The movement quality of thought or life consists of – pauses, resistance, difficult bits, sudden jumps or leaps, changes of direction, etc. Drama and engagement come from watching this happen in the body. We cannot directly communicate thought but we can tell by watching someone move what he or she is thinking. Everyone can relate to the struggle against or with a thought.
(Decroux?) “The body is the battleground of the mind … Mime makes movement with stops and curves and straight lines.”
Paris, May 2003.
The improvs come alive when we let go, stop wanting to show or be something and are simply as we are, here and now. Étre – the ‘to be’ that we all struggle to find in these improv exercises.
If we reject ‘story’ (narrative?) and the need for things to ‘happen’ in corporeal mime AND our expressions are neutral and an-emotional (not un-emotional) – What are we giving the audience?
When it works it seems like we are giving the audience ourselves, our real selves – frail, weak, stupid, afraid, and alone. But we are not giving by baring our souls for all to see, or by showing and indulging in every weakness we have. We give it clothed in struggle. We do what we do in spite of ourselves. The improvs teach us how to let the weakness show through. This is how we can connect, because we reflect the audience, because the audience recognize themselves.
The connection must be clean and clear. The moment we interject, even the tiniest nuance, the pathway is lost, the audience wakes up to where they are and fall back into their habitual skins and thoughts and attitudes. Then it’s as if a glass wall were thrown up between us.
It almost doesn’t matter what the subject matter is as long as it can be arranged to form a solid stage for the struggle:
People find corporeal mime difficult to take. It takes a long time and a great deal of patience for the connection to be made, like meeting someone for the first time. It isn’t common anymore to look for great strength in weakness, emotion in restraint. Usually we get signs showing us where to look or how to look for these qualities. How much richer would it be if we could uncover and discover this light for ourselves, looking out from behind our own eyes.
Our work is about frailty, mortality and fear – our own.
“… there is always one person in the audience to whom you speak. One. All I ask is that you feel for or against.”
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- Everything written symbols can say has already passed by. They are like tracks left by animals. That is why the masters of meditation refuse to accept that writings are final. The aim is to reach true being by means of those tracks, those letters, those signs – but reality itself is not a sign, and it leaves no tracks. It doesn’t come to us by way of letters or words. We can go toward it, by following those words and letters back to what they came from. But so long as we are preoccupied with symbols, theories and opinions, we will fail to reach the principle.
- But when we give up symbols and opinions, aren’t we left in the utter nothingness of being?
- Yes.
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Improvisation and technique are two ends of the same continuum. We work on technique to find the fictive body, the decided body, the pre-expressive body. We improvise to find the light to fill that body. Each is empty without the other and we work to bring the two ends of the continuum together.
