Week 7: What Do You Mean?
We started with Act One Scene Two. Claudius addresses the room with “Though yet of Hamlet, our dear brother’s death.”
The setup was simple:
We sat in a circle.
The actor would move across the space and sit next to someone.
They’d speak a verse line or a verse line and a half – yes! I was momentarily allowing actors to stop halfway through a verse line this week.
Actors would speak their individual units of text, their separate thoughts, and then stop.
The person they were speaking to would then ask: “What do you mean?”
The actor would explain what they meant in their own words, as themselves, using plain modern prose.
When they had their next line or thought to share, they’d move across the space and sit next to another person and repeat the process.
Finding Clarity
This was a slow and simple but very effective exercise. It gave us the time that it naturally required to begin truly hearing the words, making sense of them, hearing the thoughts as they’re pieced together in the moment. The goal was to ensure that everyone we’re speaking to has thought communicated to them as clearly and effectively as possible before finding the next moment.
The exercise revealed the effectiveness of:
always finding someone across the space to share each new thought.
To look them in the eyes.
To bring them into the moment.
Essentially inviting a two-way interaction, where the speaker has a duty to the listener to communicate as clearly as possible.
We wouldn’t proceed until that clarity was established between speaker and listener.
Interesting moments came when an actor would be asked, “What do you mean?” and would sometimes respond with, “Hmm. Yeah, what do I mean?” “What am I trying to say here?”
Sometimes they would naturally find their translation from 400-year-old poetry to a clear modern explanation in the moment. Sometimes they would piece it together slowly. Sometimes as a group we would feed in and help them piece it together collectively.
Now Speak
For the latter part of the session, we removed the question “What do you mean?” and ran through sections where clarity, communication, and connection with the people and the room we were speaking to became our sole focus.
This continued our ongoing work to avoid our actorly habits of drawing the action inward–either as individuals speaking a speech to ourselves, or when there are two actors on stage interacting with each other, drawing that conversation close and closed and inward like arms around shoulders or walking closely together.
For now, we’re ensuring that we try to keep our words sent across the space.
Or…. if we do choose to deliver lines intimately and up close, to keep offer those moments audience members rather than the other actors on stage.