WORKING WITH NOVELS – A CHRISTMAS CAROL

I have always loved the Christmas Carol; the story of how even the meanest closed person can reconnect with the world and in some measure makes some amends, atone for his cruelty. Despite the fact that the cruel and inhuman system of which he is a small but significant cog continues to grind on at the stories end, it is somewhat ameliorated by Scrooge’s more open heart and generosity. 

I have always loved working in workshop with poetry and novels, something not immediately like a play. Dickens’ work, though packed with fabulous characters and dramatic confrontations is still novel in form. It enables you to experience in a truly multi-layered way, what is happening . As the words and images dance in your imagination a whole multi-facetted response can come. If you want to stay with the story alone, with these other aspects lurking beneath, you may, and these images and atmospheres are still at play; alternatively you can give the images and atmospheres a free rein and see what happens and discover a side to the story you only half- believed was there.

In my approach when working with novels I have come to the conclusion that to focus on looking at images and atmospheres before the narrative can bear some rich and powerful fruit. How will that affect how we tell the story? 

In a workshop I led a year ago on Kafka’s The Trial, I decided to use the novel, even though I had done a very successful production of Berkoff’s adaptation in 2004. In the adaptation Berkoff had made a lot of creative decisions for us. As someone who has done a lot of adaptations I knew that choice and filtration is partly the job of the adapter so I am not complaining about this, but what became clear during this Chekhov exploration of The Trial was the facet of alternatives available when you used the novel itself (even in translation). You can read about this workshop on

https://maxhafler.wordpress.com/2019/05/21/like-a-dog-exploring-kafkas-trial-with-chekhov-technique/

Working with Atmosphere as the guiding spirit, the core of the work,  assisted by the images and rhythms  the author provides, the actor/creator can explore the text in a way that foreign companies approach Shakespeare often – through a different lens. This does not mean that the narrative is forgotten but it is not the most important thing – well, certainly it is not the only thing.

From the Trial workshop

There is one place left on this course which begins on Saturday at 12.noon – 1.30 pm. Email chekhovtpi@gmail.com

Advertisement

Creating where you are – My Site Specific Room

I remember when I was a child and played in my room. Areas of my room had a particular atmosphere or feel there . Under a table became a tent or a cave, a place of safety. My bed became a rocket ship . I closed the curtains and used a torch to create lighting. The room disappeared as I dived into my fantasy. The walls melted….

Like Max in his wolf suit in WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE

In the new course, My Site Specific Room,  starting on the 9th November, we have an opportunity to return to this absolutely crucial element of creation; imagination, atmosphere and energy. When I was a teenager I had a fantasy that I would have an imagining room, completely white, in which I would be free to imagine anything. I loved exploring the imagination; it made me feel fully alive.

As I became embroiled in the business of becoming a professional actor, I paradoxically lost much of my attachment to imagination. Acting became a serious material business. It was only with playwriting , teaching, directing and more especially my fortuitous discovery of the Michael Chekhov Acting Technique which has as its bedrock the Imagination and the Body, when the Imagination reassumed its majesty as a creative tool. Working online, I returned even more to the core values of ‘lets pretend’. This is one of the great plusses of learning online at home, in your room…

 For fourteen years on the NUIGalway Drama MA I taught ensemble and devising, before it was the fashionable thing, and have worked extensively with youth theatre and applied drama on devising. One of the exercises at the Uni  was to give sub groups the opportunity to find a spot on campus they could explore and use and make the venue the inspiration for a short dramatic experimental piece as we brought the audiences to them. Pieces in a squash court, a ladies toilet, a long corridor with stuffed animals in it, a church ante-room… four of the exciting venues that were memorable. 

The Michael Chekhov Technique elements for the course will of course be atmosphere. What is the atmosphere of the room in which you are working? And of course Imagination, so that the piece you create is not about your past life in that room but comes from somewhere else. We will also work with composition elements  and tempo and variety  .

