Eliot Fintushel
489 Sonoma Avenue
Santa Rosa CA 95401
(707) 526-1481
Copyright 2011 by Eliot Fintushel
Thinking with Your Skin
(Paradoxical Ideas in Physical Theatre)
In the tradition of physical theatre--commedia dell'arte, mask theatre, mime, and the theatre of clowns, buskers, and saltimbanques--you have to think with your body. The conceptual mind is just too slow, too shallow a device to be able to handle the barrage of shifting information--proprioceptive, social, and environmental--to which a performer must respond. All in an instant, he makes his audience nod, gasp, sigh, weep, or fall down laughing.
How is that possible?
It may sound mystical or New Agey, but the main ingredient is a kind of selflessness: hollow flexibility. The successful performer has learned to surrender to gravity, to inertia, to the floor, and to other performers' bodies. The student of physical theatre takes herself to the edge of abandon, almost out of control (that "almost," of course, is crucial, and distinguishes performers from mystics) in order to achieve the responsiveness at the root of good stage work.
Some of the basic ideas in physical theatre sound like riddles, but they are written in our bones. Here, for example, is a precept for improvisers in trouble . . .
You find yourself onstage feeling like a deer in the headlights, your fellow actors and the audience staring, waiting. The flop sweat is gathering. You're in a bind without a clue as to what to do or say next. Now what? The rule is:
"Physicalize at random."
Here, "physicalize" is a term of art that means to express something intangible, an idea, a feeling, a mood, a thought, or a sentiment, through posture or gesture. If sadness makes my chest cave in--I have physicalized the sadness. If, thinking of release, I open my chest, spread my arms and let them undulate like wings or like beating flags--I have physicalized optimism. If, imagining a miser, my eyes narrow and my whole body curls in like a dead, dry oak leaf--there, in the body, is miserliness.
"But that's just crazy," you want to say. "What meaning can come out of physicalizing at random? Won't it be a mishmash of tics and flailings?"
No.
As a matter of fact, we humans are all but incapable of saying or doing anything arbitrary, as Freud and Rorschach knew! Everything in us works together--until we obstruct it with scruples or civilization. Try this experiment: ask a friend or a student to relax her arms, letting them swing at her sides in the ordinary way people do when walking, and to stroll around the room. Now ask her to walk on the outer edges of her feet, then, after a while, on the inner edges. If you watch her hands as she does so, you will observe that they rotate in and out along with the feet.
It's just this body of ours doing what it does best--working as a whole, each part echoing, reflecting, or taking up the theme that another part has announced.
In fact, we say "Physicalize at random," to trick ourselves into dumping the mental and physical inhibitions to that wonderful functional unity that everybody's born with. In fact, the resulting gesture is always the right one. And the leap out of the constraints of convention and into that rightness can be exhilarating both for performer and for audience.
When I was a student member of an upstate semi-Equity touring company, working alongside seasoned actors hired out of the Big Apple, I took part in an improvised scene about factory workers. I was the big boss, telling one of the workers what to do--but he wouldn't. The character's resistance to my character was so strident that it started to bleed over into the realm of the personal: actor versus actor, toe to toe, and shouting. I was about to wilt under flop sweat and trepidation, when the god of commedia, horned and grinning, kicked me in the butt: "Physicalize at random."
And I cried. (That is, my character did). It was a cloud burst, a thunderstorm. Now the ball was in my brother actor's court. But what could have been tastier than this reversal of status, the boss become vulnerable, the worker omnipotent. My stage partner was a pro--he (to be precise, his character) comforted me. The audience howled.
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How did we get so tied up in knots? Young children at play are as wild and varied in their movement as a waterfall. They use not only their own bodies but one another's body freely, without restraint. They no sooner think of a thing then they are it. Here a child has become a lion, a pterodactyl, a thunder storm, or a princess, and there, a toddler turns into a mountain that another child climbs; now a landslide knocks the other down, and both are swimming without water.
