"Ruth Kanner and her acting group raise the art of storytelling-theater to new heights…masterpiece acting in which every little detail of body and soul is treated perfectly and exhaustively"
- The StageREDUNDANCIES
DATES: Tuesday, 13 to Thursday, 15 April
In this laboratory of practical investigation, participants will explore the two central forces energizing theatrical creation: the drive to create organized informative structures, alongside with the impulse to let the untidy, the uncontrolled and the unexpected invade the scene.
The Complexity of Walking
ReplyDeleteDay 1 of Ruth Kanner’s Laboratory was devoted to re-discovering the simple act of walking.
We began simply enough, concentrating on our walks as we moved around the room. Gradually we were asked to become more aware of our bodies as we moved: placing our feet fully on the floor, moving both forwards and backwards sensing others’ presence, exploring the three dimensional space around and above us by incorporating our hands, torsos, knees, backs… And then we added the ingredient of text. Snatches from Kafka’s ‘The Vulture’, spoken in fits and starts – purely in terms of syllables and sound without any ascribed meaning. How did the nature of the spoken text change with the nature of our walks? How did we encounter and connect with others physically and vocally? What happened when we held all our energies in, controlling our movements and our voices rigidly? Spasms of movement and text fought their way out of us, slowly infecting the whole body. Already, without consciously applying ‘meaning’ to either our physical or vocal dimensions, themes and relationships had begun to emerge.
The next phase saw us break into various and changing pairs to play a common game in theatre – the taut thread between two performers that can never sag nor break. This came with a twist, however. The leader of the pair was now the ‘director’, and the follower, the performer. In this relationship, the ‘director’ was asked to lead / coax the performer into areas and positions further and further out of his or her zone of comfort – and all while the performer was continuously identifying himself / herself through numbers: birthdays, address, telephone numbers, area codes, number of siblings… Fun it was, but along with the idea of the leader being the director, came the notion of responsibility and care towards the performers we direct. This same exercise was then repeated in groups of four: one director with three threads leading from various parts of his / her body, each to a different body part of a different performer. The performers were allowed to speak snatches of the Kafka text only when they moved in response to the ‘director’s’ invisible thread. Controlling and ‘choreographing’ and ‘directing’ three performers at once became an exercise in mind-body coordination for the ‘director’. How did one engineer the movement of one with the stillness of the other two, the movement of two with the stillness of the third? The movement of all three without collision, indeed even creating scenes of encounter and conversation?
Physicalising the act of directing, basing it purely in the act of walking and associated movement, suddenly illustrated the three dimensional world of constant choice that directors inhabit.
The Act of Listening
ReplyDeleteThe second half of Ruth Kanner’s Laboratory on Day 1 broadly had to do with listening – not hearing, but listening. And not with the ears, but with all the senses in the body as well as the sixth one that this Forum is name for. Listening both to other performers when working in an ensemble, and – as director – to what each performer might offer, perhaps (and often) quite unconsciously
The exercise again was disarmingly simple. Two walls facing each other. Everyone takes their place against one or the other wall choosing where to go consciously. The only task was to walk across the room from one wall to another in straight line. In this world of walks, the act of stopping occasionally would be a major event. Simple and clear-cut, difficult to muddy in any way – apparently.
But – as we are learning as we go along – with Ruth, it is the very simplicity of what she asks of us that throws up the most complex issues for consideration. To cut a long story and several repetitions of the exercise short, Ruth indicated the following points for our consideration:
1. How do we enter the space and take our places? Who initiates this? When and How? Are we, as an ensemble, listening to that? Do how and when we enter and where we stand bear any relation to that first act that has – in a manner of speaking – set the first rule in a hitherto empty space? The very specific decision that has to be taken – both by the performer and the director – in this vital act of ENTERING a performance space.
2. What are the rules of movement that are being set by people as they cross the room? Are we listening to those and responding to them – going with or against them – consciously?
3. What moment/s would we call a main event? What would we call an insignificant or background event? When and how can / should the latter take over the role of the former? The importance of this texture provided by the background for the main events to play against, from, because of and into.
Over the repetitions, we began to notice a marked change among how we were working as a group.
1. The tendency to dive into the exercise armed only with enthusiasm lessened
2. Periods of active waiting – where we were very aware of every other body in the room – increased. Not dead, boring moments, but moments alive with possibility.
3. Relationships and tensions between pairs, trios, small groups were ignited through the smallest of decisions: a step away, a leaning against, a sitting down…
4. These moments were acknowledged and maintained by the whole group as a collective. Every development or break away was an informed choice of one or more performers.
