Twenty-first note - Chalk Circle in your town

The Chalk Circle Theatre (Krétakör) will be on tour on the Festspillene i Bergen with their play, The Ice on the second and third of June.
It is a tough and cruel performance based on a contemporary russian novel. It is not directed by their leader, but by another young director, who already worked with them before.
Probably one of the last chances to see the ensemble together, because from the next theatre season they are going to alter and probably to split.

Poem by János Pilinszky

The soil is not soil.
The number is not a number.
The letter is not a letter.
The sentence is not a sentence.

God is God.
Flower is flower.
Tumour is tumour.
Winter is winter.
Relocation camp is a pale
territory with an uncertain form.

One day workshop at Vestjyllands Højskole (methods)

About the workshop which Olga and I led at the school.
My main goal was to get to know a little bit the people, who attended the workshop, and to show some ideas, some exercises to them, so they can get to know a little bit my way of thinking and working. And to awaken some searching for the reason for doing theatre today.

One of the exercises was that I asked them to create scenes, when they are suprising us. They were working in couples.
This execise can open you towards creativity. We are all waiting for a suprise, beacuse we all know that this was the exercise. What can still be suprising in this situation?
Suprise is an important tool of an actor. Breaking the expectations. When one expects something to happen, and this expectation brakes, does not come true, he can get suprised, and his attention rises.

After each exercise I encoureged the participants to give comments on each other's work.
I am asking the group to express with words what they have experienced (and not to judge if it was bad or good). I find it very useful, because on one hand the spectators have to find words for their experiences (and translating an experience into language means that you are shaping it, and it can help you to remember it later), and on the other hand it can be useful feedback for the creators - what did my spectators get out of what I have shown. Maybe they thaught about something completely different, what I wanted to show. Maybe they didn't understand, what I wanted to be understood.
In these converstations I am also just a member of the group, who gives his own comments. Sometimes of course I need to pay attention to speak at last, not to affect other's way of expressing their experiences.

An other exercise was that I asked them to make their partner do something without using language, or explaining him with pointing at things or body language. The task is that you have to create a situation on which your partner reacts naturally with doing, what you want to make him do. This act should come as a reflex on your actions.
These were the tasks:
Make me laugh.
Sing a song.
Do the opposite of what I am doing.
Take something out of the room.
Tell a story.
Suprise them.
Take another person to the other side of the room.
Close your eyes. (for a longer while, not just a wink)
Proove, that you like them.

I did with them the transformation of drawings exercise aswell, which I did with you aswell. When they have to choose one of a series of abstract drawings and transform this picture into a sequence of movments. Others have to guess afterwards, which drawing you have chosen.

I had a list of words with me aswell, which are describing different qualities of theatre, and they had to choose the 3 most important for them.
These were the words (I write in brackets, how many votes did one get): emotions (6), story (6), liveness (4), sincerity (4), attention (4), interaction (3), visuality (2), encounter (2) music (1), dance (1), sentences, suprise, imitation, contrast, newness (those, which do not have number, did not get any vote).
There were 11 people voting: 1 from New Zealand, 3 from Poland, 1 from Hungary and 6 from Danmark - 9 girls and 2 boys, mainly in their twenties, one of them was around 50.

The last one and half hour they spent with making scenes in small groups of 3 or 4. I asked them to find something which is disturbant for them in the smaller or bigger world around them, in the community of which they are a part of. A problem, which they can not solve, but which they would really like to, if they would have the power to do so. And they had to make a scene out of this problem.
At this last part there was a group, which made an amazing scene. They were working with the problem of facing with myself, finding my role, my goals, searching for the answer of the question "who am I". They disappeared, we looked after them for a long time. Time was running, we were getting close to dinertime, we wanted to show the scenes to each other. We have found them finally, they were still not ready, they were in a big discussion. I was afraid, that they haven't got further than just discussing theoretically about the problem. But they did finally a beatiuful-beatiful scene. They found 3 big (higher than a person) mirrors on wheels. They started as something very personal, very everyday like with the mirrors, like looking their bodies in them, combing their hair, etc. After a while all these movments became a dance, they started to climb on the mirrors, to push them around in the room. They attached their bodies to the mirrors, as moving them, and we could see ourselves, and other parts of the room turning around in these big glass surfaces. They took their time. The wheels were squeaking while moving in different rithms. At the end, one of them, the boy suddenly left his mirror, than the girl next to him left her own mirror, and reached the backside of his one, and the boy walked out from the room.