Well, it isn't safe or useful, is the thing. We can't go around like that. Actual lions, actual thunder storms, and so on, have obliged us to impose restraints. The question becomes, how can we relax those restraints when we want to, when it really is useful and safe to do so--onstage, for example, or in the magic circle of a classroom activity? We want to invoke the natural freedom of childhood, but with mature circumspection and, into the bargain, mature intellectual and motor skills.
Yes, there is craft involved here. A parlor comic is generally dead meat onstage. The playground Superman, simply translated to the stage, is a chaotic blur. To transform play to art, we have to play consciously, with informed intention, cognizant of fellow stage artists and of audience, among many other things. These are the higher order activities that performers study in their acting schools. But it is possible to learn all those sophisticated skills and still be dead wood onstage--in fact, it's the rule!--if you haven't recovered what small children know in their bones . . .
Here's another experiment--and a great classroom exercise: "Emotion in Body Parts." Pick any body part and any emotion, and ask a student--or friend--to physicalize it. For example, angry hand or happy shoulder. Many combinations, like the ones just given, are easy for just about anybody at any age. But as you go down the list, demanding expressions of this or that emotion in this or that body part, you will encounter a definite divide. There are combinations for which the grownups simply draw a blank, whereas children, especially small children, K-2, do them all with gusto--and convincingly! Jealous elbow--no problem! Angry butt--here it is! Stomach in love--just look!
In the life of the imagination, there are no mistakes. I don't know exactly how the rush and roil of the child's mind--every thought a plaything, every mood a paint box color--bifurcates into right and wrong, but I know how to find the way back. And I know how to chalk a magic circle around our dangerous native genius in order to invite it, without harming us, to serve us. Then we can risk everything. I encourage my adult students to "look stupid"; with young children it isn't necessary. The curriculum for my college course requires of every student that she experience in front of the class, at least once, embarrassment to the point of blushing and feeling hot. Till middle school, at least, there is no need to trick people into taking risks. Anybody will be anything.
There is a game well known to improvisers that's called, "Prop Rounds." (Though a professor of mine liked to call it "Tubular Metamorphoses"--take your pick!) Even a grownup can do it. Show the class any common object--for example, a broom, a basket, a hula hoop, or a traffic cone. The rule is that it can't be the thing we always think it is, but it can be anything else--what it is it? Children take turns demonstrating what the object is--not saying, mind you, but demonstrating, showing, using it for the thing they see it to be. One child makes the broom into a microphone and sings the Star Spangled Banner. Another sees it to be a horse and rides it around the room. Another plays it like a slide trombone. The hula hoop becomes , in turn, a gigantic earring, a halo, a toilet seat, a porthole, and the sun. The basket may be a belly, a baby, a hat . . . Every idea, embodied, is both possible and good.
In fact, it's common to see children who are slow to learn the academic subjects excel at an exercise like this. Their teachers see hidden qualities emerge. In a way, it's accidental, isn't it, that grammar and arithmetic have come to be considered more essential elements of the grade school curriculum than creative drama? It's not hard to imagine a world where those priorities are reversed. (Only think of traditional societies in which people spend more time sculpting, painting, chanting, or dancing, than in doing business.) Then those who fall behind in our current order might be the ones out in front.
It is necessary to be serious about silly things.
Let's take a step further. Suppose the props we transform are one another or ourselves. The mime Tony Montanaro used to say:
"Wrap yourself around the image."
