Thoughts on training and other things...

Watched Sunburned Hand of the Man play at the Croft, they were amazing, I saw them play at Seymore's Social Club about a year ago, and I've wanted to throw myself around to their music ever since. Well I got my chance and danced myself into an authentic trance-state and was overwhelmed by the vein of power and negativity which opened up in the music.

In more prosaic territory I've been asked to perform 10 Ways to Die on Stage at the Arnolfini! Oh check out those fancy cross over live-art/performance/theatre pants of mine. So that's penciled in for January 11th. Excellent stuff.

Fresh off the back of debuting Mr Suicide in Freak Boutique I'm working on a few short scene's for the Invisible Circus's Ghost Town Promenade performance at the Pro Cathedral. It's in less than a week so wish us luck.

I went to an excellent workshop the other day at the Tobacco Factory, it was run by three actors working for the Jo Stromgren Dance Company. It was really good to meet a different selection of people, those who come from a more movement/dance background.

Having done the workshop it has been really interesting to compare it to the other ways of working physically which I've encountered. I've been training for a while now with Tid from Fairground Theatre and I did a one day workshop with Amit from Gecko.

For me Tid's training has been about developing an awareness of the body, the ensemble and developing the physical skills which allow you to portray or embody characters, states, actions and scenes. Working personally and collectively on technique as a starting point for creation. This kinesthetic/spatial/group awareness under-pins so much work.

With Amit's workshop the focus was on developing the range, veracity and power of your ability to react physically to an emotion. To illustrate this point he used a the example of baby who's emotional reactions are so immediate and powerful: howling misery to radiant joy. The idea being that through the process of growing and socialising we lose this freedom to express ourselves so directly, but that we can regain this ability through training and harness it on stage.

The workshop with the women from the Jo Stromgren company came at the action from a very different point of view. With their work it is less about what the performer has in mind when performing an action and more about how the audience themselves interprets and associates with that action. They aren't thinking about their character's personal psychological motivation as with Stanislavski but rather the psychology of the audience.

This can be explained by talking a little about the workshop. We devised our own short sequences of movements, formed groups of 3 or 4 and linked the movements into a sequence. We then showed what we had worked on to each other. There where all kinds of interesting points in each of the sequences, with comedy, absurdity and pathos. Then we left the dance studio and went to the gents toilets where one of the groups performed their piece. Now suddenly in this context I thought that they must have been told at the start by the company to produce a piece for the toilet, because it fitted so perfectly in that environment.

However they hadn't: it was only my personal association as an audience member, my new reading of the movement in that context which made the link so apparently obvious, with very minimal adjustment from the performers it was I who made the work appropriate to it's setting. So it becomes the context which is important. This was borne out in the way the company uses specifically targeted gibberish (e.g. gibberish Swiss-German from Bern). Here the only language barrier is the one you put up yourself. At the same time you are given the freedom to play with your own understanding of what is being said.