For instance, I use my study. If i sit in a chair in the corner I feel differently to when I stand at the window or sit at my computer.  Note how when you sit in your living room that you probably choose where to sit. You don’t even think about it. This is not necessarily ‘your chair’ per se.. I have a fireplace – how do I feel when I sit at the fireplace? Could this be the start of my story/piece… how does it feel to sit by the fire…maybe there is only a small fire in the stove…i am cold…. my story begins… who am I? who am i speaking to? 

In the course you will craft a 5 minute piece using where you are as your inspiration.  It could come from a corner or a texture or something about the whole room. 

if this is of interest to you then email chekhovtpi@gmail.com . We begin on the 9th. at 4.00pm GMT. there are five workshops! Below is a video link for more info

Video link https://youtu.be/G17m3GsFMzM

Like A Dog – Exploring Kafka’s Trial with Chekhov Technique

I remember meeting a playwright who came to the university and he told us how a theatre company had asked him to write them a play. He agreed and, on the day he was to start, they brought in a large rock and asked him to use this piece of rock as an inspiration for his play. A tangible, poetic image to start his work, no story, not even an issue. A rock.

Anyone who believes the Michael Chekhov technique is only for plays is missing some massive opportunities to use the work and expand and develop devising and adaptation.

I love to use Chekhov technique for adaptation – in this weekend workshop we were using Kafka’s Trial – because it enables you to worry less about narrative and focus in on the essence of what is going on through images and atmosphere ( like the playwright who uses the rock to inspire him). If you do it this way round, if you look for what is going on underneath first, then you will find something which imbues the narrative with a depth you could never have found otherwise. This frightening and rather formless-sounding idea was nonetheless structured in our weekend workshop as I had the group look specifically at two episodes: the beginning and the end.

It is always a good plan to consider the beginning and the end of whatever you are making. It is true you can just ‘wait and see’ but that way the creator can easily get lost. However, if there is a beginning and end, you have a grasp of the piece. It does not mean that you cannot make radical changes, indeed it is right that the end might change, but you have addressed the piece as a whole from early on.

Working with the essentials of radiating/receiving/ease and form/ general atmosphere and working with images, we then began to work on the two episodes, looking for images and atmosphere, which we firstly made into non-narrative pieces. I wanted to encourage the group to resist any temptation to ‘tell the story’ in the initial pieces. This made, in the first piece particularly, a violent animalistic rat-infested world.  I then suggested that they looked at the atmosphere of the mundane world of Joseph K and for both groups to explore narrative tableaux. They then started to mesh the two elements, the mundane and the imaginative, of the story and the image, together.

We then added some text, both narrative and conversational, from the passages I had chosen, building our pieces with several ‘showings’ as we built up the pieces. This was a very supportive and creative group. I am going to run another of these workshops which take first principle elements of Chekhov and a novel.

Next up is Archetypes and Archetypal Atmospheres and as it is Midsummer, we will be working with A Midsummer Night’s Dream, so we will be doing some voice work too. It takes place on June 21-23.  There are still places. Email chekhovtrainperformireland@gmail.com to book your place. The Venue is NUI Galway.

 

 

 

Devising and Structure

a recent devising workshop  radiating and receiving…

After seeing a devised piece by students the  other night , I was prompted to ask a question of the performers, that I never asked during the Q and A as time ran out. The piece was lively and varied and  reminded me of many devised pieces I have facilitated in the same college, the myriad pieces I have worked on in youth theatres and in National Youth Theatre Ireland festivals of Youth Drama .

I wanted to ask whether the students found the process different and better or worse than working on a play.

Devising is a wonderful thing; making a piece from nothing. It has a long history. In recent times it has been popular with youth theatre, applied drama with non-actors as well as on the professional stage. With devising, actors can initially make almost anything they want; they can own the piece completely as they have joint ownership; they can mix styles and give their piece the flexibility of a piece of music. It gives them a massive buzz and is an invaluable part of theatre education and practise.