Become the thing you're thinking of. In the game "Sculpture Garden," children pair off and take turns being sculptor or clay. No words are exchanged; since, after all, clay can't see or hear, the sculptor has to just mold with his hands. Tilt the chin, press back a shoulder, lift an arm, push at the back to make the chest stick out. At a signal, the work is finished, and the statue has to be as still as stone while the rest of us, those who were sculptors, walk among the statues and have a look. Sometimes we give them names: The Mountain Climber, The Ballerina, The Stomachache, The Stegosaurus. In this game the children who play the clay and those who play the sculptors learn complementary lessons, both important. The sculptors have to embody a vision, a thought, or even a joke, in another human body--mind to matter. The clay has to yield to a partner's touch, sensitively and judiciously, while maintaining balance, and to be ready to become anything. This is one form of the skill I've called "hollow flexibility" (a phrase borrowed from my old teacher, Philip Kapleau.) This protean skill is available to everybody, exhilarating to all who exercise it, and amazing to those who watch.
We thought we were just one thing, and it turns out that we're everything!
Even more surprising are the transformations that appear--and easily--in the game I call "Polaroid," because there is no sculptor, no director, and no consultation. The players create a definite picture together, often with wonderful nuance and symmetries, spontaneously, in an instant. First, the teacher introduces his camera, which, unlike other cameras, can take pictures not only of things in front of it, but also of things on the side or behind, and at any distance, for example on the Moon or in the next universe over. It can also take pictures of things that happened yesterday or last week or last year or a million years ago, and things that will happen tomorrow or next year or a million years from now. It can even take pictures of things that will never happen, things in books or in the imagination.
The secret is in the film, of course: it's made of people. Four or five or more players stand shoulder to shoulder against the wall (in the "film compartment.") The teacher, or someone else, by invitation, says what she want a picture of. (For example, the end of the world, the age of dinosaurs, a child's future wedding day, the Bolshoi Ballet, flying cars, Washington at Valley Forge . . . ) Next she counts slowly to three. With each number, the "film" takes a step forward and nearer to one another, all the while morphing into the shape of the picture until, at three, they freeze into a tableau.
No planning or discussion is permitted by the people who are the film. Their bodies work it out together along the way. They "think" it through physically, as a group. The teacher can also push the sound bar (mimed), which makes the picture audible and silences it the instant the bar is pulled back. (Interestingly, once the operation of the sound bar is explained, children, whether they have become yowling wolves or a screaming tornado, unfailingly silence themselves the instant it's pulled back. Here's an example of discipline that arises naturally out of fascination and delight.)
How can a group of players spontaneously create such an interesting tableau? How does each know what the others intend, so that they end up, in the photograph, as coherent parts of a whole, all in about five seconds? No doubt, a lot is going on under the surface--peripheral signals are passed among them by sight, sound, and touch, and a universe of shared experiences shapes their reactions to phrases. If the group's mutual sensitivity and responsiveness can be dulled by fear, self-consciousness, or anxiety about being judged--as is often the case in high school, for example--it can also be sharpened by craft, as in the following exercise.
"Stop and Start Together" begins with the class walking about silently at random. When the teacher says, "Stop," everyone must stop, then go when the teacher says, "Go." Once this pattern is established, the teacher drops out. The instruction is given that when anyone, on their own impulse, stops, everyone stops, and when anyone starts walking again, everyone has to walk. In a variation of this game, the class as a whole or smaller groups may try to walk across the room all in a phalanx, stopping and starting by the same rule as before, and reaching the other side together. When this exercise is understood, the effect is remarkable; an onlooker would swear that everyone secretly was wearing earphones and listening to a common command or else executing pre-set choreography.
There may be interesting difficulties along the way. One or two children may dominate, always initiating the change, obliging the teacher to adjust the rules in order to make the game more democratic. Notice what has gotten in the way: anxiety about putting oneself forward has dulled the group sensitivity. Something personal and psychological has impeded the purely physical awareness of movement and rest and the simple, natural give and take that arises out of that sensitivity. Watch a flock of birds turn on the wing or migrate great distances together by sensing, each and all, the pockets their wings make in the air.
The familiar "Mirroring Game" cultivates the ability to harmonize one's own will with another's in the arena of physical movement. The class pairs off, and the members of each pair face each other at a distance of only a foot or two. There are three stages to this game. First, partner A is instructed to lead and B to follow, switching after a while. The leader has the sophisticated challenge, although she is allowed to do anything at all, of doing it in such a way that her partner is able to follow along. Slowness and continuity of movement, we discover, are a big help.
