C. Performance Score: Dreams

We've spent the last nineteen days developing skills of expression and expanding awareness. We've taken apart behavior, looked at its aspects and consciously reformed our actions. We've focused on detail. We've exercised and exercised and memorized a lot of rules and agreed on many conventions. In the end, after all the considerations, thoughts, insights and analysis, it's the body that does the job; if it's listened to and trusted, it will know what to do with surety.

20A. Walk/Sound, Solo, Ensemble

• Go somewhere on the floor and stand in a neutral posture. Breathe. Quiet
your mind and relax into your body.

• You have three choices: walk, sound or pause. When you're walking, keep
your walk simple and functional. When you're walking, you're not sound­
ing, and when you're sounding, you're not walking. In other words, you're
sounding from stillness and walking in silence. These are separate actions.

• Practice this on your own until it becomes comfortable. Let the voice and
the movement interact and rhythmically alternate in irregular patterns. Both
the voice and the walk will express your story, feelings, subtext, etc.

• After a while, I'll say stop. Everyone return to neutral. Keeping within the
same form of sounding and walking as separate actions, build an ensem­
ble piece.

• You're collaborating on three levels: the sound, patterns of travel, and
content of the scenes.

• At some point, I'll give you a two-minute cue to end.

^^ •

A

simple score such as this one, like so many others in the training, can be played over and over again. Each time will be entirely dif­ferent from the others. In this exercise, Walk/Sound, Solo/Ensemble, the physical action is limited to a walk, but the collective choreography can become quite complex. There's infinite opportunities for variation in the timing and spacing of each step. Combined with the choral over­lay and the unfolding chain of events, walking leads to a full-bodied and multi-dimensional improvisation. As mentioned earlier, separating vocal actions from physical actions demands control, focus, and an acute body awareness. By now students have acquired these skills. Within the con­text of this exercise, their actions appear ritualized, formal.

We don't usually separate the vocal from the physical elements of our actions. When we do, our behavior appears peculiar. What's pecu­liar is that the form is highlighted. We're noticing it more than we usu­ally do. A balance between the form and the content seems odd because most of the time we pay attention to the content.

Ritual and Ceremony

As soon as we focus on the formal elements, the details of how an act is executed, we're in ritual. In this sense, in Action Theater, we always cre­ate ritual or ceremony because we always balance form and content.

Rituals and ceremonies don't stress the individuality of the person. The act is the focus, not the person performing the act. The act is what must be performed, over and over again. In these exercises, instead of

focusing only on the action, we focus on the person simultaneously. This brings both the person and the form into the foreground.

Our lives are full of ceremonies: taking the sacrament, lighting the Sabbath candles, exchanging wedding vows, cutting the birthday cake, blowing out candles, singing together, singing the national anthem, greet­ing each other, washing dishes, fixing the morning coffee.

Often actions are motivated by personal agenda that clouds percep­tion and puts the content up front. The next time you pick up a cup of coffee, let the form take over. Feel how the cup moves through space. Give that form as much attention as the need to bring the coffee to your lips.

Ensemble Awareness

If an ensemble has been practicing together for some time, honing their collective awareness, individuals can begin to assert their identity in more impacting ways. In the early stages of ensemble practice, everybody con­cedes to, and joins in on, the collective actions. Large groups may be joining to relate to other large or smaller groups, but rarely does an indi­vidual stand apart. The fear is that too many individuals will stand apart, splintering the ensemble and dispersing attention. At some point, and with practice, an ensemble can hold a solo, duet or trio, because every­body is tuned in to it. Everybody knows what's going on. They offer sup­portive action, allowing the primary event to develop.

For example, suppose the entire ensemble is lined up against the back wall facing the audience and making wild gyrations and sounds. Cassie steps out and walks directly forward toward the audience as if in a trance, teetering and moving her mouth and hands soundlessly.

Some examples of supportive ensemble action to Cassie s action may be:

Downplaying or fading, Becoming still, Offering vocal backup, Offering movement backup,

Shadowing or echoing her action,

Becoming other objects that fit into her world.

