TOWER SHAKESPEARE THEATRE CONFERENCE
(in preparation for ‘Tower Hamlet’ 2010)
Scenes from Macbeth, King Lear, Othello, and Romeo and Juliet
7 December 2009. Main Hall, The Brady Arts Centre, 192-196 Hanbury Street, E1 5HU
Programme for the Day
10am Opening remarks: Artistic Director Jon Hewitt: Aims of the project.
10.15am Presentation of theatre pieces from the Five Training Groups: (Traditional British Shakespeare, Stanislavski, Lecoq, Mime, Grotowski).
Scenes from four of Shakespeare’s Greatest Tragedies:
Macbeth, King Lear, Othello, and Romeo and Juliet
11.15am Break
11.30am The Conference participants experience the training of each group for twenty five minutes, followed by a twenty five minute debate on how the work could develop and what we can do in future
11.30am Traditional British Shakespeare Group
12.30pm Lunch
1.30pm Stanislavski Group
2.25pm Lecoq Group
3.20pm Break
3.35pm Mime Group
4.30pm Grotowski Training Group
5.25pm Closing remarks from Artistic Director
5.30pm Conference Closes
Detailed Report
10am Opening remarks: Artistic Director Jon Hewitt: Aims of the project. Where we are.
We wish to contribute to our culture. We do this work without financial assistance. This project is not a stepping stone. This project seeks to make a difference to British theatre. Theatre is art. Skills must be developed, and understanding of that art increased in the audience. We work hard, we make thorough preparation, and we apply techniques self-consciously and deliberately in a controlled artistic way. Those who stay get the reward from this work; the achievement of having created something beautiful, of being part of a project greater than oneself, and of learning a discipline. Today we have a kind of festival of disciplines: five different approaches. These are not means to the same end, but different ways of creating, of being, like different philosophies or languages, and as such set their own terms. The superficial critical response of whether we like or don’t like them is no more conclusive than to ask the same of different languages.
The first rehearsal on 28 July was in the Theatre next door to begin the Grotowski Training. In September we held the Professional Actors’ Seminar on ‘Definitions of Traditional British Shakespeare’ attended by 44 actors [Report available]. From 30 Oct to 1 Nov we presented ‘Ghost Song Shakespeare’ using the five methods applied to extracts from Shakespeare and new writing. Previously Admiration has presented ‘Romeo and Juliet’ as Clown and Bouffon at Oxford House, then oppositely with a sense of social and contemporary context in the Docklands area, Isle of Dogs. And after ‘Romeo and Juliet Docklands’ it made sense to make ‘Tower Hamlet’ in the Borough of nearly the same name. I first came to a meeting with Alison Denning, Arts and Events Officer, Brady Arts Centre in February. Alison had come to see our ‘Romeo and Juliet Docklands’ at The Space that same month. I first met Jerry Deeks, General Manager in March.
I had wanted to make a ‘comparative’ theatre project for some time: which may be taken to mean working in comparing, or using, different forms of theatre together. From March to May we held a daily experimental Group at Chisenhale Dance Space. But after some time we found that the constant variety, that any day could contain any approach or many at once, needed to be simplified, the strands separated, and that is why we now have five different groups, with no cross-over. This is not a horse race and search for a winner, but a celebration of diversity. The general public want to know how car engines work, what drives the sun, how animals evolve; and likewise there is a shared curiosity to know what theatre is, how it works, how we can do it, how we can learn to get better at it. Today’s Conference is very much to encourage growth in that curiosity.
The Five Groups have worked in different ways and addressed different problems. In Traditional British Shakespeare we have looked at text, how the actors present themselves to the audience, how they relate to the audience, we debate social meaning, we seek in performance an immediacy and flexibility. In the Stanislavsky Group we began to look for the original Stanislavsky teaching independent of the many variations in teaching methods that have been added to it - this is not an easy task - we created a Chart of differing interpretations, we worked with exercises, for and against the principles behind them and we found what Stanislavsky was not. We are grateful for the John Gillett book ‘Reclaiming Stanislavski’. We also used Benedetti’s ‘Stanislavski Introduction’ and ‘Stanislavski And The Actor’. We have struggled in finding our definitions and answers, but it has been a useful journey. With the Lecoq Group, we have used as a base the exercises of Marcello Magni from a two week masterclass, and have worked with actors who have attended Lecoq or Lispa, we have explored principles that are explored at L.E.M. and I have also used exercises from the Ecoles Gaulier and Lassaad. For Mime we have closely followed the teaching of Ella Jaroszewicz at Studio Magenia exploring physicalisations of the metaphors of Shakespeare. With the Grotowski Group we have continued working with the Plastiques and Corporals and making our way through the exercises of ‘Towards A Poor Theatre’ ensuring that we explore mime, biomechanics, Delsarte and Dalcroze where they are mentioned in the text and not skipping over them; learning how to make choices within this field, and beginning to see how we can apply these techniques and this training to composition.