The mirror's challenge is the same as that of the clay in the statue exercise: "hollow" and flexible, to let oneself flow with the partner's initiative. In the second stage, the partners are instructed to give and take the lead as they like. The best is to be able to do that with continuity, so that the lead passes fluidly back and forth without any break or pause. In the last stage, the partners are coached: "Both lead and both follow," or "Nobody lead or follow. Mirror each other." By this time, their bodies will understand what that means. Every movement is part of the flow. Active and passive, initiation and response, no longer mean anything as opposing terms. It's just one dance.
This may sound like metaphysics, sentimental mysticism, hocus-pocus, but, in fact, it's a commonplace of everyday life. It goes on everywhere people do things together. The only extraordinary thing is that here we are doing it consciously, with no end other than moving as one.
If into this mix we add the voice, things become a little more raucous--and a lot more fun. The production of voice is a kind of human movement, after all, and shares the qualities of movement. For example, Rudolf Laban's classification of styles of movement applies just as much to our voices. Laban was a choreographer as well as a pioneer of industrial time and motion studies. Using Labanotation, a system he devised in the 1920s for precisely recording dance, Laban was able to describe any human movement with reference to a few simple elements, roughly: weight, shape, and speed.
Each of these elements can have two values; thus, every movement is heavy or light, straight or curving, and fast or slow. These three two-valued qualities combine to produce, like corners on a cube, eight types of movement, from "punching" (heavy, straight, and fast), through "pushing" (heavy, straight, and slow) and so on, down through "floating" (light, curving, and slow).
You can easily witness the "punching" style of movement among businessmen late to work, "pushing" in the slow burn of customers en route to the complaints window, and "floating" among lunch-break window shoppers. Every part of the body partakes of the Laban dynamic of the whole. (Remember the walking experiment in which, unconsciously, hands tilted to match the tilt of the feet.) The voice is no different. The puncher's voice punches, the pusher's pushes, and the floater's floats.
In fact, in mask performance, where the goal is to physicalize the shape and rhythm of a particular mask, an internalized cadence or quality of voice can guide the physical characterization--for example, the miser's whine, the trickster's chuckle, the lover's lyrical sigh--even though no one ever hears it. The performer harmonizes movement to (imagined) sound. Sound ensouls the movement.
My mask teacher, Leonard Pitt, studied mask theatre in Bali and performed, for a while, with a Balinese company. He once told us that the director sometimes stood in the wings, just listening, and critiqued the masked performers by the sounds their bodies made onstage.
In the game of "Name Shapes," students embody their voices as they voice their body's movement. Standing in a circle, each person in turn says his name in an extended, exaggerated way and moves in a style that goes with it. Without tutoring or preparation, qualities of sound find their perfect correlates in movement: loud goes to large, tremolo to trembly, legato to fluid. (Notice how often words that primarily apply to sound or music are borrowed to describe movement in space, and vice versa. This is just as true for the vocabularies of emotional and physical qualities, as we'll soon discover in the treatment of "neutral mask.")
The effort is to have body track voice in as much detail as possible. After each individual name shape "performance," the whole group together repeats that person's name and movement in exactly the way that the person just did it.
These days we actually know some of the science behind empathy. When we see a gesture enacted, "mirror neurons" in our pre-motor cortex fire in the same pattern that would accompany our own performance of that gesture. Whether or not, in our shifting, evolving scientific understanding, this schema ultimately proves out, our ability to identify with others and to let their voices and movement influence our own, as if they were our own, is undeniable. We experience this in the "Mirroring Game" and in "Name Shapes."
"Voice Puppet" enlarges on the discoveries of those games. In it we are animated by a voice or a sound that isn't our own. It's possible for adults who play this game to experience sensations of release, fluidity, and clarity as a result of momentarily handing over control to another person and diving into delicious free-fall. This is yet another instance of hollow flexibility.