However whatever devising model you use, there are restrictions. Whilst the group can explore something emotionally daring, it is very hard to develop certain acting skills within it. The students HAVE to feel safe, and when you are using feelings which are more iðentifiably yours the danger of fully exploring what is going on is riskier. It is difficult in that situation to make them act better, go deeper, because you as the facilitator have no idea what you might be dealing with, hidden beneath the subject matter that they have created. I had this experience myself quite recently with a group and it was a curious realisation that devising and acting skills are not always mutually compatible.

Looking back on my own experience I wondered whether restricting the scope of the material actually helped.

I facilitated a project many years ago on the theme of spirit for a youth theatre festival. The theme was given to us. It was a tricky one. At the end of this project there was to be a public performance and I was much less experienced, afraid we would not be able to make anything presentable in the time frame. I took with me an idea based on The Tibetan Book of the Dead which begins with a wake and then we follow the spirit going off to four levels, to be decided by the group, before leaving to eternity. Eventually the Spirit was released. This structure enabled us to find so many things about ‘what we let go of in death’ ‘ what does it mean to be alive’ that we could never have explored without that structure which I had taken in with me. The structure empowered them; it restricted their freedom a bit but also gave them lots of scope. Unexpectedly, four young actors devised a hilarious strand about four dead grandmothers who sat in an eternal front room, watching their living relatives on telly and supporting and criticising them, until one of them decides it is time to take the journey to departures. Their sections were scripted whereas the others were mainly movement -based ensemble pieces.

But even though we did a lot of things in experiment and discussion, I felt concerned to not push them in terms of their performance especially during the funeral/wake section. I was very gentle. After all I did not know these people and who knew what their relationship was with death? In fact, as it happens, one of the participating facilitators had had a close bereavement in the family and we had to talk about his involvement which was quite a moving story in itself.

The structure  enabled us to make something which challenged everyone. Restriction can mean freedom.

In a scripted play though, the actors have the conduit of their character to push their energies. The actors may or may not be like them and especially when working through the Chekhov technique you are never asking them to directly tap into their own experience but to find the feelings and the journey through imagination and the body first. That also allows you through the score of the play to express parts of them they do not show and to encourage them to work with those energies and radiate them to the audience convincingly. The character gives them a safe place because you are never directly working with them or their lives.

This is what I wanted to explore when I didn’t ask the question at the Q and A I mentioned at the start of this piece.

Not long ago I facilitated a devised piece about Ireland with a group. The piece was quite beautiful, but for various reasons, I found it was very difficult for them to express negative feelings about how they felt about the place, and when we started to explore this, some difficult feelings came up. Next time I work with them we are going to work with some scenes from plays as well as devising a piece, so they can work as free authors in their comfort zone and then push the boundaries when they have a structure and are playing someone other than themselves.

The further from my own home I get – devising theatre for the ‘abroad’

One of the fundamentals of creating theatre is to share. It is an act of sharing. Nowhere is this more true than when you are devising with a group, and especially when the group is devising a piece of theatre based on their experience. So it was with an American student group from Principia College whom I met for two periods of devising; once at the beginning of their trip, and once at the end. The devising of their piece around their trip to Ireland, what they experienced both literally and emotionally, is the subject of their dramatic piece. Indeed this process is not over as the summer intervenes and they recreate and further develop the piece next term with their drama professor John O’Hagan.

I have devised many pieces, particularly with young people’s groups, and with this piece in particular it was important to share the idea that this was not a lecture or a slide show, but a feeling response to their experience. This highlights for me what is absolutely unique about a theatre experience; a direct response from the hearts of the performers pouring their energies into the theatre space, either through the filter of character and story or in this case, the more direct route of their own writing, and their own experiences.