Uncle Vanya

Marvelous performance in Kolozsvár (Cluj Napoca - in Transylvania) of the play of Checkov directed by a Romanian director; Andrei Şerban. The sense of his love of the space around us. Genius ideas are the most simple solutions. Strike of a genuis is to explore them.
First we sit on the edge of the stage facing the round shaped auditorium. The actors are sitting scattered in the rows. Here takes place the first act. They climb, jump, run and balance around in the whole space, over the balustrade of the chairs, up on the banister of the balcony... There's a dance at the end, which describes with few sharp gestures the relations between the characters. Afterwards Sonia and Vanya stayes seated in the rows, all lights fade, exept for the lightbulbs of the huge chandelier in the middle. It slowly starts to descend right above Vanya. It is not a fluent movment, it jolts as the machinche is making it come down.
It stops in a little distance above him. First the yellow lightbulbs go out, and there's only the cold blue light of a round neon just above him, and finally it fades aswell.
Light comes back, and Sonya and Vanya are showing us, we should enter the stage.
During the second, third and fourth act we are seated in the middle of the big stage. The flies above stage is enthrallingly high. All the space has athmosphere of an enormous workshop, a place where people do their work, with the raw materials: ropes, iron tubes and other constructions, spotlights, and walls made of bricks. They play around us: at the edge's of the stage on small platforms, in the glass cabin of the stage-manager (with a stong red curtain on the backwall of the cabin), above on the technician's balconies (there are two balconies above each other in around 25 - 40 meters high), on the small backstage; and between us: all chairs are in a distance from each other - the actors walk in between them several times, in most of the cases they were telling monologues there.
The backstage is curtained off at the begining of the second act, you do not expect that something will happen there aswell. Later, suddenly you hear it starts to rain over there. They pull up the curtain, you can see a small model of a house surrounded with mud. The rain is falling here, it is illuminated with cold lights coming sharply from certain directions - creating a big shadows on the faces, when the actors enter into this mud. There are shelves behind, they are divided into small boxes. On some of them files, and some others - as you can discover later - live doves. On the performance, which I have seen they started to move in the best moments, when their wing-beat supported the meaning of the actor's sentences in a batiful, poetic way.
When actors go into this backstage, they get covered with mud, and wet from the humidity of the rain.
It is played in Hungarian (by Hungarian actors), but everything is subtitled in Romanian. Even the begining and the ending of each act is projected. There are tv-screens everywhere around showing all subtitles, all the time.
Elena, the wife of the professor turns her speach into different languages, mostly English, and sometimes French and German aswell. Others take over from her, an answer her in the language, what she used: to please her, to be ironic with what she have said, to show they have same accomplishments, as she does.
The whole evening carries irony and beauty at the same time. Deeply lived situations, but a distance from each event. The close and empathic relation to the situation and story of these people, but a show being in theatre all the time.
At the end the safety curtain mounts, and actors leave to the auditorium to bow. They are playing, standing up in different places of the auditorium to bow - more and more behind, they even go up on the balcony and slowly disappear behind a row of chairs. We - the spectators - are standing up on stage and applauding for the actors, who are waving for us in the auditorium.

I have seen this performance with big luck and a lot of benevolence of very kind actress. We were hitch-hiking from Saint George (Sepsiszentgyörgy) with Bence till Cluj, we were longing to see this performance, because we heard very good comments about it. I got the phonenumber of an actress, Péter Hilda, who was working at Saint George, but now she is at Cluj, and acting in this performance. There is double cast, that evening Hilda was not playing. She made some calls for us to get some places for us, but they told her, there is no chance. The seats are limited, and there were already extra chairs for that night. But still we met in front of the theatre, and she was leaving no stone unturned to fit us in. I have met her once before. And in the last moment we got the last seats. She got a chair aswell, and stayed. She said, she loves this performance so much, that she can not leave it, if she is there.

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.

The Daughter of the Turkey-herd Woman - fifth part

The prince did not go back to his parents, neither to the house of the Jewish family. He went right a way to the seacoast, he wanted to cross the waves. But he haven't found any boat or canoe, or any means of transport on the coast. He waited there for a month looking out for someone, who can take him across the water. Than suddenly he saw a boat on the horizon, approaching him. There were two sailors in it. As they reached the coast, and they started to anchor, he cried at them: "I want to cross the water." "Oh, we cannot sail anyone cross the water, it is even forbidden for the bird to fly over. That is the command of the king."
"If you refuse to take me, I'll kill myself into the water." And he prepared himself to jump down from the rocks.
Than one old sailor says to the other: "Listen, they might kill us, if we sail him across, but we are both old, look at him, what a pity if his young life ends. Let's take him." "Come and jump in!" Said the other one to the prince. They started to row with him across the water.
The daughter of the turkey-herd woman was closed in separate room, guarded strictly by armed soldiers. When the boat reached the bank, the prince went to her room directly. The soldier in the door warns him: "Stop." He stops for a second, but than makes some steps again. "Stop!" Says the soldier. "Otherwise I'll shoot at you." But his words were bigger, than his braveness, he didn't dear to pull the trigger. The prince stepped up to him. "What are you doing here?" "I'm watching over the fiance'e of the king. She is locked up in this room, so she cannot escape."
"How foolish you are, soldier." Replied the prince." "How much do you get for this?"
"I do not get a penny, this is my duty, I'm a soldier."
"You are certainly fool. Why do you waste your precious time watching over her, without getting any money? Come let's play cards instead."
The soldier shook his head. "I do not have money for that."
"I'll borrow you some. Come on!" He gave half of his gold to the soldier, and they started to play. The prince was a big card player, he could even win the stars from the sky with playing cards, but he let the soldier win. "Listen soldier, if we continue this game, you'll win so much money, that you will not know what to do with it. But this is nothing compared to what you get, if you do a service for me. Will you?"
"What would it be?"
"Take this cup of wine, and take it to her. You'll get this big amount of money, if you do this for me."
"I can do this, this is nothing."
The prince threw his ring into the cup of wine, and the soldier took it to the daughter of the turkey-herd woman. When she started to drink it, the ring hit her teeth, she looked at it, and she realized who's it was.

Twentieth note

I'm going home soon. Home? Sometimes I wonder what is home for me? We talked about this question and worked with it last summer in our workshop, and a even before, a little bit, in Denmark.
What is important in the home? People, who are close, safe place, ability to be understood, and understand others?
I have seen a performance of students, I was amazed by the devotion and humility what they have in their work, and I was shocked at the same time. Their leader used to be an actor in the theatre, where I am studying now. People, who know him from the theatre say, the performance talks about his questions, and problems.
I was wondering, how much distance one has to take from his private life, and private questions, when he is working. Of course, you can only talk about things, which are important for you, but you have to make some steps backwards to have a more general view. Otherwise it becomes your personal therapy, and You misuse your company and the audience, who comes to see you.