Next year for TOWER HAMLET, a three week run at The Courtyard, 2 to 21 February, we will apply this work with the five groups to the greatest play; the greatest work of the worlds greatest playwright, ‘not of an age but for all time’ as Ben Johnson said. Why did we choose this play? Because it is about form, and meaning, the nature and play of reality, for example in the play-within-the-play and mime show, in the double- and subtextual-meanings, and because it demonstrates, as Stanislavski said, ‘the search for the meaning of existence’. Today we see the start of five different equally acceptable and charming answers to the questions of this play.
We are very grateful to the Brady Art Centre staff for all their help, and The Royal Inn, The East Ham Methodist Mission, The Actors Centre, The Crown, The Bethnal Green Mission, and The Mercers Charitable Foundation for the help they have previously given. But we now have no funding. This is professional work. More than that, it is a conservatoire research project with adult professionals and this work deserves to be respected and to be paid. We urgently need help with space to rehearse. I have been directing non-stop since September without income. We do need help. Please do come forward if you can help us.
We may be looking for some new people to join us next year. In this project we want to do East London, our society and theatre, proud. That is our intention. I do hope you will enjoy this work today - both the presentations, and the training led by each group and in which all are very much encouraged to take part, and also in the debates on each tradition of theatre which follow.
10.15am Presentation of theatre pieces from the Five Training Groups: (Traditional British Shakespeare, Stanislavski, Lecoq, Mime, Grotowski).
Scenes from four of Shakespeare’s Greatest Tragedies: Macbeth, King Lear, Othello, and Romeo and Juliet.
TRADITIONAL BRITISH SHAKESPEARE GROUP
From Macbeth
Macbeth and Lady Macbeth Act I Scene VII
Macbeth and Lady Macbeth Act II Scene II
Doctor, Gentlewoman, and Lady Macbeth Act V Scene I
From Romeo and Juliet
Balcony Scene Act II Scene II
STANISLAVSKI GROUP
From Romeo and Juliet
Act IV Scene III
LECOQ GROUP
From Othello
Othello strangles Desdemona
From Romeo and Juliet
The Wind
Excess and Restraint
Romeo and Mercutio reported
Finale à la cart
MIME GROUP
From Romeo and Juliet
Romeo and the Apothecary – Gold and Poison
From Othello
Othello strangles Desdemona
GROTOWSKI GROUP
Three Characters - Iago, Juliet and Desdemona
TRADITIONAL BRITISH SHAKESPEARE GROUP
From King Lear
Two daughters and King Lear Act II Scene IV
From Othello
Iago and Roderigo Act I Scene III – ‘money in thy purse’
Iago and Cassio Act II Scene III – ‘reputation’
STANISLAVSKI GROUP
From Othello
Act 1 Scene III
LECOQ GROUP
From Macbeth
Banquo’s Ghost at Dinner
From King Lear
Goneril and Regan make up Cordelia
Lear and Fool in the storm
Lear and Cordelia reconciled (i) on TV (ii) The Chord
MIME GROUP
From Macbeth
Banquo’s Murder
From King Lear
Blinded Gloucester and Edgar reach the ‘cliff’
GROTOWSKI GROUP
From Othello
The Possession - Othello murders Desdemona
11.15am Break
11.30am The Conference participants experience the training of each group for twenty-five minutes, followed by a twenty-five minute debate on the work and how it could develop in future. For each debate the actors from the Group formed a Panel in front of the audience to answer questions.
11.30am Traditional British Shakespeare Group
For training with the audience this group’s choices included a physical limbering, speaking and moving with text and tongue twisters, a speech for everyone to say, nursery rhymes, taking it in turns to stand on a chair to address everyone as a crowd and seeing how long attention could successfully be held.
TBS indicates member of Traditional British Shakespeare Group; S Stanislavski; L Lecoq; M Mime; G Grotowski; E Equity; D Director; A guest Academic or actor or member of public. The Panel are all the actors in a Group together.
Debate: What is Traditional British Shakespeare?
JH (D) We seek fun, personality, love of genre and flexibility.
TBS Panel We asked ourselves what is traditional? What is British? Traditional could be Elizabethan. Can try different situations, all the traditional British contexts. Telling the story directly to the audience.