"Voice Puppet" is played in pairs, puppeteer and puppet. The puppeteer stands behind the puppet. The puppet bends over, torso, arms, and head hanging down loosely from the pelvis. If the person playing puppet sees the floor, it means that there's too much tension in the neck; she should be looking at her knees or shins with arms just hanging down. This is the puppet's position of repose. Whenever there's no sound, even for a short moment, the puppet falls back into this position.
The puppeteer manipulates the puppet by means of her voice and any other sounds she may make, for example, by whistling or stamping or slapping her own stomach or a puffed cheek. The puppeteer may coo, roar, grunt, hum, yodel, or cluck her tongue, and it's the puppet's job to embody the sound--a sort of human oscilloscope. The puppet's torso may undulate and rise. It may shake like jello or flap like a flag. The arms may shoot up or beat like wings. And every time the puppeteer lapses into silence, the puppet falls into repose.
The movements should be responses to the sounds, not to any idea the sounds may represent. The exchange is physical, not conceptual. If a sound is dog-like, the best response, within the spirit of this game, is to become not a dog but the sound of a dog.
This vibrant responsiveness at a level more basic than ordinary thinking is the foundation of a good deal of the actor's and improviser's craft. Thinking is just too clunky, and the result is terrifically unaesthetic. When a performer thinks, the audience knows what he is trying to express, but they don't feel it: the performance is wooden, artificial. There are many theater games that cultivate the ability to respond below thought; the most interesting are for adult students.
Consider the game that Viola Spolin, in her seminal book, Improvisation for Theater (Northwestern University Press, 1963), called "Contrapuntal Argument." An actor sits between two others and carries on two completely unrelated conversations, left and right, at once. It is often just as surprising to the middle actor as it is to the audience that she was able to accomplish this; one certainly can't think one's way through it. It's also a chore for the two on either side to maintain a conversation uninfluenced by the other--but that's quite a different skill.
In another exercise, which I like to call "Stealing Faces," we set up an imaginary situation between two people--for example, a job interview. The actor playing the interviewer, is tasked with running through a gamut of emotions, while the job of the other is to mirror those feelings. To do this, she has to work upstream against the tendency to be conceptually responsive.
Suppose, for example, that the interviewer shouts, "You arrogant twerp, why should I hire you, anyway?" Then, "Because I'd do a good job, sir," or "I'm sorry if I've offended you," would not be responses in the spirit of this game, even though they might be sensible. The sort of response this game requires would be an emotional reflection like, "I don't give a hoot if you hire me or not, you fat oaf!" The actors have to cut under the superficial process of thinking to the visceral push and pull of the situation onstage.
In conventional literary theatre, the sort of theater where actors memorize and deliver lines that someone else has written, it is, of course, essential for the actor very thoroughly to memorize his lines. But, again, if all he does is deliver the memorized lines, even if he has worked on them with thespian craft to enrich them with his own feeling and associations and has analyzed everything for objective and motivation and so on, the audience will still see little more than a golem--the creature of which the Talmud says, "It walked like a man, and it spoke like a man, but it was not a man."
In fact, what is necessary to achieve miraculous life onstage is, after learning the lines by heart--to forget them. The actor finds herself onstage confronted by people and situations that evoke a definite response, she confronts them with hollow flexibility, she feels impelled to speak, and the words that come out of her mouth, not mimicked but authentically arising from the situation, happen to be--exactly the words in her script! This is the deep trick at the bottom of naturalistic acting, and its central paradox: spontaneous authenticity that arises from exhaustive preparation: studying and memorizing, then forgetting.
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In physical theater, the theater of gesture and movement, we say:
"Think with your skin."
It's like surfing, riding the waves of attention from fellow performers and from the audience, and responding with an acuteness of which thought is seldom capable. Like the old joke about the first principle of comedy--what is it . . . . . . . . . . . . ? Timing. You have to be able to feel the moment ripen, and for that you have to be, in a way, empty, receptive. Once more: hollow flexibility.
