TEACHING, LEARNING, & EARNING.

Some notes on 'physical theatre' and my own discovery of the use of 'statues' as a key to actor training.

In Tadashi Suzuki's Suzuki Actor Training Method some of the key elements are the stomp, walks, marches and statues.

In Quantum Theatre: Slapstick to Shakespeare a key practice is the Principle of Four and the use of a twisting exercise that forms to a statue or still living shape. From that statue or shape I assist the actor to locate their own creative essence.

There are three significant moments to developing my understanding of how potent such a held living shape can be.

The first point of discovery occurred when I was a university student and needed a winter job to replace my work as a landscape gardener. The job I found was on campus and was as an art model. When I was hired, I had no idea that the modeling was nude. When I took my first pose for the drawing class, I was hit as if with a bolt of lightning on the top of my head. Suddenly I had a whole imaginative journey unfolding about the image of this pose. When I went to each of my next spontaneous poses a new image unfolding. I discovered my creativity and imagination that day. Over the next two years I became the top model in the city, Pittsburgh. All the while, my imagination and creativity was being fed while working in this profession.

During that period I understood I should pursue 'clowning' as a way to learn more about creating theatre. I felt that a clown had to learn the roles of director, writer, designer, trainer, business person all at once.  I came across an authentic circus master Danny Chapman who at that time at 63yrs old had been in circus 55 years. Finally the day came when I was to be a clown in performance with him. At his home he gave me one of his costumes and he put on my make up, then stood me away from him and another circus apprentice. Danny asked me to put on the red nose. As I did so, I was again (2 years later) hit with a virtual bolt of lightning through my crown. Danny and the apprentice witnessed this and my reaction and fell into hysterical laughing. I stood still as a statue, but I looked at each of them. As I eyed each they saw something new and laughed again. With tears in his eyes and still laughing, the old clown Danny told me to take off the nose. He had truly initiated me.

Then my travels took me to Carlo Mazzone-Clementi and Joan Schirle at the Dell' Arte School and the rest of their staff. Having seen the acrobatic training around Danny and his circus friends, then encountering the acrobatics taught at Dell' Arte, I decided to get some books on acrobatics and begin to teach myself to emulate the high level I saw with Danny. Soon I looked at books on all aspects of theatre and found Braun's book on Meyerhold. I started to create my own ideas and training concepts the first of those was the idea that a statue was the ideal starting point to discover how to move, how to imagine and how to react to ones own creativity.

... to be continiued