Ib. Walk/Run/Freeze to Freeze in Same Scene

• Everybody, walk. A bit faster. Accelerate a bit more. Wide open strides. Breathe. Sometimes follow somebody. Go where they're going, walk as they walk. Frequently change directions. Avoid walking in a circle. Keep the pace up. Open strides. Stay focused on your breathing. Continue to watch your breath. Notice where everybody is and where everybody is walking. See yourself in the context of everyone in the room. Keep the pace up. From time to time, run. Run fast. You're either walking fast, or you're running fast. Sometimes follow somebody.

• And, now, from time to time, freeze, stopping all movement at once. Your whole body—your hands, your face, even your eyes—still. Hold your energy in that stillness. From time to time follow somebody. Freeze as they freeze. Eliminate the walking, so you're either running fast or you're still, absolutely still. The next time you freeze, freeze in a very dramatic, even melodramatic, posture and expression. Don't plan it. Impulsively leap into unknown territory. Pretend you're passionate, mad, emotionally haphazard. Be a demon. Sometimes follow somebody. Freeze as they freeze. Run as they run. Sometimes freeze in reaction to someone else's freeze, their shape, their condition. Move into their scene.

• Everyone run at the same time, freeze at the same time, and be in the same scene. Again. Again. Be in the same scene. Be sure to play different roles. Again, another scene. Darker. Be wild.

Students are looking at everyday activities: simple forms of walking, running and standing still. But they're operating in the context of a group, extending their awareness of time and space. They're observing each other specifically for shape, feeling, and intention of action. They're entering into ensemble mind.

Ensemble

Ensemble refers to a group of people who collectively and simultane­ously construct theater work wherein each of them is considered only in relation to the whole. There are different kinds of ensembles. An Action Theater ensemble improvises theater collaboratively with no script, no director, no choreography. The individuals serve the collabo­rative intention. Who leads and who follows is irrelevant, and changes continually depending on the material presented. The group is single-minded, one organism.

Imagine a group of pelicans flying together in a "V." The members of an ensemble are like the individual birds. As the pelicans create their "V" in flight, so do the ensemble members create their scene of action.

The pelicans don't think, "Now, I'm making a 'V'," and the performers don't think, "Now, I'm making a scene." Both respond to their moment to moment experience relative to their intention. Both get the job done. Both are aware of their environment: sensing, discovering, relaying infor­mation, while at the same time, adapting to changes from within the group.

Ensemble work reflects how performers interact with their envi­ronment and each other. In an ensemble, performers constantly pass cues back and forth. To see and hear these cues, the performers require clear attention, freed of personal needs or wants.

They must:

1: Notice what the others are doing.

2: Believe what the others are doing is real.

3: Let the others' reality become their context.

4: Act from inside the context.

Inevitably, patterns enacted in ensemble are repeated outside the studio and visa versa. How aware are we of the spaces we inhabit? The other people in it? How does it feel to be moving closely with a group of people? How flexible can we be in changing places as follower and leader? Can we free ourselves from distracting judgments and prefer­ences?

As the work evolves in the course of these twenty days, students change the way they relate to their internal voices. What was denied becomes acceptable and demons become creative resources. Condemning beliefs turn out to be negotiable—or, at least, intriguing limitations that transform into intricacies.

Form

When we perform an action, how we configure its content in time and space molds its meaning. Imagine all the different ways "I love you" might be spoken and all the corresponding meanings. If we were to ana­lyze each "I love you" to see why they're distinct, then we'd have to talk about the timing of the words, volume, pitch and inflection of the voice, as well as the relationship between sound and breath. These are all ele­ments of form that help define the action of saying, "I love you." Form defines action and effects meaning.

In Action Theater, we isolate four elements of form: time, space, shape and dynamics. We explore and experiment with them. By doing so, we expand awareness and open up our choices of expression.

Time

Timing refers to the relationship between one moment of change and the next. We must be aware of time, of now, otherwise our actions may not be relevant. With practice, we develop the ability to recognize and differentiate between moments. The inability to stay present in time is devastating; the inability to be with change is deadening. Here's a story.

One afternoon a family is out boating on a bay. The boat runs out of gas and drifts out to the mouth of the bay where the breakers are enormous. The boat overturns and the family is scattered in the water. Each person responds to the situation differently: one man clings to the capsized boat, terrorized; another swims des­perately, trying to keep warm; the woman believes that the wreck is pre-destined and bargains with the sea for her life. None of these people consciously stay within time, within their changing environment. But the young boy who is with them does: he gives all of his attention to the way one moment fol­lows the next. He learns how each moment contains clues for the next. He keeps his eye on the swell and swirlings around him and calls out directions to the others. Dive. Breathe. Float. Swim. Dive. Breathe. Because the boy stays in time, the family sur­vives until the ocean releases them.

Personal agendas, and the resulting loss of awareness, described above, prevent us from living in the present. We allow beliefs to govern our actions, rather than our experience of the constant flow of change.

As our awareness of timing develops, we discover that each present moment holds everything we need to meet the next. In this flow of chang­ing phenomena, we see that all the old moments have aided our deliv­ery to this one, one moment falling out of another. There's no longer any thing as a false move.

We examine the timing of an action in two ways: speed and dura­tion. Speed refers to the rate of change of an action. Duration refers to the time period an action lasts, from start to end, before it closes, or is interrupted by another action of differing form and/or content.

The following exercises invite students to make conscious choices about the speed and duration of two actions—movement and speech— in time. They work in partners. They must not only be aware of how their material exists in time, but how their time choices relate/respond to their partner's, too. They learn that movement and stillness, silence and sound live inside of time. No distinction exists between one person's movement and another's, only between movement and no movement.