Here is a further refinement of the "Voice Puppet" game in which the whole class can be puppets at once. Call it, "Atmosphere Puppet." Everyone assumes the posture of the voice puppet in repose and simply listens. There is no puppeteer. Instead, the puppets respond to ambient sounds, floorboards creaking, heat ducts rumbling, a passing truck, a birdsong, someone clearing her throat halfway down the hall. The sounds are the puppets' strings. The world is the puppeteer. Even very small children have no trouble learning this game, and graduate students find it fascinating.
Tony Montanaro, in his magic barn in the woods of South Paris, Maine, where maskers, mimes, clowns, buskers, and saltimbanques from all over the continent would gather to refine their art, used to conduct the converse exercise to Atmosphere Puppet. He called it, "Plunge." A lone performer would stand before the rest of us and respond in movement, gesture, and speech, too, to every inner impulse. We watched motifs sprout, stir, ramify, explode, transform. Sometimes stories emerged, and sometimes it was like looking at a sculpture or a painting that morphs through time. It was not about thought, I can tell you.
But sometimes Tony would make the performer stop, and she usually acknowledged the justness of his intervention. She knew she had made something up, she had played out some old routine, or she had embroidered around a personal tic. Out of fear or weariness, the performer had cheated: she had left the authentic, spontaneous realm of the body and had tried, conceptually, to invent something.
Horror vacui.
Paradoxically, to achieve wonderful responsiveness onstage, the life of hollow flexibility, you have to see precisely what's thick and stiff in you: the particularities of your own personality as embodied in posture, gesture, and movement dynamics. Alas, this sounds like a ponderous undertaking, but, though difficult, it's intimate and straightforward. Here are two exercises that aim at this awareness.
The first, "Neutral Circle," can be performed and enjoyed even by kindergartners, and not without some discernment, though it takes the crucible of adolescence, I think, to really appreciate what it's about. The class forms a circle. Each student in turn steps forward, says her name, and then steps back, with this requirement: that there be no special content or meaning in the performance.
Normally, when you see someone sit or stand or walk or do anything at all, in fact, you see much more than the nominal activity. Jeffrey Bihr, the voice teacher, has given this example: when someone, with drooping shoulders and long face, says, "Pass me the butter," the response is not, "Here it is," but "What's wrong?"
As Ralph Waldo Emerson said, "What you do speaks so loud that I cannot hear what you say."
In the present exercise, it turns out to be extremely difficult to just step forward and say one's name. One student looks tired. Another is eager to please. One is terrified of doing it wrong. Another can't stop laughing. One does it like a soldier. Another seems to be angry about something. It doesn't take an expert: you read everything in the shoulders, the chest, the gait, the vigor or flaccidity of movement. It's amazing how much you see in a step and a syllable, when you're given license to look. Reading the body, you feel very much like a mind reader.
Note well: the insights you seem to get into someone's soul when you play this game are an illusion! You don't really know what makes someone lower their head, for example; it could be sadness--or a stiff neck. Hepsybah, a character in Hawthorne's House of Seven Gables, is despised and feared by children because of all the mean looks she gives them, but the truth is, she is near-sighted and has to squint. In this game, we're not learning about souls but about appearances, about correlations of movement and feeling. Whether the feeling is ours, projected, or that of the person we're watching, is not so important. It is a theatre game.
Especially for adults and for older children, this exercise is as much for the observer as for the person whose turn it is. We are cultivating the ability to discriminate body language. Everyone on the circle gets a chance to experience the vertiginous isolation of the performer, trapped in her own movement repertoire, the chance to see, often for the first time, particular qualities in her own movement made visible by "the look of the Other." Also, everyone gets to see that we're all like that.