5. Waves of background ‘noise’: shuffling of feet, squeezing close together against a wall, drawing a curtain were picked up as echoes, and like echoes faded away. But some formed the impulse or consequence of a major event that commanded attention
Finally, into this structure, we introduced snatches of text from ‘The Vulture’, once again leaving it up to the act of listening and responding to decide who spoke what, when, how, where and how much. Suddenly we had the beginnings of verbal and spatial performance text. In just over four hours we had created a blueprint for a performance that had all the necessary ingredients of drama. And this by focussing just on two everyday actions that most of us take for granted – walking and listening.
Ruth Kanner's Laboratory: Day 2, Part 1
ReplyDeleteWatching Ruth Kanner’s actors in performance yesterday evening suddenly put into place so many of the things she has only begun to explore with us over the last two days. The centrality of walking and moving in the space individually and as an ensemble, the insertion of small but precise gestures and actions into the landscape, the use of repletion, the act of listening to each other in every way possible, the heightened awareness of the performers which infect the audience… and the complexity, coordination and clear communication that one could arrive at starting from these seemingly simple – and often neglected – building blocks. And the use of text as a central component – but text influenced and impacted by all these other factors that surrounded and entered it.
I put that first because that’s the way my mind worked as I was watching the performance excerpts. Backwards almost – so many things immediately connected with the exercises and explorations we had done as part of the Laboratory on Day 2.
We began the afternoon with a sort of recap with walking. Only now we were joined by Ruth’s actors who catalysed the exercise to another level, pushing us to find more and more in walking, shaking parts of the body, insignificant gestures … all of which we thought we had covered the previous day. We began to encounter each other with the Kafka text again, this time in both English and Hebrew, with the added element of a live violin weaving in and out of this tapestry. We were asked to decide for ourselves in a very personal way what our selected piece of text meant to us. We then began working in pairs within the group speaking our selected text to each other, exploring also a small gesture we could perform on the other: brush off lint, fiddle with a locket, remove a strand of hair… The next text exercise involved the whole group playing off each other, following each other’s leads, responding … basically listening all over again but without the very specific walking structure of the day before.
To end this section of work, we broke into pairs – two ‘directors’ directing one of Ruth’s performers performing a text we had never heard before. But directing without speaking. We were asked to create spaces and situations for the performer – physically – to explore how this would impact the delivery of the text. Using our own bodies in close proximity, contact or even absence – or using chairs and a spiral staircase as Olya and I did in two very different ways – every text became imbued with something else. I won’t call it meaning, because for that one must have a context to place it in. But imbued with infinite possibility perhaps?
Ruth Kanner's Laboratory: Day 2, Part 2
ReplyDeleteFor the second half of the day, we each read out to the whole group a text about a dream that we had been asked to write. Ruth mentioned that she had been working with dream texts for a long time. They fascinate her because the entire mechanism of a dream goes against the need to document and analyse it. They are expert at switching the good and the bad, the small and the big, the minute detail for the main event, the me for the somebody else. So how does one logically deconstruct it? Or is logic and informed choice perhaps only one of the ways forward? Seemingly, this was moving into different territory.
Once we had heard everyone, we swapped texts and heard them again. Hearing our own texts back was a completely different experience. For myself – and I can only speak for myself here – I noticed the following which made the experience so distinctly different:
1. Speaking our own dreams some of us embellished it, adding details and background. The ‘performer’ did none of this. So there was immediately more clarity about the basic ‘text’
2. Perhaps because the performers had heard it once, they each had a different response to it which they decided to portray. This act of planning and interpretation was something Ruth picked up on later.
3. Also, they were ‘second-generation’ somehow, and with that distance, able to see certain possibilities and potential that we – the originators – lacked could not.
We swapped back to our own dreams again. This time we were to select a fragment from the text, and speak it to another person in the group. The event, Ruth specified, was the telling of the dream, not the dream itself. The recipient would then repeat the last line of the person who had just spoken – imitate it as closely as possible – and then, with the same vocal / physical energy of that line segue into his or her own text fragment. The point was that we were all recipients, working with a very specific input given to us from the outside, that was not of our own logical choosing. Therefore, basically fitting our text to something arbitrary – and often the arbitrary turns out to be much deeper and intuitive than clear logical choice.
So we had come full circle. The last exercise with the actors where we had directed text we didn’t know by creating physical situations that the actor didn’t know snapped into place as a process of play and exploration to help both the director and the performer enter, experience and explore other ways forward.