An ensemble improvisation can be a continuous exchange of primary (Cassie) and secondary (supportive) players, no matter how many per­formers.

Imagining Beyond

Solo and duets risk ensemble fracturing and eruption of archetypal dynamics: us-against-them, competition, antagonism, and out-right war­fare. How do we avoid this? Or better yet, what can we do when this arises? If everyone in the ensemble remains conscious of their actions— responsible for their words and deeds, focused on the moment-to-moment aspects of their actions, disentangled from personal identifications — when warfare-like action of any kind happens, it will be imaginatively enacted without reference to already known concepts or opinions. A sharply pointed finger will be experienced as a shape in space, the turn of a back as a dance, the fall from an attack as a contour of time and movement. The performer looks at the roles of aggressor and victim as a composite of feelings, movements, and voices. Rather than a stereo­typed diminishment of these situations, perception expands into enlight­ened experience.

W

hether working as an ensemble, small group, or individual, per­formers experience the challenge of staying with an image, an action, a feeling, or a quality of being, for an extended period of time. We've all experienced the urgency to move on and see what's next, to get involved in more activity. We're impatient, restless, judgmental; we're afraid of taking up too much space, afraid of not taking up enough.

The more practiced one is, the more drawn one is to step out, away from the crowd and to stay there for however long it takes. The more relaxed and practiced one is, the more one is capable of, and enchanted with, less activity. Simple moments take on awesome relevance and incon­sequential events become enrapturing.

The following score pulls together all of the skills accumulated throughout the month.

^^ •

20B. Superscore

• In trios. Find a place on the floor and stand neutral in relation to your
partners.

• The Superscore is the master score, an open improvisation without a par­
ticular focus. Everything you've studied, explored, understood, tooled up,
and gained insight into comes into play here. Here's a list of reminders:

• Move, sound or speak in any combination or separately.

• Shift, transform or develop your forms.

• Join each other or do something different.

• You and your partners are always in the same world, even if
simultaneous scenes are going on.

• Relationships may be either direct or indirect or both.

• Partners relate in time, space, shape, and dynamics, all the
time, and these are either contrasted or similar.

• Listen. Always know what your partners are doing. Pay
attention to detail.

• Every action is a stone that is being laid down and may be
retrieved and explored again.

• At some point, I'll give you a two-minute cue to end.

The Superscore list seems like a list of things to do. It's not. It's the way we remind ourselves of what's always going on.

Notes:

Let awareness direct you. Let it shift or transform. Your aware­ness will decide to stay with something for a long time, or talk, or make a sound. Awareness responds to you and your partner. Relax. Let awareness improvise.

If a voice or character feels false, experience that falseness, go with the sensations of what you call "falseness." Then the expe­rience will no longer be false.

Techniques are tools for efficiency. The performer must tran­scend techniques in order to engage in the moment-to-moment sensations of experience.

Feelings aren't in any hurry. It's the ideas that rush along.

A person quietly resides inside changing phenomena. Occa­sionally, she notices the phenomena. Occasionally, she thinks she is the phenomena itself. But, sometimes she experiences herself pretending to be a person pretending to identify with the phe­nomena. From this curious detachment, she performs.

T

he final score of the twenty day training, Dreams, often invites per­sonal material. The students have become a community. They've travelled through intimate and exposing experiences together. They've been seen and they've seen into each other. They've been privy to watch­ing themselves with great perspective. They are less attached to their judgments, their personalities, and even to the events and circumstances which make up their lives. They've been willing to play with it all week after week. Now, they play very skillfully.

20C. Performance Score: Dreams

• Everyone leave the floor. We're going to make dreams. You will each get
a turn being a central figure in a dream.

• Here's how we proceed:

• One of you will go onto the floor and begin a dream by doing something
that feels right to you, at the moment. Anything. You're the dreamer, the pri­
mary focus, for this improvisation, even though it will become a collabora­
tion between yourself and anyone who enters your dream.

• You'll have a few moments by yourself. Then, anyone in the audience can
enter or exit your dream at any time. Everyone on the floor is collaborating
on the flow of events. The dreamer is not the only one controlling, or respon­
sible for, the events that happen. But, the dreamer is the only one who stays
on the floor until the end.

