Workshop in Exeter

Yesterday I gave the workshop I announced earlier in this blog (post from 16 Feb) as part of Theatre Devon's Exeter Performers Playground initiative. Eleven practitioners from a range of background joined in as we explored the musicality of movement, voice and ... well ... apples.
It was really stimulating (and challenging!) to try to summarize some of the discoveries I have made at my desk over the past 8-9 months and to make them productive for practical exploration and experiment.

A few things struck me in particular during this session:
In one experiment I asked one performer to execute a simple task (no acting!), peeling and eating an apple on stage. We then repeated the exercise but I added a simple 'drone' from a synthesizer, a kind of 'non-music' that I had hope would be relatively unexpressive, but would somehow alter our perception: sharpeing our ears for the acoustic aspect of this mundane performance, letting us hear the peeling, cutting, biting and chewing embedded in sound and thus more 'musical'. The opposite was the case. The participants agreed that the had paid much more attention to the soundscape of the exercise when there was silence. The 'drone' for them introduced a well-worn film-music trope: a foreboding, attention seeking narrative device, that took their attention away from the here and now (or: hear and now!) of the little scene and instead into narrative speculation about what was going to happen.

A second exercise worked more in the way that I had hoped: I asked two pairs of performers to perform the same task (apples, again!), but asked them to use the specific quality of a piece of music I played while they were doing the scene - neither illustrating or fictionalising the music's presence, but merely trying to translate its qualities (rhythm, melodic shapes, timbre, mood etc.) into how the ate their apples.
What was interesting to me was that the two performers in each case translated the music quite differently, responding less in a planning, premeditated way, but letting the music affect their breathing, heart-beat, posture etc. and work its way from the outside in, evoking emotion. Inevitably, however, as a audience, we began to fantasise about the characters' psyche, motivation and relationship.

What this also means, as some of the participants commented at the end, is that musicality does not mean a specific aesthetic, a particular aesthetic, but a shift of attention (for the practitioner, the audience or both), which can lead to very different things: abstraction, defamiliarisation, but equally, enhancing presence, narrative or characterisation.
As it happened, I had just come out of a fascinating talk that Tim Crouch gave immediately before my workshop, in which he strongly (and very convincingly) made a case for leaving a gap between actor and character, so that the audience actually has some space for imagination, speculation, engagement and not be confronted with a hermetically sealed figuration of a character and its situation. Musicality, it occurred to me again, can be one way of opening up this gap, of providing an irritation, a shift, a little grain of sand in an oyster. And as we know, that's how pearls are made!

It also became clearer to me than before, that I was pursuing a non-normative, non-prescriptive notion of musicality in the theatre: a musicality that is contextual, individual and opens up pathways rather than dictating a specific route.