10E. Performance Score: Slow Motion Fight

• Let's form an audience. Two people go out onto the floor and face off. A third goes out to be the referee.

• The two perform a slow motion fight. Slow motion must be maintained so that no one gets hurt. The referee makes sure that the combatants remain extremely slow at all times.

• You both must respond to the contact you get from each other. You are pretending that you are the most vicious of enemies. When you get hit, your face and body shows that it really hurts. If you land a punch or a kick, you're overjoyed. Use that responsive energy to come back to your partner with another.

• Remember, the two of you are partners. You're collaborating on this fierce dance.

• The audience cheers and heckles, encouraging the combatants to fully allow feelings, expressions and actions of aggression to surface.

Slow motion stretches out time and everything within it. Each particle of feeling and action can be illuminated. This slowly, students can clearly track their process. Feelings such as rage, fear, hurt, and joy rise and fall, large waves coming in from the distance, overtaking the "fighter," and then subsiding. Whether or not the student is willing to ride these waves becomes evident.

Kai moves slowly until right before he lands a blow, then he speeds up to make his mark.

Carol strikes with her fingers rather than fist, her arm moving from her shoulder rather than her torso.

Hugh falls down and then lays there. Phil hangs back, wait­ing, for him to get up.

Susan and Michael can't play. They're laughing too hard.

Kai, Carol, Hugh, Phil, Susan and Michael are stuck in ideas about what they're doing and what it means. Kai really wants to win. Carol doesn't think she's the kind of person who hurts people. Neither does Hugh. Phil feels sorry for Hugh and politely waits for Hugh to take his turn. Susan thinks the whole thing is ridiculous and Michael doesn't think he should get fierce if she doesn't.

If these folks divorced themselves from personal identification with their selves, from a habitual way of looking at the particular form, "Fight," they'd be free to observe its elements. They could play "Fight" and notice how it works: the movements, facial expressions, timing between partners, rise and fall of feelings, and relationship to the audience. Glued to personal identification, they aren't free from their judgments and are dominated by the idea that the actions convey something about themselves personally. In order to truly enjoy this exercise, they need to see, that in terms of energy and form, there's no difference between hitting someone and being hit. Oppressor and oppressed are concepts we bring to activity. If students let go of these concepts, they can see a dance of movement and feeling. Energy is being exchanged.

If students are studying to be professional actors or performers, they might be called upon to play act a fight at some time in their career. They must be able to call up the feelings drawn upon in this exercise. But suppose students are not interested in performing. What's the value of this particular practice in a person's daily life?

Hidden Emotions

As long as we leave emotions unexplored, hidden below the threshold of our awareness, they remain encapsulated within fear. What we don't know, we're afraid of. We create judgments and opinions about these emotions to keep them at bay. We consider others who exhibit them as different than ourselves. We're foreigners in our own bodies.

The Action Theater training never asks for particular emotions. Stu­dents are never asked to be anything—happy, sad, or angry. Instead, structures, such as this one, awaken emotions. A fight will certainly stim­ulate particular emotions.

All emotions are in all of us. For some, if these emotions are never owned, explored, or played with, they erupt in devious ways, unconsciously and maybe even destructively. If one tours one's own inner landscape with awareness, inhabiting all experiences as they arise, then one discovers that what was feared is not fearful. A fully embodied experience is quite different from the projected experience.

Emotions are not "things" in themselves. They can never be known or presumed. They don't themselves carry inherent threat. They are configurations of our energy brought on by a certain environment. This envi­ronment may be the state of our mind and body at the time, the dynamics between me and another, my surroundings, whether I'm alone or not. Emotions never occur the exact same way. They're only what we make of them. We create their substance and characteristics. We are not them, nor they us.

In Slow Motion Fight, we're fighting friends. We feel rage. It's obviously not at my friend. Therefore, I must be relating to something within me, my rage. These others are collaborators in my drama. If I only dance my own stories, I'll never open up to any truly spontaneous possibilities.

Day Eleven

Response

11 A. Polarities 11B. Fast Track

Sound and Movement Mirror

Sound and Movement Responses

11C. "It" Responds

11D. Performance Score: Back to Front

Black and white. Heavy and light. Hot and cold. Elements we think of as opposites need each other to exist. They rest on each other and are of each other. For instance, hot has coldness in it. Otherwise, ive wouldn't call it hot. Coldness is missing hot. Therefore, cold. The same with dark and light. Light is less dark. And dark is more of what used to be light.

Or, we could look at it this way. Hot is not hot at all, and has nothing to do with cold. It's a configuration of sensations which occur only when I experience them. So, hot, now, is not the hot of later nor before. This hot is never to be repeated the same way again. Its context will always be different. But, we repeat the words "hot" and "cold" depending on them to be identical.