• This is a Superscore with a designated central figure. So, you can remind
yourself of our Superscore list.

• Since there's many of you participating in this event, we'll add a few more
elements to our Superscore list of reminders:

• Have no more than three, at the most four, different things
going on at any time.

• LISTEN so that everything works together.

• Join or bulk up each other's actions.

• As in our sleeping dreams, allow time and space to stretch and bend,
and the images to be non-linear, oddly related and sequential, or overlap­
ping. Content (scenes) can shift suddenly. Several time and place zones can
exist simultaneously.

• Make your entrances and exits clear and direct.

• At any time, the person playing dreamer can end the dream by saying,
"Stop."

• When you're not on the floor, you're an active audience member, ready
to jump in. So, stay involved.

^^ •

Entrances and Exits

The following are examples of clear entrances and exits:

• Enter or exit while doing a task.

• Enter directly to a particular location as if you belong there
and exit as if it's time to go.

• Enter or exit in a hurry, or take your time, a lot of time.

• Whatever your choice, relate it to what's going on.

The entrance and exit tactic, built into this score, hones skills of obser­vation. Students being the audience have an external vantage point from which to view the scene. Their function is to serve the scene rather than serve themselves. With this in mind, they determine whether their input is appropriate, depending on what they perceive from their audience position. They may choose to hold off or go forward, aggressively inter­rupt, or secretively slide into the current images and actions.

Exits demand an overview also, but from the inside of the improvi­sation. What effect does their departure have on the scene? Does it weaken or strengthen it? For some, who have a tendency to overstay their effectiveness, this is a good practice. Get the job done and leave.

Humor

Ann is improvising with Hugh and Stan. They each are carrying a chair. There's a loft in the studio. Holding onto their chairs, they're following each other in a line around the room. Stan's leading. When he passes the loft, he tosses his chair up onto it. Hugh follows and tosses his chair up onto the loft. Ann wants to do the same but doesn't have the strength. She gets confused, wavers, and finally throws her chair out of the room through a nearby door.

■

After the improvisation, we isolate this event to discuss humor. As it happened, it was not funny, yet it could have been. We felt Ann's awk-

wardness and self-consciousness. She got stuck, confused, lost aware­ness inside of her predicament.

For humor to occur, the performer must disengage from her predica­ments. She must see all predicaments as the circumstances of the entity, not one's self, she's playing at the moment. Ann got lost because she iden­tified herself too closely with the situation. She experienced her inabil­ity to toss the chair as a personal failure. She forgot she was "playing" an entity who was unable to toss the chair. If this had been her view, the situation could either be funny or tragic. That choice is up to her. If she experiences it as funny and expresses a detailed confession of herself perceiving herself inside of the predicament, then we too will experi­ence humor with her.

Humor rides on timing. The performer feels each beat. No thoughts or distractions blur his vision. He is in the dance of expression, moment by moment. He expresses present awareness and if his awareness is humorous, he will be humorous. In Action Theater, we don't run after humor. Humor finds us.

T

he dreamer may say, "Stop" for one of two reasons: 1) he senses a conclusion or, 2) he feels uncomfortable. Sometimes these dreams become more like nightmares. If the dreamer is identifying with the material, he may reach overload and decide to call it quits. On the other hand, having the power to end the improvisation, in itself, elicits a cer­tain degree of objectivity and freedom.

"Dream" is a useful word. We all do it. We all know what it means. We all know that dreams don't necessarily reflect our everyday world. They swirl up from a mix of embedded psychic material, beyond our control. Using the word "dream" puts people in a place of mystery. They're more willing to float into the nether world of the imagination, and build scenes that bend and mix social, spatial, chronological, and linguistic organiza­tion. The personality of the performer disappears, leaving a transparent and transforming energy that fills space with feeling and complete actions.

D

reams are chosen to be the final score of the training. Each mem­ber of the group becomes a central figure of a dream. The group has shared rich and provocative moments together. They've served each other during this process of collective and individual transformation. In offering themselves up as dreamers and by adding to each others dream, they act from gratitude.

