Workshop proposal for a theatre conference:
The rehearsal process is a period of exploration, abstraction,
elimination and loose repetition. Through impulse and choice, the actor’s body
is scripted and re-scripted as it interacts with performance texts, acting
spaces, directors’ concepts, and other performers’ bodies and movements. Thus,
by simultaneously attending to external stimuli and internal response, the
actor develops a routinized display through purposeful use of the ‘bodymind’ – a
formulation of the ‘sensing’ body put forward by Phillip Zarrilli and other theorists
of performance training. In rehearsal, the bodymind takes an actor through a
process of generation, expulsion, and cohesion, eventually building to a
performance deemed ‘frozen’ and ready for audience consumption.
Given this almost violent process of creation, the embodied
activity perceived by a spectator functions much like a palimpsest – an object written
on and written over that provides a dense amalgam of its current state and its
previous incarnations. But can the actor’s body be read as a palimpsest? Are inspirations
and emotions generated and discarded in the rehearsal hall still traced upon
the performer’s bodymind and, in turn, distinguishable to a perceptive audience
member? Are such traces a benefit or hindrance to audience reception?
Regardless of how ‘answerable’ the above questions may be,
they point to important considerations for actor training: understanding a
performer’s bodymind not as a mechanical device to be refashioned and reengineered
but as a repository for ideas with varying lasting impressions for performer and spectator alike.
For this conference, I propose a movement-based workshop in which Anne Bogart’s
Viewpoints are explored as a means for understanding the actor’s ‘palimpsested
bodymind.’ Viewpoints-based exercises
will be used to explore an actor’s ability to create, discard, and re-imagine
impulsive play.
1 comment:
Justin,
This is a great project and one that I hope you undertake soon since I hope to witness it. Especially prominent here is the influence of Gil Harris’s notion of the Palimpsestic: surfaces written upon by different hands at different times. Your use of this concept as a way of refiguring the performer’s body is terrific: it brings out the question of legibility really effectively (what discourses / histories do we decode in the gestural ecology of a performance) but it also asks us to notice the actor’s body as a place for active reading. In your account, the repertoire, no less than the archive, should be read (the Chicago reviews we read last week show this to be a pretty radical idea).
The project you propose seems, at first blush, to be admirably clear: create a performance with different texts embedded within it, then survey the audience to see which of these were perceived. But it also asks for theatre artists to exert particular energy in bringing across non-textual meaning. This amounts to a shift in dominant theatre practices (which are strongly textocentric, unified (meaning monological rather than polylogical) and realist, which is to say, representationally uncomplex). I take it that you see Bogart’s Viewpoints as exemplary of a theatricality that is already palimpsestic (and thus, non-dominant). But I wonder if you are limiting the possibilities for palimpsestic expression by making Bogart’s approach the means to the end you seek. A lab-based inquiry with several artistic teams working simultaneously might make for a more open-ended experiment.
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