The year 12 have been rehearsing for their exam production of The permanent Way. They are using a variety of techniques including Epic Theatre techniques. They will encorporate the Le Cog use of the levels of tension favoured by Complicite Theatre Company.
Simon McBurney
MASTER CLASS NOTES
Use of Space
In 18th/19th century theatres were at the centre of towns and going to the theatre was as much about social standing and a social experience as much as about the play itself. Often through positioning of seats and lighting on the audience everyone could see each other. People went to the theatre to be seen.
2003 Theatres are on the edge of town. There are marginalised. They are not as central to society as they once were.
So now we ask what is theatre’s place?
So when start to make theatre he asks the most fundamental questions
Is it necessary?
Is it boring?
Beginnings
When watching a play the visuals come first.
The presence of a human body in space
Eg. A man walks on an empty stage.
Immediately a story begins ( This is like The empty space Peter Brook)
The person has a physical presence, there is a tension in which he holds himself. He has a rhythm and weight. So through observations a director or deviser can create a language through the body more clearly. Showing the qualitative differences between each person.
The human body is as much a text as words of a play.
A play which uses on definition of which character is speaking is Martin Crimp “Attempts on her life”. Which makes the actor and director have to make choices and show through the body language as well as the text the clarity of the story and characters.
The Neutral mask
The neutral mask was created by Jacque Le Cog and Sattone as a means to show what the body is thinking. As you take away the face you bring up the volume on the body.
Tiny movements will change what the body says
eg. If the feet are pointing outwards it suggests vulnerability and naivety.
Jacques Le Coq
There are three masks: The one we think we are, The one we really are, And the one we have in common."
(From, The Moving Body (Le Corps poetique) Jacques LeCoq with Jean-Gabriel Carasso and Jean-Claude Lallias. © Copyright The Estate of Jacques Le Coq, Jean-Gabriel Carasso, Jean-Claude Lallias 1997. Translation © Copyright David Bradby 2000. Routledge 29 West 35th Street New York, NY 10001 ISBN0-878-30140-2 (Hb)
"The Jacques Lecoq School, founded in December 1956, is an international professional school of Mime and Theater based on movement and the human body. As a school of dramatic creation, it relies on knowledge of the organic and emotional dynamics of man and nature. It is primarily directed towards Theatre and a Mime that is renewed and broadened by each creator."
The basis of all theatre are these small changes in body language. McBurney calls this minute shifts of architecture.
To help create a common frame of language for a group of actors McBurney uses a scale of human tension.
1 Catatonic State
Taking out all tension in the body. (End up on the floor)
2 The Relax
Very relaxed but can walk and talk but like on a beach.
3 The Neutral
extremely economic movement , it is a state that really doesn’t exist, but always on the search for neutral. Always the right amount of energy to do each action no more- but not a robot.
4 The Alert
A little more tension. Alert energy, ready.
5 The Suspense
More tension, the reactive. You take an in breath eg like a bird. Fight or flight.
Eg. Melodrama.
6 The Passion
Extreme level of passion, add passion to suspense emotions connect- expressing to audience this is how the body tells the story of feeling. This is hard to sustain eg. Kabuki for the body, opera for the voice.
7 The Tragic
No movement possible eg. Petrification . A place where no movement, an extreme of feeling.
• Although this a mechanical way of creating tension and language it gives a common frame of reference.
• It is Architecture of theatrical expression
• it contrasts the body and the voice
• the actor is a story teller and uses his body and voice in the space to tell that story.
Theatre only exists in the audience’s imagination. When theatre creates a collective imagining (as see the same Thing). At that moment, when our internal lives cross over into our outer lives, this moment tells us we are not alone.
Complicite
Founded in 1983 by Simon McBurney, Annabel Arden, Marcello Magni and Fiona Gordon, Complicite is a constantly evolving ensemble of performers and collaborators, now led by Artistic Director Simon McBurney.
Complicite's work has ranged from entirely devised work to theatrical adaptations and revivals of classic texts. The Company has also worked in other media; a radio production of Mnemonic for BBC Radio 3, collaborations with John Berger on a radio adaptation of his novel To The Wedding for BBC Radio and The Vertical Line, a multi-disciplinary installation performed in a disused tube station, commissioned by Artangel.
Always changing and moving forward to incorporate new stimuli, the principles of the work have remained close to the original impulses: seeking what is most alive, integrating text, music, image and action to create surprising, disruptive theatre.
Simon McBurney
'Over the time that I have been working with Complicite what happens in the rehearsal room has changed enormously, yet certain elements are always present. The constant fooling around; the immense amount of chaos; pleasure as well as a kind of turbulent forward momentum. Nothing is off limits apart from not turning up.
It is often extremely unstructured, though paradoxically quite disciplined.
The room is crammed full of stuff; on the walls pictures, text, photographs,
videos, objects, clothes and paper everywhere… But this is by no means a consistent picture.
Often we reach a moment when there must be nothing in the room at all.
It has to be bare, empty and uncluttered.
So when rehearsing a piece I do not have a method, no single approach.
Ultimately the material dictates each rehearsal.
People often ask where we begin. We always begin with a text.
But that text can take many forms - I mean it can equally well be a visual text, a text of action,
a musical one as well as the more conventional one involving plot and characters.
Theatre, says Aristotle, is an act and an action. Action is also a text. As is the space,
the light, music, the sound of footsteps, silence and immobility. All should be as articulate
and evocative as each other.
I have often heard people say that as a company we are fascinated by action and image.
But that is only because what people DO must be as clear as what they SAY.
I do not mean that what they do must copy language. But just as poetry is central in much
of the theatrical cannon, so what people DO can also be couched in its own poetic transformation.
In The Three Lives of Lucie Cabrol we were encountered the problem of the representation
of the protagonists, Jean and Lucie, making love in a barn. All our solutions were either
embarrassing or clichéd, until under the pressure of the final weeks we suddenly seized
the planks we were holding to represent the barn they were in, and started to fling them
around the rehearsal room. The wall came apart and planks flew across the stage and we
found the dynamic of love making transposed into the explosion of the space and the movement of the objects.
This is an example plucked at random from years of graft. Most of the time such moments
of revelation or discovery are rare. And there are more weeks of despair than seconds of elation.
In such moments I long to be told what to do. Or to disappear down the corridor and play with
the curtains or dive into the makeup box, and let someone else decide for me. A piece of theatre is,
ultimately, in the hands of those who are performing it. The actors. It is they not the director who
must have the whole piece in their every gesture, hearing the meaning in each word. And to do that
I think, as an actor, you have to feel that you possess the piece. And to possess the piece you
have to be part of its creation. Involved intimately in the process of its making.'
Simon McBurney
The students will have a workshop from Joyce Henderson next week, a founder member of Complicite.
Also Max Stafford Clark will give the students a workshop on his techniques and how he worked with the actors on the original production in April. Exciting times for the year 12's.
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