20A. Walk/Sound, Solo, Ensemble

• Go somewhere on the floor and stand in a neutral posture. Breathe. Quiet your mind and relax into your body.

• You have three choices: walk, sound or pause. When you're walking, keep your walk simple and functional. When you're walking, you're not sounding, and when you're sounding, you're not walking. In other words, you're sounding from stillness and walking in silence. These are separate actions.

• Practice this on your own until it becomes comfortable. Let the voice and the movement interact and rhythmically alternate in irregular patterns. Both the voice and the walk will express your story, feelings, subtext, etc.

• After a while, I'll say stop. Everyone return to neutral. Keeping within the same form of sounding and walking as separate actions, build an ensemble piece.

• You're collaborating on three levels: the sound, patterns of travel, andcontent of the scenes.

• At some point, I'll give you a two-minute cue to end.

Asimple score such as this one, like so many others in the training, can be played over and over again. Each time will be entirely different from the others. In this exercise, Walk/Sound, Solo/Ensemble, the physical action is limited to a walk, but the collective choreography can become quite complex. There's infinite opportunities for variation in the timing and spacing of each step. Combined with the choral overlay and the unfolding chain of events, walking leads to a full-bodied and multi-dimensional improvisation. As mentioned earlier, separating vocal actions from physical actions demands control, focus, and an acute body awareness. By now students have acquired these skills. Within the context of this exercise, their actions appear ritualized, formal.

We don't usually separate the vocal from the physical elements of our actions. When we do, our behavior appears peculiar. What's peculiar is that the form is highlighted. We're noticing it more than we usually do. A balance between the form and the content seems odd because most of the time we pay attention to the content.

Ritual and Ceremony

As soon as we focus on the formal elements, the details of how an act is executed, we're in ritual. In this sense, in Action Theater, we always cre­ate ritual or ceremony because we always balance form and content. Rituals and ceremonies don't stress the individuality of the person. The act is the focus, not the person performing the act. The act is what must be performed, over and over again. In these exercises, instead of focusing only on the action, we focus on the person simultaneously. This brings both the person and the form into the foreground.

Our lives are full of ceremonies: taking the sacrament, lighting the Sabbath candles, exchanging wedding vows, cutting the birthday cake, blowing out candles, singing together, singing the national anthem, greeting each other, washing dishes, fixing the morning coffee.

Often actions are motivated by personal agenda that clouds perception and puts the content up front. The next time you pick up a cup of coffee, let the form take over. Feel how the cup moves through space. Give that form as much attention as the need to bring the coffee to your lips.

Ensemble Awareness

If an ensemble has been practicing together for some time, honing their collective awareness, individuals can begin to assert their identity in more impacting ways. In the early stages of ensemble practice, everybody concedes to, and joins in on, the collective actions. Large groups may be joining to relate to other large or smaller groups, but rarely does an individual stand apart. The fear is that too many individuals will stand apart, splintering the ensemble and dispersing attention. At some point, and with practice, an ensemble can hold a solo, duet or trio, because everybody is tuned in to it. Everybody knows what's going on. They offer supportive action, allowing the primary event to develop.

For example, suppose the entire ensemble is lined up against the back wall facing the audience and making wild gyrations and sounds. Cassie steps out and walks directly forward toward the audience as if in a trance, teetering and moving her mouth and hands soundlessly.

Some examples of supportive ensemble action to Cassie s action may be:

Downplaying or fading, Becoming still, Offering vocal backup, Offering movement backup,

Shadowing or echoing her action,

Becoming other objects that fit into her world.

An ensemble improvisation can be a continuous exchange of primary (Cassie) and secondary (supportive) players, no matter how many performers.

Imagining Beyond

Solo and duets risk ensemble fracturing and eruption of archetypal dynamics: us-against-them, competition, antagonism, and out-right warfare. How do we avoid this? Or better yet, what can we do when this arises? If everyone in the ensemble remains conscious of their actions— responsible for their words and deeds, focused on the moment-to-moment aspects of their actions, disentangled from personal identifications — when warfare-like action of any kind happens, it will be imaginatively enacted without reference to already known concepts or opinions. A sharply pointed finger will be experienced as a shape in space, the turn of a back as a dance, the fall from an attack as a contour of time and movement. The performer looks at the roles of aggressor and victim as a composite of feelings, movements, and voices. Rather than a stereotyped diminishment of these situations, perception expands into enlightened experience.

Whether working as an ensemble, small group, or individual, performers experience the challenge of staying with an image, an action, a feeling, or a quality of being, for an extended period of time. We've all experienced the urgency to move on and see what's next, to get involved in more activity. We're impatient, restless, judgmental; we're afraid of taking up too much space, afraid of not taking up enough.

The more practiced one is, the more drawn one is to step out, away from the crowd and to stay there for however long it takes. The more relaxed and practiced one is, the more one is capable of, and enchanted with, less activity. Simple moments take on awesome relevance and inconsequential events become enrapturing.

The following score pulls together all of the skills accumulated throughout the month.