It is very often the case that initially students come at devising very intellectually and make thin work. Once the feeling response starts to happen and the instincts kick in, the work gets deepened. It is wonderful to watch this opening up to the “intangible” as Michael Chekhov would say. Only when you approach the intangible and start to use and express it can an audience truly get a sense of what the experience was like. “Atmosphere” is a very valuable tool in accessing this intangibility, particularly in this group when they wanted to get a sense of place, for example, Dublin, Belfast or Tara.

Whilst you need to also play to the group’s strengths (all of this group could sing beautifully) I am a firm believer that it is unfair in all but the most basic of circumstances not to develop the skill level in the group, so I always mesh a number of skill workshops in with the devising to help the participants maximise their power; except in exceptional circumstances creation is not enough. So in this series of workshops we meshed tools, ensemble, voice and devising together. There was of course a large Chekhov component; we used the imagination and the body first to find expression, which freed many of the students up and widened the range of feelings they could express. Meshing devising and skills work is complex in that you have to choose exercises to suit the material they produce on the day so the leader cannot prepare the exercises in advance, except in a broad way.  You as the leader risk more but you also gain more when the magic comes and their devised material is enriched by the skills you have offered.

Because we were always dealing with the participants’ own material it was vital to show the utmost sensitivity towards it. The deviser is usually revealing something about themselves directly, especially in written solo work. It is often not appropriate to use this material as an acting exercise and push the student into difficult areas. A play enables more of a distancing between the actor and the material. It means students can be more robust in their acting because they are playing the impulses and feelings of the characters rather than themselves. The work is seen through the atmosphere and situation of the play ; it is not theirs but they nonetheless have to inhabit it in order to perform successfully. Often with devising the work is very very close and as a leader I am aware of a delicate balancing act, which often involves how much they want to reveal.

This, along with rules of composition which we touched on and the creation of a rough structure and some deep honest work was the total of the time i spent with them. it was amazing to actually see them in their first tentative days and then in their last days in Ireland, like a beginning and an end in itself. Thanks for such an enriching experience.

I will be returning to atmosphere specifically in the summer school Journey Through Atmosphere,August 24 -27th being held on the NUI Galway campus. We will be working with Pericles, a play with a myriad of journies and atmospheres. Plays with Journies, like devised pieces about journies seem to me to have atmosphere almost as their engine. check out http://www.chekhovtrainingandperformanceireland.com for info or contact chekhovtrainperformireland@gmail.com

In my beginning…devised work and composition

In the last few weeks I have watched a number of ensemble based  theatre pieces developed through a devising process in the burgeoning Galway Theatre Festival and whîlst I have a whole number of responses and questions to consider with regard to these pieces, developed by groups at all different stages of development, I want to focus on one or two aspects of these productions, primarily concerning composition and its importance in making a real contact with audiences.

 

In order to explain this further I suppose I need to just go over what that Michael Chekhov term means, though the name composition is on the surface pretty self explanatory. Composition involves the idea of beginning middle and end. This is not peculiar to Chekhov and has been around for centuries; that a work of art has a ‘feeling of the whole’, like a painting has a frame, and this is important for the audience. This is not to say that life appears always to have that structure, though in the wider sense it does. In the words of Helmut Berger in some woeful 70s movie I saw he said “you live, you fuck, you die” , reminding us that even we have a beginning, middle and an end. We understand this organically as people and respond to it in art. These stages in a work of art are vital to what we want to say, and how we are going to say it. When I say this I do not mean that a piece has to have a happy ending or we cannot leave things open; but, if we do, as artists we have to know what the purpose is , what responses we might want to invoke in our audiences and be honest with ourselves as to whether it is  successful.

