Collaborative Practice - Term Paper Example

Collaborative practice ‘Practice makes a man perfect,’ goes the age-old adage. Although perfection is unattainable, yet practice helps improve our skills considerably. Technique, vocal quality, scene work, acting strategies, and monologue experience add a qualitative accent to acting. To me, Bacchea seemed to provide an opportunity to hone these skills. I passionately took up the challenge of experimenting with everything that differentiated a great actor from a poor actor. It also sent me on the path of self-discovery, and I unearthed many of my latent abilities. So profound was my SDP experience that it not only changed me as a person, and as an actress, but also broadened my outlook. In this report, I summarize the challenges that I undertook, and share the experiences I underwent as an actor, while working in concert with rest of the cast. Sustaining the identity of a character is a tough call. The toughest part is to credibly emote that character. Stanislavski terms the ability of actors to give feelings and emotion to their characters, through a recollection of their own life experiences, as the emotional memory. According to Boal (2000: 219), ‘actors must work on their bodies to get to know them better and to make them more expressive’. The fear that I didn’t know myself or my body, too well, made me uncomfortable. My heart hardened, as I felt held back, needing to be released. However, gradually, the unit helped me realize who I was, and discover what I as an actor, and as a person, was capable of. For example, I felt, I could never choreograph dances. I let my imagination travel further, allowing myself to open up, and discovered otherwise. The unit was like a dear little baby to us, the cast. We worked hard, putting our ideas into it, wherever necessary. Initially, due to the language problem, Bacchae made little sense to me. It was on reading the Kneehigh theatre company version that I got a better sense of the story. I could relate it to the contemporary times more and realize how we were to go about it. My excitement heightened further, when I found that women in Bacchae not only shed their traditional roles but were also thrust into a promiscuous position that contrasted sharply with their usual characterization, submissiveness, and modesty. It led me to think of the women of today and how people supported the belief that women who stayed in their homes were oppressed. It is often said that women who stayed in their homes have always been oppressed by men. The origin of bitterness between men and women had its roots deep in human psychology and biology. The way women suffer in our society is nothing but the same old story that has been going on ever since human life began. We had to be very careful in the portrayal of the women characters of Bacchae. ‘Oppression’ is a strong word. It both repels and attracts. It is dangerously fashionable to use it. The word is much abused and sometimes not innocently. I concluded that the notion of oppression differed from woman to woman. The view was corroborated by my discussion, on religion, with Sian. I was a Muslim and she, a Christian. She held the notion that Muslim women were an oppressed lot. She thought that the ‘veil’ was symbolic of their being oppressed. Giving my example, I told her that I was a Muslim woman and was not oppressed. The veil, I informed her, was worn as a matter of choice and not as a compulsion. Since I really wanted to remove her misconceptions and make her understand Islam better, I discussed the issue with her a couple of times. However, this also set me thinking about the character I was to portray. Given the cultural background, I came from, I, too, could be dragged into an unseemly controversy in my first performance itself. As I delved deeper into my character, I discovered that each woman is oppressed in their own way. The tutors asked us to be careful lest we made our characters stereotyped. ‘What then was the stereotyped woman?’ I reflected. A character is made up of many layers and as such, to me, there was no such thing as stereotyping. While working on the character development, we learned that improvisation games were the best option to uniquely represent the women. In the process, we played a lot of games using Keith Johnson’s methods. We imbibed the technique of not blocking each other and allowing the characters to flow. This methodology allowed me to empathise with Agave, the protagonist of Bacchae. As revealed by Dionysus, Agave insulted the god by saying that he was not the son of Zeus. Dionysus drives Agave, and all women of Thebes mad and compels them to go off to the hills, where they wear animal skins, and dance and sing hymns to the praise of god of wine and revelry. Toward the end of the play, Agave, still in a frenzy of madness leads the women in a bloody attack on Pentheus, her own son, whom she mistakes for a mountain lion. In the disbelief she carries in the entire rave, her attempt to stall Dionysus’s being overtaken by music, her mistakenly ripping her son dead, and ultimately ripping herself apart, I found a remarkable similarity to my own character. My likings apart, the play, for me, had its shares of dislikes. The monologue of Adlehied Roosen from the play ‘The Veiled Monologues’, which I used, made me feel sick with its imagery. “Unlike Stanislavski’s use of personal memory, you were not asked to imagine how you would feel if you were in this character’s situation, but to get a sense of how they were feeling” (Chamberlain, 1981: 56). The question arises, how could I imagine being in another person’s shoes without being in his position myself. A Stanislavski