Afterword

I

began taking notes after an experience in Ann Arbor in the 70s. I was performing a solo improvisation in a loft space. I had asked a group of people to set the stage for me. They arranged an environment full of props. One of the objects was a fairly large Raggedy Anne doll. In the course of the improvisation, I named the doll Alice. Within ten minutes, she had died and the rest of the piece was about the aftermath of her death. As I was taking a bow, I noticed three women crying and holding onto each other in the front row. Later, they came backstage and were still visibly upset. One year previous to that very night, they told me, a friend of theirs named Alice had died. Before coming to the show, they had held a memorial dinner in her honor. I was shaken. I realized that the workings of improvisation had ramifications beyond my understanding. I had to observe it very closely.

This book reflects where I am, now, in that process. It's been a long time since that evening in Ann Arbor, and I've acquired a lot of notes and questions. Every time I had thought I understood the work, a new set of questions would arise. Then, those new ones would have to be fol­lowed up. About five years ago I decided to compile some of these answers into a book, no matter what. I should have known that the book itself would offer innumerable questions. At some point, as any improvisation will, the book ended itself. It was time to stop, to collect, to polish. No more questions could be brought in.

My investigations continue. In the past three years, I've taught two five-month trainings and intend to do more. Working daily, with a group of people so intensely and extensively, takes me (and them) further into the detailed discipline of clear expression.

At some point, there might be another book that begins where this one leaves off. Until then, we improvise.

If you would like a video demonstration of some of the exercises in this book, or if you'd like to get my comments on a video of you or your group doing this work, please write to: Zap Performance Projects, 1174 Crag-mont Ave., Berkeley, CA. 94708

At some point we must look inward for our education. We must notice what inhibits our freedom, be willing to give up all preconceptions, be truthful, and relax, in order to act from lively emptiness. —from the Introduction

E

ACH CHAPTER of this book presents a singj^fcy of the twenty-day training which Ruth Zaporah developed into Action Theater, her inves­tigation into the life-reflecting process of improvisation. This book shows through exercises, stories, anecdotes, and metaphors how to focus atten­tion on the body's awareness of the present moment, moving away from preconceived ideas. Improvisations move through fear, boredom, laziness, and distraction to a sustained awareness of creative options.

Action Theater is a true path to liberation: from self-binding and self-limiting con jepts, from fear and mistrust. Working within the framework of Ruth's instructions we can practice being sponta­neously alive in a world that \vs, not already been formed, where no script exists.

—Edward Espe Brown, Zen teacher and author of The Tassajara Bread Book

Improvisation by its very nature is impossible to capture in words. There are few competent prac­titioners left in this cynical and materialistic era. The need for 'winging it" both on and offstage, of going out on a limb, "suspending disbelief,'" is of supreme importance particularly at this time. This is the value and healing property of impro­visation, whether y< n're an artist or a business per­son. Ruth Zaporah is a master of this elusive and transformative art form. At last, after all these ye.j-s we have a compendium of her exercises. This is a book of spells for your enchantment.

—John O'KeWe, playwright and actor, founding member, Blake Street Hawkeyes

Those of us lucky enough to see Ruth Zaporah perform have anticipated this book with great eagerness. How has this genius of authenticity, this brilliance of spontaneity come into being? How does she do it? As countless students will tell you, Ruth Zaporah has been leading students in the direction of what she knows for a long time; she is an extraordinary teacher. And now, in a sim­ple and wonderfully avocative telling, she has given u£ a record of how her work and its teach­ing takes place. This book will very soon become an indispensable classic, not only for studies in theater, but also in the nature of life.

-Susan Griffin, author of A Chorus of Stones and The Eros of Everyday Life

Ruth Zaporah is a teacher, performer, and director. She travels widely in the United States and abroad, performing and teaching in theaters, dance and the­ater studios, on college campuses, and in psychologi­cal training programs. She has twice been the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Choreographers Fellowship.

Дата добавления: 2015-10-31