 

In the last few devised pieces I have seen there have been issues with really successfully making that form, either because it was not desirable or simply overlooked as unimportant. In the Brokentalkers production THE BLUE BOY which I saw recently, the piece seemed to have ending after ending, emphasising the fact that the piece was over long and did not  know where to settle. Many endings suggest no ending, and for me, drain the emotion from the piece. It left me ultimately as an audience member feeling, ‘well is that it?’ As this was a piece about child abuse in Irish industrial schools, this was a very unsatisfactory feeling to be left with. Sometimes I think it is the devising process itself that’s to blame. Authors have customarily a problem with editing their own work, and when this also might mean cutting ‘a good scene’ either for yourself or someone else, then editing can difficult. Add to the fact you have an ensemble of co-creating authors, finding an ending can be problematic.

 

 

But then there are also beginnings; the BLUE BOY and another piece MY POET DARK AND SLENDER  opted for a fairly casual ‘sliding in’ to the piece , a kind of ‘we are just actors talking’.  It’s a device which was used a lot in the 60s and 70s. it establishes a different sort of contact with the audience but is also dangerous because it prepares the audience for less energy ,less commitment and less involvement. Though more successful in the Brokentalkers show through the charisma and focus of the first performer who spoke, and the feeling for me that this low key energy was a preparation for where they were going to take us, generally this kind of approach  is not a beginning, but an apology.

 

Indeed in some cases, this ‘sliding in’ can appear like a ‘screw you,’ to the audience ,’we can do what we want’. I  saw a production of The Cherry Orchard done in last year’s Dublin Theatre Festival by a company from Belgium called STAN. I have a piece about it on the blog called Selling The Cherry Orchard With Stan . In that case, for me, the effect was worse, because they were doing The Cherry Orchard and it prepared us for the fact they would do what they liked with it, which I was expecting in any case, and so the opening was, well, juvenile.

 

In any case, if you are going to call this ‘sliding in’ a beginning, you need to be very clear about what you are doing and the intention you have in preparing your relationship with the audience.  Why deprive me the audience of an interesting start to a piece to prepare and involve myself with the work and what the artists are trying to say? What is the purpose? If the purpose is good, and what you as the devisers are really committed to, then fine. If not, well the news is, devising has as many cliches as any art form.

 

Which brings me to a devised work in development called STREET , which was about poverty and subsidy and being an out of work actor. I made a very strong connection to this piece for two reasons initially. I knew and have had many of these actors in my classes over the decades I have been teaching, and have directed some of them as adults. Secondly, as someone who has acted myself, I knew all too well the problems they were facing. What clinched it for me though was the work was emotional and raw and really reached out to the audience. They radiated their commitment. Yet it was not overblown, just open. I felt it cost people to ‘go there,’ and felt the potential of a piece which tackled why theatre was important, partly because  the problems the artists face are so universal these days, with the eroding of employees rights for all walks of life . As we just watched pieces of this show and this was very much ‘in development’ ,there was no structure to consider , but I was excited to see where this piece might go.

 

The piece which for me was most successful though, was CARE performed by WillFred. It was literally about endings. The piece, about how hospice workers care for dying patients was incredibly moving and for me embodied a deep understanding of theatricality. The person we followed who was dying was in fact a mannequin, a brilliant device, because as I sat watching the show it made me think of all the people I had known who had been ill and died. It left me imaginatively free to fully engage my emotions. There was beautiful live music to go with this work. This show has survived the original devisers but amazingly you would never notice this, such was the commitment and skilful direction. Like many of the other pieces I saw it was very factual but there was an incredible unforced imaginative element, which BLUE BOY for me did not have. In comparison, The Blue Boy  for me wore its art on its sleeve which obfuscated rather than illuminated.

 

Because we followed our dying person, CARE had a strong ‘feeling of the whole’ despite the fact that all manner of means were employed to tell the story. If I had any qualms it was a little stronger vocal delivery ( a common problem in devising work), and perhaps a scene where one of the nurses could not cope with the stresses of the work. A small complaint, when I emerged from the theatre so moved.

