Shaping and Honing

Exercises in Isolation, focus and the performer-audience dynamic

New day, new focus. Our main objective during our initial rehearsals - alongside deep dives into less obvious character masks - is the sharpening of key skills essential for effective commedia performance. This rehearsal’s focus… well, focus - both of the mask and of the audience. As both performer and director, the audience-performer dynamic has always fascinated me, and in commedia it is vital.

While delving into the traditional scenarios, I ended up watching TAG’s wonderful The False Magnifico directed by Carlo Boso. One of the delights of the performance is the clarity and precision of focus and how adeptly they pass focus from one character to another - not mechanically, but quite naturally. Not a new concept to me, but knowing and doing are very different animals. And masks are much like animals: prone to hogging the limelight and not necessarily doing what you want them to do! Discipline is what’s needed.

Warming up the basics

To embed these fundamental skills and take complete control of the masks, the techniques must become part of our warm-up and this week we decided to zoom in on these core skills with some simple exercises.

Isolations

Isolations: the segmenting, if you will, of different body parts. We worked on isolating areas, starting with the head and working down the body. One lovely (if slightly disturbing!) exercise, is to imagine a nail through your forehead and trying to rotate just the head/face round it. Tricky but lovely, subtle movement, almost like an inquisitive dog. These subtle shifts in the body, neck and head really help to give clarity to a mask’s emotions. Carrying on down the body, we worked the neck, shoulders, rib cage and hips moving with rotations and tilts to find articulation and expression. After too many years away from performing, I found my torso particularly hard to free up. Using a concave-convex stretch introduced by Cheryl really helped: Clasping your hands, outstretched in front and curving the spine over, stretching the arms right forward and then reversing with the hands interlocked behind, pulling shoulder blades down and gradually arching the spine with chest pulling upreally helped to unlock the vertebrae! A really nice surprise was switching the way we clasped our hands. The small alteration really helps intensify and deepen the stretch. 

Passing the focus & talking through the audience 

Here’s one John suggested which he’d remembered from his work with Carlo Boso:

Two characters, either side of the stage. One looks at the other, who then looks out to the audience and speaks, maybe complaining or denigrating the other. Having spoken he passes the focus back to the other, who then turns and speaks to the audience. Simple.

The quality of movement: sharp, precise is key. Not talking over each other, waiting for the cue. Exploring the difference between an aside to the audience and a line intended for the other to hear. Passing the focus with precision is so important when improvising dialogue. As we have often found, it can be hard to get a word in edge ways once the masks take the stage.

How is the look passed? Physically, in an exaggerated way with a punctuation beat, to force the audience’s focus. Starting with an individual character stance (we used zanni as a starting point - lowered centre, upper arms engaged, at midriff), keeping the body and arms still, the head turns in isolation and looks to the audience, speaks, then snaps back to pass the focus to the other. We exaggerated the moment of transition from audience to partner to ensure that the moment the focus passes is crystal clear - the training in isolating comes into play. In performance this would be lessened but it’s about training the body, neck and head until it becomes movement memory.

Expanding on this further we introduced a simple ball game. One character has a ball (they become the major, where we want the point of focus to be), the others (the minor, giving focus) create the focus with their look/body. The ball is thrown or passed to another, everyone’s focus shifts to the new bearer. Extension are added - words or grummalot are introduced, the ball becomes different things, situations are spawned and the masks come alive!

Complicité and the ‘stage picture’

I’ve always taught students that, when creating theatre, we are creating stage pictures that the audience then interpret. Again essential in commedia that, in its purest form, has little or no set. Complicité between performers here is essentials that we instinctively use balance the proxemics on stage to build up the stage picture. Developing the ball game further, we introduce the rule that the mask in possession of the ball, must find centre stage. The others then must balance the stage around them, directing the audience’s focus. As the game progresses, we instinctively began to work together to create different pictures and groupings around the stage. As the ball was imbued with different qualities, narratives grew and the masks began to respond and react together, feeding off the emotions and actions of the one in major, gasping, moving, walking in unison. As we started to free the rules, the major took different positions on the stage - not just centre - and intuitively, the others framed the major with their positions.

Woking this exercise was a real joy, partly because of some of lovely choices different performers made (the ball became a heart, a bomb, a proposal gift) but also experiencing the intuitive unity - the complicité - becoming actually tangible, and electric in the room.