response might be to try and remember a moment, where we have had those kinds of feelings and to transfer those feelings to this person’s situation. Chekhov (date: page no) however, doesn’t find hunting for the memory of a specific moment useful. I also found some problems with the emotional memory. Although, I felt, it could produce results in the rehearsals, but I worried, if it could produce the same results, for me, in the performance. Chekhov (Chekhov, 1981: 58) confers that “by digging up old memories, we might be overwhelmed by feelings and lose our “mental balance”. His concern here is clearly for the well-being of the performer. Even Lee Strasburg, who was the most prominent advocate of the emotional memory approach, didn’t want the actor to work with feelings which were too fresh or raw. Under the conditions, when the words were so clear to me, the imminent course to keep the character natural with real feelings was to stay calm. We also worked on developing the physicality of our characters, so we picked up the animals we thought the characters represented. I chose the cat. In ancient Greek myths, domestic cats were considered symbolic of home and hearth. Their reproductive habits associated them with devoted motherhood, fertility, and promiscuity. They were also protectors of the home. Taking a cue from Johnson (1981:202), who has remarked that playing different animals improves movement and voice skills and allows the personalities to flow freely, I used the cat to get the correct physicality, making me more comfortable and helping me develop the right movement and voice skills. Atmosphere too had a great bearing on the development of our cast. We took a workshop on Chekhov’s atmosphere. According to Chekhov quoted at Chamberlain (1986:56), “the atmosphere of a performance is created by the performers in collaboration with the audience.” We succeeded in bringing the audience up and then bringing them down towards the end. We also worked on Butoh and Isadoras Duncan workshops as their ideas developed with free and natural movements, inspired by the classical Greek arts, and nature. We used skipping, running, jumping, leaping, and tossing with free-flowing costumes, bare feet and loose hair. We needed this, to portray our being possessed by Dionysus’s spell. This gave me a chance to explore new movements and allow myself to be free. I also got the chance to choreograph dance. As my imagination led me on a rollercoaster, I naturally felt great when everything was placed together. I took a lot of inspiration from Derida Dance Company, who work on contemporary dance forms of different nationalities and are inspired by African tribes and cults. We wanted to emulate the elements of tribal cults from the dances of Derida Dance Company, in the tribal scene of rave. These were so dissimilar from one another, yet they carried a common and strong sense of unity of women. Now, I would like to share a few words about the music. From the beginning, I was worried about the music going very bland and commercial. I was determined to have diversity in music as I knew our performance was going to rely, a lot, on sound. We wanted a music that could contrast with each scene. For example, in the scene when all the women are possessed and have an orgy, they become fast and aggressive. It was accompanied by a beautiful and slow song by an Arabic group called Niaze. It made the scene very powerful and made me feel as if the character was really possessed and under a spell. In the tribal scene we used drums and didgeridoos. “Drummers at possession cults, drum louder and with more syncopation in order to throw people over the edge.” (Johnson, 1981:202). With so many drums going louder and the music making the atmosphere intense, we wanted the audience to feel as if they were under a spell. This is how music proved to be a big instrument in our performance and made a significant impact on it. Originally, we had the idea that we should use the space outside in the fields to perform our show. Though it seemed a very good idea, but since a rave is usually held in closed space, we decided to use the theatre. The set design was very basic using Peter Brook’s idea of the empty space. “I can take any empty space and call it a bare space. A man walks across this space whilst someone else is watching him, and this is all that is needed for an act of theatre to be engaged.” (Brook, 1968:11). So, all that was needed was, us the actors. We used four podiums, which had ropes hanging on them with the idea of caging, to depict women being caged and trapped. I have found this project one of the most challenging and exciting experiences of my acting career so far. As a person I found that “when you are an actor you cease to be a male or female. You are a person, and you are a person with all the other persons inside you” (BBC: 1967). This is a relevant quotation because this unit has taught me a lot about myself and discover talents that I never knew existed in me. I have developed confidence as an actor allowing myself to go. I have also learnt that one must be prepared to let things go. I was so passionate about the rave that it really hurt me when we finished it so soon, but I guess all good things come to an end. I feel in my group we connected really well. We shared inputs and carried out workshops with an equal fervour. I feel we were very lucky to have people from different disciplines as it helps in amalgamation of different ideas and imaginations. The outcome of the show was a success. It was all the more interesting because it came out exactly the way I had visualized it. It didn’t create any disappointments; I was happy. Read More