To boldly go – Chekhov and devising

This was the first workshop in my new project, Chekhov Training and Performance Ireland and my first real experience of applying Chekhov Technique to the process of devising theatre completely from scratch.  I have used the technique with circus performers (see an earlier blog post) in leading and facilitating ensemble, as a tool for physical theatre, as well as working with actors on regular plays , but this was the first time connecting  the technique with the absolute core of our creativity – devising from nothing.

Yet isn’t that what Chekhov and his technique asks us to do? To just open ourselves to the creative spirit and allow a character to walk into the room from the mists of the imagination, to introduce itself, and inhabit our frame, without the structure or proscribed world of the text? It was both exciting and daunting to ask the participants to come with no lines learned, no books read, nothing.

Devising is a very very personal process with as many approaches and seeds of creativity as there are people on the planet. I felt this issue of the ‘seed point’ of where we start was absolutely crucial for our work this weekend. So I did not want to bring in a theme from which we would begin nor did I want to impose any kind of mythic structure, like looking at a folk tale or myth, something which Chekhov himself used as an exploratory tool, because in this instance I felt that that too might be an imposition. what i was trying to get my group to connect with was this absolute root or seed point of creativity.

So we began with body sensitising; qualities, ideal centre and radiating/receiving before moving on to creating body-statues which led on to spontaneous sketches of characters. Each participant made three sketches of characters with their bodies and then was asked to choose one. Further imaginary body  and inner life work followed, and gradually characters began to emerge and fill the room.Tiny scripts began. we also worked, through gesture, that they find a polarity of the character’s energy, an open warm gesture say, which closed to a hurt closed gesture and the actors started to get a sense of a force within the character.

I decided that within the weekend we would also look at general atmosphere so we could put our character into an environment. After some initial imaginative and atmospheric exercises we tried putting the characters into two atmospheres and it was heartening to hear people say things like “I never thought she would behave that way.”

What was quite daunting to me at the start of my own Chekhov exploration was the massive palette of choices working this way can produce. When you don’t even have a script to hold you down and you realise that you as the creator are also completely steering the ship it is quite a prospect. In this process you are on your own -it’s you and your creativity. Being creative requires a curious mixture of strong will power and an extraordinary openness, of freedom and discipline. For me the Chekhov Technique really offers that freedom.

Our next weekend (13th – 15th May ) here in Galway will be looking at the Chekhov technique with regard to directing  and acting and working with a yet to be decided text. you need to have some Chekhov knowledge.contact chekhovtrainperformireland@gmail.com or phone 086 330 7325

The Dancer, the Acrobat, and the Chekhovian!

When I was asked to mentor through Chekhov technique and assist the shaping of a piece by Dueda, a Italian-based circus theatre company meshing dance theatre and aerial work, I was a little daunted. After all, I was neither proficient in contemporary dance nor more especially aerial artistry. But after a fascinating week working with Chekhov and devising in the Aerial Creation Centre in county Clare it once again confirmed how well this Chekhov work can be used to develop experimental performances as well as being used with text. More about the role of mentor later.

“There are no purely physical exercises in our method. These would be useless since our primary aim is to penetrate all parts of the body with fine psychological vibrations” Michael Chekhov- On The Technique of acting.

In Chekhov the performer is using the body to find sensations and feelings, not develop physical strength or dexterity. Therefore, one of the puzzles of this work was the learned disciplines of the performers; one an aerial artist, and the other a contemporary dancer. Chekhov has such a different focus on the body to other disciplines that it can be challenging for people to allow the feelings through. Initially this seems paradoxical. After all if people are fluent and disciplined in their bodies, why does feeling not pour through them? Ultimately as a fellow Chekhov teacher and I discussed recently, the psycho physical approach to movement can be at odds with physical training, because the movement is to some extent a means to an end, a means to find internal expression and feeling.