In the second game along this theme, we use a so-called "neutral mask." The mask originally designed by the Italian maskmaker Amleto Sartori for the French mime teacher Jacques Lecoq is the model for neutral masks used in many theatre schools. Lecoq's use of the mask was near-mystical and aimed at cultivating a fiery intensity in stage performers. The present exercise is focused more on straightforward discovery of how we actually do move.
The neutral mask is as simple we can make it, fluid, unified, a mask that constrains the wearer to do nothing--or anything--by way of embodying it, a mask without personality. Students, taking turns, put on the mask and, as before, perform a simple set of tasks: sitting still for ten seconds in a chair, then walking to a table, turning over an object that lies there, and, finally, walking back to the chair and sitting again.
It's a minefield. Alone in the mask, when I play this game, I feel isolated and self-conscious. (Good! It wakes me up to my own movement.) The goal is to sit in such a way that someone seeing me, when asked to describe me, can only say, "He's sitting"--not happy, not sad, not anything, but just sitting. Then I have to walk that way, with no special quality, manipulate an object that way, and so on.
But what exactly shall I do with my arms, my hands, my knees, my neck? This feeling of being at sea is a wonderful teacher. I become acquainted with my body in an objective way. It's as if I were sitting on the other side of the proscenium, seeing myself from the perspective of the audience.
For the rest of the class, it can be equally revelatory. They are instructed to watch carefully every departure from neutrality--every gesture that means something personal--and to remember it in the form of two words or phrases, one of them the name of the feeling, and the other a physical description of the movement that evidenced or evoked it.
To see all the flashes of meaning in gestures is easy and absorbing, but marking their origin in the body turns out to be, though doable, difficult. Everyone has something to say, but often, when they try to name the physical part, it comes out sounding like a feeling.
"Yes, OK, you're right: she looked anxious when she walked," I'll say, "but what made her look anxious? What's the physical part?"
The reply: "Her step seemed hesitant."
"That's still an emotional description. What did you see?"
"There was something uncertain about it."
"Another emotional term."
"It was jittery."
And here we arrive at the most common case--a descriptor that is at the same time emotional and physical. Our mind can jitter, but so can a platform, so can our bones. "Sunken" can describe a mood or a mattress or a person's chest. The word "buoyant" can describe mind states or water wings.
What does this overlap of emotional and physical descriptors say about us human beings?
Sometimes, in the simple movements between chair and table, a whole story seems to emerge. A prisoner is waiting to be shot. A princess entertains her suitor. A night watchman hates his job. How much is coming from the performer and how much from the observer?
In fact, it is possible to find purely physical terms in which to describe someone's posture and movement:
"His chest was concave."
"One shoulder was farther forward than the other."
"Her torso leaned forward when she was getting up."
"He moved quickly and made a lot of noise with his feet."
It's the other students' job to see how an emotion speaks through the body and to distinguish the one from the other. We're not aiming to establish a list of correlations, a table, or an index--"this" means "that." Rather, we're cultivating a certain inner and outer eye, an aliveness to body language, not only others' but our own. That sensitivity, hollow, flexible, is worth infinitely more than any book of correspondences. It's alive.
Performers have to find in themselves an Archimedian point, a fulcrum below the everyday conceptual mind and below the ideas of who they are or who they're supposed to be, on which they can lever themselves--and the audience--into any imagined situation or character. One name for that fulcrum point is "hollow flexibility," and that's a resource, a battery, a fountain of inspiration, not just for stage trotters but for everybody.
A certain lack of definition is inescapable--and may be of the essence. Lao Tze, praising emptiness, said, "A wheel draws its utility from the hub at the center." Every physical gesture is both an intersection and a generator of unlimited meanings, unlimited associations. How terrifying the responsibility and the power of just moving a thumb--in some arenas, from some seats, it may mean life or death! We can't be sure where our gestures came from or where they lead, and yet we act, we feel, we move, we participate in the universal flux. Physical theatre comprises a focusing and refinement of that everyday human business and human pluck.
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