise the structure of the verse by repackaging its rhythm into conventionally modern, naturalistic speech patterns.
As in other forms of spoken verse–including rap–a conversational naturalistic delivery very rarely serves these thoughts and interactions.
Authenticity and truth are still infinitely achievable through the choices we make within the verse.
When we connect to the underlying momentum and energy of the action from start to finish, we get the difference between a long, ambling, self-indulgent production where audiences stop listening–and a shared two-hour experience where actors and audience alike are locked into a driving beat of action.
Energise The Line
We continued to work through Act One, aiming for each moment to be an opportunity to not concern ourselves with a naturalistic reading of the page but as a physical and energised act of connection with another.
We moved from standing in the centre to rushing to all extremities of the room on each new thought.
As with all of the work that we’re doing, exercises like this might on the surface feel at first to be nothing more than exercises that wouldn’t make their way to an actual public-facing performance.
But my contention is: why not?
There were moments we all agreed on where an actor with energy and speed and determination would come across the space, directly speaking to us as we sat there as an audience member to receive the line–intimately and powerfully–before they find someone else to share their thoughts with.
The sheer act of ensuring that these words are always there for somebody to directly receive, and never to be delivered to our navel in a tortured character emulation, could very well be a mode of playing that act, or that scene, on any given night.
Play Without Words
We rounded the session off with a full run of Act One again–but this time without the words.
The intention was to retain everything we’d explored around physicalising the scenes from the first part of the session:
The forward motion and “next moment” drive.
The physical act of filling the space at every thought…moving and filling and owning that empty space.
Ensuring that eyes and face and body are fully committed to sending something across.
Keeping the forward momentum going.
Keeping that physical act of sharing ideas and interactions alive and dynamic in the space–whether to your fellow actor or to someone across the room.
To do this, I streamed a random shuffle selection of tracks to the TV speakers, switching into a different track for each scene.
This naturally added a new dynamic for new people coming in, and forced the actors to be responsive and reactive to the character of the music whilst adhering to the physical filling of the space through physical action.
I encouraged the actors to worry less about a meticulous plotting of their speeches, but to convey a much more short-form crystallisation of their interactions and motivations in the scene through physical activity alongside the music.
Brain Blanks
When it came to Act One Scene Three, Andrew as Polonius had what he describes as “a total brain blank”.
He stood in the space at a loss of what was happening and what to do.
I challenged him to forgo any obligation to rack his memory as to what the conversation in the scene entails, but simply to use the music to convey an interaction where he was asking Ophelia questions of some kind.
Andrew still felt at a loss and protested he doesn’t know what to do.
I pushed, countering: the scene is simple–just engage with his fellow actor physically to the music and essentially “show us what it is to ask, by moving to the music.”
Andrew still struggled with the challenge, and it led to a prickly debate afterwards.
His position: if an actor is facing a blank or unable to find a hook as to what to do next, it’s no good just trying to push on regardless.
I countered that this was exactly what the exercises and approaches are surfacing for us in terms of challenge.
And as Andrew observed: where we fail. And that this space is a place to be able to fail and usefully clock those failures.
By knowing where those failures arise, I suggested, points us into the wider objective of what we as a company of actors should be aiming to achieve…
Removing the Safety Nets
What we’re talking about in this work is throwing ourselves consistently into a dynamic of performance, an approach to live performance that has essentially removed all of the conventional safety nets of a production.
Where conventionally you know your exits and your entrances and your blocking:
You go over there to do that with that prop at that point and then you give this to them.
You know that your fellow actor will be over here
and you’ll deliver your line exactly as you have a dozen times before to them at that moment.
What we’re exploring is the removal of all of those safety nets.
Throwing ourselves into the space where so much is unknown.
Feeling–as I described it–the “lactic acid” of the unknowability of what to do next in a moment in the empty space.
But to push through that burn.
To focus less on one’s self in the moment and work together as a collective to keep the action going.
To assist each other where the unknowability of what comes next can essentially be the essence of the magic that we are being brave enough to create.
It feels like some really good work is happening in these sessions.
Because if these moments of–let’s call them–“creative cramps” aren’t being triggered, then the training probably isn’t flexing the muscles enough.