The rehearsal room is a place for experimentation, collaboration and exploring idea’s. We re currently in the middle of the process of making WOMENSwear (Thomas, 2015) and we have so many ideas bustling into the rehearsal room. As director, it is predominately my job to ensure that the company remains focused.
I write this post the morning after the night before. Last night we explored the notion of space and place in order to examine the way we gravitate around the space and each other. I began the rehearsal by asking the company to discuss what they understood to be ‘performance’, ‘theatre’, ‘space’ and ‘time’. This generated a number of interesting responses and we spent time understanding each others perceptions of each word. By starting the rehearsal in this way, I found it interesting to uncover how the other members of the company understood these notions and found that we all agreed on a lot of the same principals.
I then ran a workshop with the actors exploring space, where I asked them to begin by walking steadily around the space, listening to the sound of the room. My intention for this task was to introduce the actors to the larger space – the space beyond the traditional stage which we so heavily rely on. In his 1968 publication The Empty Space, Peter Brook states;
I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage. A man walks across this empty space whilst someone else is watch- ing him, and this is all that is needed for an act of theatre to be engaged. Yet when we talk about theatre this is not quite what we mean. Red curtains, spotlights, blank verse, laughter, darkness, these are all confusedly superimposed in a messy image covered by one all-purpose word. We talk of the cinema killing the theatre, and in that phrase we refer to the theatre as it was when the cinema was born, a theatre of box office, foyer, tip-up seats, footlights, scene changes, intervals, music, as though the theatre was by very definition these and little more. (Brook, 1968 p.7)
The theatre I am inspired to create is that of simplicity, more focused on the text, rather than intricate plot twists and over-done set design. From an early stage in my university career I have been influences by Brook’s statement. Like Brook, I don’t not believe in the superficiality of an imaginary world because this can be found in the cinema. Whereas, in the theatre we are able to present our work in a multitude of ways, and break the idea of the theatrical event.
As a directing style, I prefer to start the rehearsal process with a long period of experimentation and exploration to really understand the nature of the script. Throughout our early rehearsals, we have explored the distance of the stage and how we can exploit pace within the performance.
A technique I have found particularly useful was beginning the rehearsal by giving the actors a map of the London Underground each. I then asked them to describe to the rest of the group what their initial thoughts where, and how the may made them feel. The actors expressed how the may made them think of journey’s, and traveling from one destination to another. Their ideas reflected echoed my own thoughts and we discussed the idea of unending journeys, and how we are constantly travelling for something. Whether our travels are work, love or spiritual, we are constantly moving from one space to another, regardless of our intentions. This exercise was incredibly useful when drawing it back to our script, as we started to piece together the links between stories and uncovered how their pathways crossed and drifted away from each other.
Where are we travelling next? Who know’s. But perhaps we will meet you there.
Citations
Brook, P. (1968) The Empty Space. New York: Touchstone.
Thomas, S. (2015) WOMENSwear.