B (E) Prologues and monologues and soliloquies are all different, [traditional is] clear in its objective and who is speaking to who, can’t just go all guns blazing, an aside is where the others can’t hear. Epic proportions in settings, the emotion will follow the words, Stanislavski internalised it, the emotions before the words, don’t have to plumb the depths to reach a performance, impro in different ways.
AL (A) Everything is in the text, responsibility to stay close to the text, choices within the text and follow them, in Stanislavsky more important to get emotions across.
AN (A) Which text?
Panel (TBS) Arden.
I (TBS) Though exceptions, ‘word’ rather than ‘name’ we chose in ‘a-rose-by-any-other-word’ in Romeo and Juliet.
T (L) Good to keep a book with every actor and director’s decisions regarding the character, interpretation and history. Writing in nuts and bolts and then put into context with own story. With Shakespeare there’s a lot of history you’re not told.
M (A) Could mean to do as when Shakespeare was alive?
A (TBS) Not setting, but values and constraints and ways of playing, traditional for any time.
I (TBS) British Shakespeare, traditional but not conventional, so not boring.
A (TBS) Stick to the text.
G (A) The value of groundwork before rehearsal, meaning of so many of the words, only way to understand is to act it and not to study it.
H (M) Pantomime and the Elizabethan route to get stock characters, foundations and differentiation, audience interaction, how to make completely different.
U (G) ‘Naturalistic’ and choreographed?
Panel (TBS) Yes
U (G) In rehearsals are you always ending up concerned about how you look?
R (TBS) Never too sure where we’ll be.
I (TBS) Yes, did choreograph to a certain degree.
U (G) Are you thinking more about the exterior?
A (TBS) We have to think about how we’ll tell the story.
R (TBS) We’re not internal and need to know the whole audience.
T (G) In a world of ‘method’ and headshots, what made you choose this group?
AX (TBS) To open up and find the whole physicality, personally because I love the writing, so much emotion in each sentence.
I (TBS) All personal reasons, our preference lies with this theatre.
A (TBS) Bolder and bigger when talking to the audience member, just as intimate as to the camera.
B (E) Popular stories of the day. All the characters passed on through the centuries, sometimes wouldn’t know the person till performing, this century more luxury of rehearsal and close to the roots.
A (TBS) We’ve had 13 weeks in rehearsal, 4 for this stage. We need to learn the words first.
12.30pm Lunch
1.30pm Stanislavski Group
Jon Hewitt led the group using a succession of exercises in a summary of most of the Elements (omitting textual analysis) that were said to comprise the ‘system’ of 1914 according to Vaktangov, as documented by Jean Benedetti: Muscular Relaxation; Concentration; Belief, naiveté, justification; circle of attention; task; affective action, memory and feeling; rhythm, increased and held energy; relationship to the other; public solitude. (Of course a great deal of time could be spent on each).
JH (D) We have to ask which Stanislavski we are considering. To generalise, Stanislavski began in high quality amateur theatre, and moved to considering the training of the actor and how best to prepare a role, the first person to apply scientific study to this question, that is a rational approach based on investigation and evidence, and then later in his life he moved even further towards how to put the actor’s creativity at the centre of the whole process of theatre. To generalise again, Stanislavski changed emphasis from such tools as emotional recall, psychology and textual analysis, all of which he never completely abandoned, to the method of physical actions and active analysis.
We have found in the work of Stanislavski a great deal of understanding of practical stage-craft, to be drawing on many means at once, and a great deal of common sense, and NOT seeking for the actor an impervious un-adaptable state. Also, when working with Shakespeare we have to consider the ‘system’ plus the verse. Stanislavski loved to work with Shakespeare. It was the basis of his last lesson.
We looked as exercises, compared different actors’ understandings, worked on given circumstances, and tested principles of recall with a standard text, and other experiments.
If you try out a principle, test it, going with its intentions and going against them, negative results are to be welcomed as much as positive ones for what they show. [But in the insecure actor this may be seen as a mistake. There should always be experiment, but an actor who just wants a casting has already closed down possibility of invention. You must allow those around you as well as yourself to be inventive. But is this accepted?]
We have heard many times of the danger of an actor just going into themselves; perhaps a useful definition of self-indulgence is when the exploration takes a form that is destructive to the group or the project as a whole. The growth of a professional actor can have many white light mountain top moments, but these will come naturally of their own accord.
Our objective has to be the success of the project as a whole.