Day 3, Part 1
ReplyDeleteThe third and final day of Ruth Kanner’s Laboratory surprisingly did NOT begin with walking. The group were actually invited to sit on chairs for a discussion!
The discussion began as a Q and A with Ruth and threw up several ideas which are central to the way she works. She mentioned two processes of working which feed off and from each other: the ‘chaotic’, unplanned part where the ensemble and director just keep on working with minimal speaking and analysis, followed by thoughtful selection, judgement, editing and structuring. But preceding any work with the actors is Ruth’s own preparation which includes selecting and editing the text. True to her fascination with dreams, she says things seem to fall into place like a leap in energy of an electron in those liminal moments between waking and sleeping – somewhere between the coolness of logic and the randomness of dreams.
And she works with actors just as she worked with us – of course not for three days! With walking, with fragments of text that actors are given on the first day of rehearsal with no idea of where it came from and what its context is – to try and capture the rawness of the moment of when the actors meet the words for the very first time. Without any knowledge, without any preconceived notions. There is a tendency to illustrate or demonstrate a text once one understands it completely, and that is what needs to be avoided to constantly “open fresh routes of expression”. It helps and even compels the actors to reinvent the text.
In terms of selecting texts, Ruth feels compelled – living in modern-day Israel – to speak about certain issues facing the society today. It was as if – as an artist – she was recruited to respond to them, and provoke response for them.
We also discussed the idea of a collective in relation to what we had seen of Ruth’s performance yesterday. Perhaps, we wondered, it had something to do with their cultural roots being in Russia which has a strong sense of the collective, a strong sense of Communism (as a way of conceiving society). Other terms (self-explanatory, really) that came up in relation to the actors were a sense of ‘creatureship’, an animalistic quality, an enjoyment of their own sensuality individually and as a group, and their transformational quality. Transformation not just in terms of character and performance but in terms of subversion, in terms of a sense of existing on the edge – combining both security and danger. Ruth is also works a lot from observing animal behaviour – where this turning of tables and shifting between the main event and the insignificant is so very apparent. She gave an example: two cats are confronting each other, snarling and spitting. At the very height of the tension, one of them suddenly – even causally – licks its paw! It was these peripheral expressions that theatre can ignore –flattening the performance and the experience into only the main drive. Without these details, the main drive itself seems so much drier, so much poorer than the rich texture it could and should be.
The practical part of our last day with Ruth revisited all the elements we had been introduced to over the previous two days. Walking, listening, fragments of text… This time she added an element that had the potential to impact the space we were in: a criss-cross of black elastic band rising, falling, stretching around the room. We were first asked to move into it, around it, under it, over it, within it to explore the various physical and spatial relationships we could have with it. But without touching it. And then fragments of the Kafka text were introduced, words to be used and experienced as pure sound and syllables without meaning, without any descriptive or illustrative associations. To deprive words of meaning was quite difficult for some of us. It was this new relationship we had with the spaces created by the elastic that were given the freedom to impact and influence how the text came through.
ReplyDeleteWe went through this exercise now individually choosing a specific relationship with the elastic and letting our movements with it and because of it change the way the words came out. It was similar to what we had – as director duos – done with Ruth’s actors the previous day: only now we were experiencing it in our own bodies.
The final two hours were spent with Ruth’s actors. Two actresses presented a delightful performance of ‘The Woman Who Preferred To Look For Food’ – quite a dark text, but treated and performed with such wonderful levity and delicacy of touch and nuance, that it stayed far away from depressing us and at once succeeded in being subversive, illuminating and sensitising. As Ruth had pointed out, it was both content and form that concerned her equally, and this performance was a wonderful example of that.
Once again, we went through experience of walking together, shaking out our bodies, and encountering each other. Working in pairs we once more explored how we could draw out bits of text from each other in different ways – completely unplanned, completely playing, but creating the bases of some very intimate and human relationships without the application of conscious thought.
To close, we returned to walking and moving to the accompaniment of the violin – and suddenly we had all got drawn into a celebratory collective dance, moving round and round hand in hand in one big circle. It embodied – I think for all of us – the collective and ensemble power of Ruth’s work. To end a three day, 4 ½ hours a day intense Laboratory workshop with such an explosion of joy and laughter is truly a gift to treasure.
Thank you Ruth and all the actors!
CPR would like to thank BI ARTS ( the British Israeli Arts Training Scheme - a programme funded by the British Council and the Government of Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Culture and Sport) for it's support in covering travel costs for the Ruth Kanner Theatre Group.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.britishcouncil.org/israel-arts-culture-bi-arts.htm