Attack!

Every kind of live performance has its own natural rhythm – whether this rhythm is generated by music or text, or the unique rhythm of the show itself. The audience perceives these rhythms. Sometimes the audience becomes part of it unconsciously. Perception of the rhythm may be unconscious but the audience is no less sensitive to it.

As a performer I must therefore find this rhythm and attack it, be right on top of it, use it. Like musicians playing a piece of music jump right into, or on, a chord or a note. I remember going to a concert of the Academy of St-Martin-in-the-Fields. The way they ‘exploded’ into the first note of Eine Kleine Nachtmusik and kept going. It was the most exhilarating musical ride I’ve ever experienced!

True – the rhythm is often created or decided upon by the performer but once it’s found or, as often happens, reveals itself in performance, it must be leapt into with no doubt. Full commitment, even abandon. This is what makes an audience hold its breath and engages its attention for a long journey together with the performer.

Musicality in Speaking

“The pure sound and texture of the words carry an enormous weight of meaning. … The actor must be sensitive to words and appreciate the taste and sound and imagery of a word, even a simple word. Many modern actors … tend to speak the way that they do in everyday life.

What the actor needs to work on all the time is finding the thought behind each word. When you do that you find there is a music in thought.

When King Lear says, ‘Never, never, never, never’ – if you try to analyze this in metric terms, you can never say it truly. Paul Scofield said it differently every single night. Every single time, it had different music. The music was the thought and feeling, so the beat was not regular. The beat is the human beat that can only be found by the actor discovering more and more deeply the true thought and feeling that comes not just from his own thinking but from the actual texture of the words themselves.

In Shakespeare there is such compact thought in each line that if you take the line as a whole it would actually be beyond the human being to think so elaborately. If you listen to the texture of the work, you can discover the sense of music and link it to meaning. It is the difference between Western music, which is all based on a predictable structure given by bars that the composer has set down, and Eastern music, which is based on an awareness of irregular rhythms: There is no regularity.

When the thought and the feeling are right, the music returns; but it isn’t a music that comes from starting with the external structure.”

Peter Brook, interview in American Theatre, May/June 2001.

[YT]: This is what we try to do in mime. To be able to move with the musicality and texture of words and of thought.

Ensemble L’Agapanthe

Paris, July 2003.

Watching this ensemble playing and singing their music with joy, taking the audience on an exhilarating journey. Realised the drama they created in their Baroque music comes from suspensions and dialogues.

Without suspensions each line or voice would become just a line of notes played one by one. But with breath and suspension the line dances, takes on colour, dips and dives and takes you along with it. It’s a rollercoaster ride!

But the suspensions can’t be written in – they happen in between the counts and beats. They are not pauses. They happen in the players’ muscles and breath.

When you have two lines or more doing this they are like swallows in the air, each flying its own path but crossing and re-crossing, diving and weaving in and out of each other’s path. It’s the not-quite meeting, the transitions, boundaries, and edges that are interesting and keep you on the edge of your seat!