We found that emotional memory is one among many tools. Perhaps for an actor it is best used in the preparation of a character, (perhaps it is a natural process, and one that becomes artificial by aiming at it) rather than to be an expectation for between lines in a performance. We note that Stanislavski always emphasises the journey, large units, where you have been and where you are going, logically linked to the story, and not intense emotional states maintained statically in a constant playing. Stanislavski is clear he expects the Tasks to become fixed (and the Basic Actions) but the How (the Adaptation) to change in performance (rather than the opposite, i.e. that the how and actions are fixed and the motivation to constantly change). That is our reading of Benedetti. See Page 138 ‘Stanislavski and the Actor’.
(A) Why did you start with new writing?
JH The intention was that new writing was a communal truth with the audience. Actually we also got an inadvertent solipsism and despair. But I would also make two other criticisms, first that the work was too dilute for too long, (not straight to the heart of the theory and principles), and also that we should have separated out anything that smacked of parallel systems M Chekhov, Meyerhold, and general drama school trappings, etc, much earlier.
We also should’ve been concentrating on the work of relationships between the characters on stage, and not allowed actors introverted self-assessment of their states to the neglect of actions and performability. To this end, it might have been more conducive, in retrospect, if we’d started with dialogues and from Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, and not sought such an affinity with new writing monologues.
AL (A) In Traditional British Shakespeare the relationship is with a friend, a known person, directly with another defined person who will react; in Stanislavski the audience is a witness, probably sitting still and quietly in the dark. This is the destination between Traditional British Shakespeare and Stanislavsky, rather than the ‘fourth wall’ of realism.
JH Yes.
(A) (to actors) How much preparation time and how much countdown do you need?
H (S) The preparation time is rarely up to you. You use what you have. I only need a few seconds countdown, usually, if everything else is fine.
2.25pm Lecoq Group
The Lecoq Group’s exercises with the audience were back massage, moving the air with your arms, walking in rhythms, five tension states, crossing the circle with different characteristics, then saying hello in different ways, in partners mirroring hands, reacting and giving imagined energies to a partner, sculpting each other, moving with different parts of the body leading, slow motion walk in different environments. The Group took it in turn to explain an exercise, while other group members took part in the exercise, and another explained what to look for, what to try to find, what to expect, this last was particularly effective.
The Question was ‘How do you work?’
T (L) Short improvisation, you don’t know, you find a character and text through the body, then try again, structure, not only improvised.
R (TBS) What is the source of improvisation?
J (L) Play. If we’re satisfied. We try things. Someone has an idea, let’s put it in the space.
B (E) How do you know when it is connected?
T (L) Ask did that work. Try to connect and that’s what works. If someone is really attached to something we can try to develop it. Collective, group dynamic. The Director is an external eye, organiser, the push.
A (TBS) How much text?
J (L) Based on interaction.
T (L) Do we need to have text?
J (L) We are all foreign people.
G (M) How would you define the difference between Lecoq and Mime?
T (L) Lecoq has Mime, along with many theatre territories. I only know Mime technique through Lecoq school, mime and commedia.
J (L) To keep the fixed point is really important.
G (M) How would you define the fixed point?
J (L) Show the movement by the stillness. Mime is about rhythm, different breathing in the movement.
T (L) The aim is to be very effective. The improvised leads to the fixed, and this is what it is to devise. You’re affecting, educating, or just because you enjoy it. You start with a reason, and you want to show a reason. It’s poetry if that reason exists in your work.
J (L) Do something from an idée, but result we don’t understand, interesting, so we keep it.
G (M) Can you sum up Lecoq in a paragraph?
Panel and JH Theories or Rules: dynamic, space, connection, natural body, play of child, genres, movement not psychology, dans le corps, internationalism, gentle natural reactions, storytelling, laughter but dramatic.
A (TBS) You’re bringing your previous training.
J (L) I am interested in this work. I have been devising. Just to see what comes out.
Bi (E) Where’s the story in Lecoq? No producer, no backers. How can it work? Yet it does work. That was a better explanation than any politician has given in years.
JH (D) Mime is more specific physically than Lecoq.
J (L) In Lecoq audience creates the story. Positions are not so held.
H (M) But what would you do in a ‘normal’ play?
T (L) Play with characters and rhythm and proposing.
3.20pm Break
3.35pm Mime Group
The mime led the audience in the exercise pulling with a rope, the tock-tock of double chest impulses, some limbering. Guided the audience through the details of the exercise ‘baking the cake’.
Question: Why Mime?
H (M) I enjoy the physicality very much.
G (M) You would have thought it was all constraints but I learn so much about theatre.
R (S) You seemed more serious than the Lecoq group.
H (M) We wanted to be. We were funny and light in Ghost Song Shakespeare and we wanted to be deeper. But mime probably is more serious. It has so many rules. But you can create really quickly. A very peculiar and exact piece. Is this seriousness?
G (M) We did not set out to be more serious.
