5D. Say What You Do

Leave your partners. You'll be working alone, putting the two functions of the previous exercise together. You will be both speaker and mover, simul­taneously. Say a verb, preceded by the word "I," and perform the action that the word signifies. As you say, "I sit," you sit. As you say, "I stand, you stand etc. You are not speaking without movement and not moving without speech. The way the word is spoken and the way the action is exe­cuted happen at the same moment, with the same energy, feeling, and mean­ing. Experiment with changing your mind, which will change your expression, once or even several times, within the enunciation of a single verb. . You may pause between expressions, or inside each expression. When you're still, you will be silent. When you're silent, you will be still.

This has moved sound and movement into language. Saving, "I sit," and simultaneously sitting is a single action that emanates from the whole body as a single source. Neither speech, nor action lead. Finding this source takes some investigation, some practice. Students practice this until they feel secure in the technique, until there's no arbitrary move­ment and until the speech and the motion are bound exactly, and sur­rounded by silence and stillness. Once this happens, they are ready to explore this form in relationship.

5E. Performance Score: Say What You Do, Together

• One pair out on the floor, the rest of us will be audience.

• Both of you will now bring what you were just practicing into relationship. By saying what you are doing while you are doing it ("I" plus simple active verbs), you'll be in continuous response to each other. You're in a dialogue, alternating turns, maybe sometimes overlapping. You're watching and listening, in detail, constantly observing the cues that each other offers. Suppose your partner says, "I look," and looks away from you with abrupt alertness. You may respond with, "I look," and also look where they're looking, or anything else that comes to mind in response. You don't have to think anything up. Your partner is providing all the information that you need. Just believe them. In effect, they're telling you what to do. You only have to respond.

• Listen to your partner's voice. Listen to your voices together. Hear the rhythmic and tonal patterns. Respond to your partner's shapes, changes, feelings. There's no missed beats between you.

Adding relationship to the detail-oriented technique of the Only Verbs exercise challenges students to remain conscious of their experience as they receive and respond to their partner's experience. All of this in front of an audience. There's a lot going on that's demand­ing attention.

The last exercise of the day is simple, a relief from the gathering demands.

5F. Performance Score: Bench: Head, Arm, Leg

• I've put a bench out on the floor. Three people sit on the bench and face the audience. You can only do three actions: raise an arm, turn your head, or cross a leg. That's all. Interact with these three act,ons.

Detail

Language is eliminated. Students are left with hardly anything at all So it seems. Only three simple and common actions with which to build a world full of thoughts, feelings, desires, actions and responses. A world that's about three people sitting on a bench.

The details do it. The slightest movement describes an entire story. A head turns with a particular musicality and tension. An eyebrow lifts. An expression on a face changes and changes again, and we know the inner story.

Students, discover how little is needed. When action is stripped down, subtleties capture the focus. The slight turn of a hand may indicate a catastrophe.

Day Five leads students on a back-and-forth voyage. They travel from the inner mind, the personal, to the outer ensemble, the contex­tual, and from the inner world of language to the outer world of rela­tionship. They discover that details provide directive arrows as guides from internal awareness toward expressive composition. Back-and-forth, a see-saw of attention. They strive for a restful place, a fulcrum, a bal­anced center between all of their worlds.

They're picking, poking and looking at themselves. If what they're doing isn't enrapturing, nothing is gained. Analysis doesn't create change. It only adds information to the already existing over-abundance. Changes occur through awareness. Even though students stumble and bumble, analyze and try, they eventually, sooner or later, give up and start to play. Then all the trying, the practice, the intelligence and information-gath­ering, is laid aside. But it doesn't go away. It joins the cache of wisdom that directs their lives.

Day Six

Pretend to Pretend

6A. Hard Lines/Soft Curves

6B. "Ahs" and "Ooohs"

6C. Empty Vessel

6D. Solo Shifts

6E. Performance Score: Back to Front, Silent

The performer's timing is a dead give away as to whether they're "pre-X tending" or "pretending to pretend." If they're pretending, they're separated from their actions. Their mind is somewhere else, watching, judging, planning. Their actions aren't spontaneous. They miss beats because their thoughts create a space between perception and response. The audience senses this lapse, this deadness. It's evident that the performer has latched onto his/ her own uncertainties and, at least, at that mo­ment, is not in the flow.

Pretending to pretend, presupposes that all behavior is an "act." Performers are simultaneously, "in" and "on top" of every act, committed to every moment of change. Their responses are fast. They flow.

Day Six, as every other day in the training, begins with the body. As students become more deeply immersed in content, the danger of leav­ing the body lurks. An examined body offers untold information from which content can be drawn.

My body has a shape, a life, of its own. Where does its softness come from and its jitteriness? My hands have learned to clench their fists and my shoulders tighten. My legs spread when I sleep and my feet curl? My body knows that posture. My head tilts to the side when I run and I wave my arms in the space above, cut­ting sharp angles as if I'm whipping up afire. My body is odd and ancient, while my young eyes grab in wonder. Awkward ges­tures speak of magic, and a simple step graces itself with a mil­lennium of practice. My body can be big with the might of darkness or light, and yet, I am shy.

Unexpected magic that surprises doesn't come in one package. It isn't tinsel wrapped. It can look like anything. When you reach into that box of magic, you don't know what you're going to get. All of the exercises in this training lead the student to magic. Only she can reach into it.