The company had a lot of pieces of material but for me this performance needed to have a score, a narrative that they understood, that would enable them to transmit or radiate the feelings and situations in which the ‘characters’ were placed. This narrative did not need to be mundane or even so specific as to explore the relationship,say, of a mother and son, which was how the relationship showed itself to me initially when they performed some pieces they had made. The audience would make that connection if they felt it. But for us as devisers to follow that kind of relationship specifically could limit both performers and audience to only one way of perceiving the piece. On the other hand the feelings of the performers must be specific and felt or the piece becomes purely fabulous abstract movement. It needed its own emotional journey.

Recently, as I left a very lauded, skilled but for me alienating dance show, a friend said “well I don’t really expect to be moved bŷ contemporary dance” and I thought ” Why not? This is a live performance.” If you radiate vaguely, then you will transmit nothing, however wonderful the movement is. You will go into your default performer’s mechanism and hope for the best.

Balancing skill and abstraction yet also transmitting something tangible an audience can grasp is a fine balance. As Chekhov’s priority lies less in mundane reality and more in the intangible forces which guide our being in the world, it is ideal for this sort of theatrical landscape.

Another interesting dimension was the challenge of making sound. As a voice teacher I know that those focussed on the body are often not that comfortable performing vocally, and yet In order to express, voice, body imagination and feelings all need a deep connection. To stop up the voice seems to me a tragedy. But maybe that is just me. Chekhov works really well with voice, indeed a number of opera trained people who have worked with me have told me that much of the image work is very similar to work they do in opera training.

In the first three days the extraordinary mythic dimensions that Chekhov technique explores so deeply came to the fore, exploring qualities , atmospheres , ideal centre, archetypes and radiating and receiving. We did not work a lot paradoxically directly with psychological gesture because I felt the performers might be too locked into their training for the psycho-physical feeling aspect of the gesture, which is of course the most important aspect, to be of use. Also due to my limited time I did not feel it would be too helpful or relevant to explore centres or imaginary body, the first because it is too complex, the second because it was not relevant as they were not playing characters per se.

The bare symbolism of a rope hanging in the centre of a black space was a weighty full image, reminding me of gods who come to earth; trapped princesses down a well ; the womb; the umbilical cord; Persephone in the underworld; Eurydice in the underworld to be recovered by Orpheus; The exposure to the techniques deepened and intensified the dynamic , and together we began to build a score for the piece.

On the fourth day, as we got deeper into the emotions of the piece, I understood more fully that firm armour which Chekhov technique encourages us to break down and explore as we experienced a strong moment of ‘farewell’, of ‘letting go’. As one of my Alexander technique friends discussed with me that evening [ there was a huge Alexander technique conference running concurrently whilst I was there] it is almost always good to go to those emotional places rather than deny them, provided you are in a safe space. That safety is vital. When you explore this work you are asking people to go to places in which they may feel uncomfortable. However, without our performer’s sensations and feelings radiating out to the audience to make a connection with them, what is the artist but a skilful trickster?

We built our score using the principle of composition, creating it like a piece of music which is as effective in devising as it is when working on a conventional play. In my devising and ensemble MA module which has gradually incorporated more and more of Chekhov’s principles we have used this idea of shaping the piece through tableaux. It was a starting point.

Finally a word about mentoring. Mentoring strikes me as being a curious hybrid of teaching and directing which is involving, yet requires a completely different dynamic to either. In this case I was there at the group’s behest to teach them some acting technique and to help devise a piece from which there was already a wealth of physical material and a relatively clear basic idea. In this mentoring position, there is never a question that this is their material and yet I am being asked to help shape it, so whilst the mentor has to behave with some authority, at the same time he has to acknowledge that there is no obligation on the company to follow the mentor’s contribution. They might or they might not. This requires a deep understanding of the mentor’s role and though I have mentored before, I felt I understood this on a much deeper level than I had before. Whilst involved I required myself to have a really strong commitment until the final moment, at the same time as understanding that I was stepping away after a week.

Thanks, Dueda! Fascinating.