JH (D) But perhaps more transcendent - than last time.
G (M) We had more comedy last time.
AL (A) How much do you talk in preparation?
G (M) We talk!
H (M) Elements of a skeleton. After we become fixed.
B (E) Is Mime stage-business with what is not there?
H (M) Bring things towards you. You become those things.
G (M) You embody it, you ‘see’ it and expression, you anticipate and do it, double action.
AL (A) What is your notation?
G (M) No its in the body, you write down your score.
H (M) Do you write down your score, G?
JH (D) As far as we know there is no mime notation.
G (M) Like dance steps then expression, freedom in structure.
JH (D) Shakespeare and imagery for example ‘gold’ and ‘death’ contrasted in the visit to the apothecary from Romeo and Juliet, using and illustrating the metaphor. Emotion and dream.
(A) Do you use emotion as a basis?
JH (D) No. A good emotion, play and innocence and wellbeing is there but it is incidental or a by-product of the work, but it not a self-conscious aim nor is attention drawn to it. The emotion is light and a constant as a backdrop, like in dance.
J (L) Do you have a range of stock expressions?
G (M) I like to think not.
4.30pm Grotowski Training Group
Grotowski Group lead the audience through the details of the Plastiques.
AL (A) Do you start with a silence, and slowly work towards an ever bigger improvisation?
D (G) No we start with the physical training. Or a Stanislavskian analysis of text.
JH (D) There is not just one way of starting. You have to look at the practices of the Laboratory, and not a perceived ‘official’ way, which can be a simplification of their approach, which in the 1960’s was quite diverse, drawing on many strands of theatre, and in any case, the start you [AL] describe originates somewhat more from later phases in the Laboratory’s work such as Paratheatre. If you consider the Plastiques and Corporals and exercises in Towards A Poor Theatre, you will see that the work is highly structured with specific tasks. By the time of the creation of Apocalypsis cum Figuris they would wait in silence for a free improvisation that was of an indeterminate length and would last many hours, but they did not begin that way, and it took them many years to reach that point.
G (M) What was Grotowski’s reason? What was his point?
F (G) About removing barriers, getting rid of them, removing everything, your shadow moves. Stripping back of learned behaviour.
M (A) How did you choose your actions?
F (G) It’s impulsive – not from choice. Stanislavsky is very analytical.
G (M) Like a higher consciousness?
F (G) But the analytical consciousness removed.
G (M) As if standing back?
F (E) Very with impulses and the words. You are aware of impulses and characters but you’re in it.
U (G) But also responsible to remain in communion. The range of emotions is a result of moves and breath, whereas in Stanislavsky they come before the movement.
AN (A) Improvisation or setting?
F (G) It makes itself. There is no writing down and blocking.
D (G) No its improvisation, only with text. You find character or structure with the Plastiques. Finding idea through the Plastiques. All natural.
F (G) Taking things to an extreme.
U (G) Making a different kind of poetry, not replacing the original, but bringing the two together.
M (A) So it’s not psychological analysis but a possession.
F (G) It’s about impulse.
U (G) A marriage, keep the words, a pure combination.
(A) Does the impulse bounce between you?
D (G) That piece was structured.
F (G) One third rehearsal.
(A) Working on own, or as one organism?
Panel (G) One organism.
R (S) What impulse? What if you felt whatever, like taking off your clothes?
D (G) No, it’s more like the actor on stage, about being open and clear, the Stanislavski Facts of the story, taken imaginatively, exaggerated.
JH (D) And in time using the process of the via negativa. The via negativa is a process of actor training (although interestingly according to Ludwig Flaszen the name was never used in rehearsal with the actors at the Laboratory - Flaszen Lecture, World As Place Of Truth, Wroclaw, 2009). By definition, the via negativa is not a process an actor can carry out on his or herself. An external eye, the Director, is required. An actor attempting the via negativa without external criticism through a process of egotistical self-satisfaction will simply increase his or her blocks and defences and will entirely fail to remove them. In the true via negativa process the actor makes actions, propositions, attempts, and the Director criticises what is fake, false, ‘theatrical’, unconvincing, egotistical, clichéd, inhibited, or the mere defence-mechanisms of the mask of personality, in fact everything that is not genuinely alive and compelling. The via negativa cannot take place without this. By this means the actor is liberated.
5.25pm Closing remarks from Artistic Director
JH (D) Many thanks to everyone for coming and to all the contributors. Tower Hamlet will be produced at The Courtyard Theatre, Hoxton Square, in February 2010, from 2nd to 21st.
5.30pm Conference Closed.
Jon Hewitt
Artistic Director
Admiration Theatre
31 December 2009