Methods in making theatre - part one

You asked me to write down some of the exercises, what we have worked with during our rehearsals in Denmark, and later in Hungary.
I was hesitating a bit, because I don't have a completly worked out system yet.

But I can tell some of the exercises, what I have. I think it is more important to understand the reason of them, than the exact way how one or another goes.

One of the most important fields what you have to work with is what you are paying attention to. Let's call this focus.

You can only be free in your work, when you are focusing on right things.

When a beginner enters to a rehearsing workshop usually he can not focus well. He is worried about others watching him, he is busy to produce something. But he is not focusing on what he wants to produce, just on the will of producing something.

Put a chair on the stage and ask a beginner to walk towards the chair from a certain point and sit down, and than stand up and leave the stage on a certain point. He will have difficulties managing this very simple task.

Everyone can walk, shout, cry, breath deeply, look in another's eye, smile, be angry, laugh, make breaks in between his actions, but at the begining it seems impossible to do these things while other's are watching you, and you are aware of this attention, moreover you are doing these things to be watched.

This is the abstraction in theatre. Each of your actions have two goals. When you are not doing theatre you are shouting to express your anger. When you are doing theatre, you are shouting to express your anger and to be observed at the same time.

You need to have to be in two states at the same time, one in the state of the emotion, what you want to express, and another is the cool-headed controller of the whole situation.

One of the most difficultest things, what a percussionist has to learn is to move separatly his hands end feet. It is complicated.

In percussion you have to make divison between the parts of your body. In acting you have to divide mental things.

Time is an important component in avoiding the wrong direction of focus. It means one has to have patience when studying the work in theatre. But to get more and more used to the situation that your actions are being watched is just the first step in the work with focus.

You have to learn what to focus on. These are parallel processes. You will drop to focus on excrescent things, which are obstacles in your work, when you start to find new things to focus on.

Humility. You need to be patient and curious. Your curiosity needs to be stronger than your desire to reach accomplishment.

What to begin with?

On my opignion you have to get in touch with the tools what you are using when you are acting.

You have basicly three tools.

Your body.

Your partner(s).

The space.

(There is one more indispensable component in theatre: audience, and you have to learn to focus on this component aswell, but it comes later.)

You can only work with things, which are familiar to you. So I advise exercises, which help you to sart to get to know these tools.

Some exercises. Your body.

Connect your movements with your breathing. Stay still while inhaling and imagine one movement, and realize this movement while exhaling. Do this movement exactly as long as you are exhaling.

Imagine a movement while inhaling, and when you exhale realize the opposite of it. For example, you are standing and you imagine that you will sit down, but than you spring up. (Let's call this the contra-movement.)

Imagine a movement, and realize both, first one third of the contra, and than the whole original movment. Try to find a very concrete goal for yourself. For example walking across the room and shuting the door. Realize this series of movments with this method; imagining every single part of your moving, move only during exhalation, and do the 30% of the contra and the whole original movement aswell.

Write down extrem situations from your own experiences. Situations which effected your body (aswell). For example when you fainted, when you were drunken, you had an operation in hospital, state of high fever, a sexual act. It is very important to write only about physical phenomens, do not write about what you were thinking, or what were your emotions, strictly narrow down your sentences to describe how your body was behaving in these situations.

Maybe you will find it to difficult to remember any of these kind of situations, than for the beginning choose something from everday life, and try to write down how you are eating, how you are smoking, gonig down the stairs, having a shower, etc. Write down as many things about your body in these situations as possible. What are the positions of your body parts, how they move, when they move slowly, when fast, how are you breathing, where are you looking at, which of your mussels are relaxed, which are in tense. Do you feel pain? What kind of pain. And so on.

When you feel you have collected as many sentences of one situation as possible try to feel tha state(s), what you have described in your body. Do not act it out. Close your eyes and try to find the feeling inside. Than make one still picture which can describe the whole situation. This picture is to describe what you feel, and the goal is not to explain to the audience in a very concrete and understandble way what was the situation exactly. They do not need to know, if it was an operation for example, they need to get the feeling what you want to express. If you are doing well they might feel something similar in their bodies. Ask them to describe what they have experienced.