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Round 1 - 5th Jan 2009
The First Session of a Mighty Cold New Year
Shielding myself from an icy blast in the doorway of the Actors Centre, greeting familiar faces back from Christmases away and shaking off the frostbite, there was, before I had even found my way into the building, a sense of eager excitement. And it wasn't just Christmas leftovers: New Writing was back.
We kicked off with some round the room introductions and then Alex set out about laying out the battlefield. This is set to be a swift skirmish, a crack team tooled up and ready to take significant ground within a little month. Another monster Factory challenge and one which we will doubtless live up to.
Alex made clear the rules of the game: a refresher for old hands and a reminder for the number of newcomers to Factory shows...
1) No characterisation - there is no such thing as character...
2) No emotional states - playing emotions focuses the actor on him/herself...
3) No discussion of backstory, side-story, front-story or anything else extraneous to the text. What's on the page is all there is...
4) Do something to your fellow players. Play to effect them, play to change them, play to win.
5) No bullshit
And then we got to work. First divvying up the plays and parts and then working in pairs and threes on the play we were allocated.
The first exercise was Paraphrasing...going through the script line by line and taking the opportunity to clarify exactly what each line means. Where there was any ambiguity in the text, the actor simply found the closest possible paraphrase to the line in order to make the text absolutely clear to themselves and their fellow players.
The second exercise was Intoning...the idea being to remove all meaning from the lines by intoning each line in a plainsong like monotone and giving exactly equal weight to each syllable in the line, thereby removing the meaning and at the same time exploring the vowel sounds...I love this one and reckon it is far more beneficial to an actors relationship with text than anyone can ever fathom.
It also put me in mind of the fantastic Arena documentary on Paul Scofield that was repeated over Christmas (still available on i-Player I hope....think..?). Track it down if you can, it's superb and in it Nick Hytner tells a fantastic story about working with PS and DDLewis on the film version of The Crucible...he recalls Day-Lewis' utter horror at discovering that Scofield (his great hero) was not the method actor he had always imagined him to be but actually worked exclusively on the basis of vowel sounds....like an old Wolfitesque ham...brilliant....bring back the vowel sounds say IIIIIIIII...
The third exercise was a Meisneresque number in which the actor would take a thought or line off the page and then deliver it to his/her partner...if their play-mate wasn't convinced (in other words found within the delivery something that was phony, contrived, emoted or anything else that was not credible) they would simply say 'No' and the actor would have to have another crack, stripping away any artifice or effort other than the clarity of intention in relation to that line/thought until the oppo gave them permission to move onto the next line/thought by simply saying 'Yes'.....it's tough this one, because it is both exposing and tiring to sustain...nevertheless, for my money, it's hugely helpful in terms of finding something other than the first or even second or third ball....to find something the surprises you and which is not in anyway planned or played for will almost always earn that much yearned for 'Yes'. Once everyone had finished that we needed a well earned breather...
After a bit of discussion we decided to have another crack at the same exercise, but with a couple of twists and changes, mostly courtesy of Alan Morrissey's well thought out analysis...to which he brought to bear some of his Meisner experience. Rather than passing judgment with a 'Yes' or 'No', this time, if the receiving actor didn't believe what the actor delivering the line said, they would respond by delivering the line back at them as a question...e.g. 'I went to the shop.'... 'You went to the shop?'. These changes didn't do much to relieve the intensity of the exercise, but it was suddenly much more playful and that playfulness gave rise to even greater stripping away of artifice. As with a Meisner exercise, the process started to unlock a whole world of unforeseen complexities and subtleties in each line, all of which were equally 'true'....exciting stuff indeed and all in under three hours.
Here's to a massively exciting '09!
Alex Blake x
Shielding myself from an icy blast in the doorway of the Actors Centre, greeting familiar faces back from Christmases away and shaking off the frostbite, there was, before I had even found my way into the building, a sense of eager excitement. And it wasn't just Christmas leftovers: New Writing was back.
We kicked off with some round the room introductions and then Alex set out about laying out the battlefield. This is set to be a swift skirmish, a crack team tooled up and ready to take significant ground within a little month. Another monster Factory challenge and one which we will doubtless live up to.
Alex made clear the rules of the game: a refresher for old hands and a reminder for the number of newcomers to Factory shows...
1) No characterisation - there is no such thing as character...
2) No emotional states - playing emotions focuses the actor on him/herself...
3) No discussion of backstory, side-story, front-story or anything else extraneous to the text. What's on the page is all there is...
4) Do something to your fellow players. Play to effect them, play to change them, play to win.
5) No bullshit
And then we got to work. First divvying up the plays and parts and then working in pairs and threes on the play we were allocated.
The first exercise was Paraphrasing...going through the script line by line and taking the opportunity to clarify exactly what each line means. Where there was any ambiguity in the text, the actor simply found the closest possible paraphrase to the line in order to make the text absolutely clear to themselves and their fellow players.
The second exercise was Intoning...the idea being to remove all meaning from the lines by intoning each line in a plainsong like monotone and giving exactly equal weight to each syllable in the line, thereby removing the meaning and at the same time exploring the vowel sounds...I love this one and reckon it is far more beneficial to an actors relationship with text than anyone can ever fathom.
It also put me in mind of the fantastic Arena documentary on Paul Scofield that was repeated over Christmas (still available on i-Player I hope....think..?). Track it down if you can, it's superb and in it Nick Hytner tells a fantastic story about working with PS and DDLewis on the film version of The Crucible...he recalls Day-Lewis' utter horror at discovering that Scofield (his great hero) was not the method actor he had always imagined him to be but actually worked exclusively on the basis of vowel sounds....like an old Wolfitesque ham...brilliant....bring back the vowel sounds say IIIIIIIII...
The third exercise was a Meisneresque number in which the actor would take a thought or line off the page and then deliver it to his/her partner...if their play-mate wasn't convinced (in other words found within the delivery something that was phony, contrived, emoted or anything else that was not credible) they would simply say 'No' and the actor would have to have another crack, stripping away any artifice or effort other than the clarity of intention in relation to that line/thought until the oppo gave them permission to move onto the next line/thought by simply saying 'Yes'.....it's tough this one, because it is both exposing and tiring to sustain...nevertheless, for my money, it's hugely helpful in terms of finding something other than the first or even second or third ball....to find something the surprises you and which is not in anyway planned or played for will almost always earn that much yearned for 'Yes'. Once everyone had finished that we needed a well earned breather...
After a bit of discussion we decided to have another crack at the same exercise, but with a couple of twists and changes, mostly courtesy of Alan Morrissey's well thought out analysis...to which he brought to bear some of his Meisner experience. Rather than passing judgment with a 'Yes' or 'No', this time, if the receiving actor didn't believe what the actor delivering the line said, they would respond by delivering the line back at them as a question...e.g. 'I went to the shop.'... 'You went to the shop?'. These changes didn't do much to relieve the intensity of the exercise, but it was suddenly much more playful and that playfulness gave rise to even greater stripping away of artifice. As with a Meisner exercise, the process started to unlock a whole world of unforeseen complexities and subtleties in each line, all of which were equally 'true'....exciting stuff indeed and all in under three hours.
Here's to a massively exciting '09!
Alex Blake x
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