Good morning!
I very much enjoyed the journey back to London from Exeter yesterday on the coach. Five hours of confinement meant I could give myself permission to sort stuff out, read and ponder a number of things including the new theatre work we have just been commissioned to make for the NHS, a project that I have called The Soulful Commissioner on which I will elaborate in a later blog no doubt. Suffice it to say I am not referring here to a police officer! (although the concept could apply equally!) I am really looking forward to my first meeting with Olly and Phil about the project this morning.
As I observed in my blog yesterday, visiting Exeter and my former teachers and friends I had an overwhelming sense of my roots and a returning 'home'. I hadn't really expected this as I visit regularly, but the sense of long friendship, belonging, care and learning that lives in that space is remarkable. I suppose its the case for many people that their school and perhaps particularly their college or university if they have been to one remains a central touchstone in their lives. Its anchored in a time of life when the adventure is beginning and all sorts of possibilities lie intoxicatingly ahead. Its rich and saturated with hope.
So how does this concept of home relate to the work of the actor?
I talked in an earlier blog about a core actor exercise that I use at the beginning of almost all rehearsal periods. Its simply called Home. I started working with this idea as a way into character a long time ago. Its one of many techniques I use to unlock character in a text and to reference in directing the piece.
Originally this notion for an exercise was prompted by a habit my eldest daughter had when she was little. Whenever she felt sad or at odds with the world, she would say to me 'I want to go home'. This started when she was about two, and at first it used to puzzle me as we would be actually sitting in our 'literal' home. At that young age she could not articulate what she meant of course, but what I learnt over the years was that for her 'home' was not really so much a physical place, but more a feeling, a sense of being grounded, centred, belonging and safe.
I am grateful to her for this as her experience translated into a very powerful key for me in unlocking and locating character in text and performance. And so at the start of most rehearsal periods we have a lot of fun making homes for our characters out of anything we can find in the props and costume store to represent the feelings and preoccupations of the character's sense of home and the relationships that make it up. This is also a powerful way into dialogue with a designer in my experience.
What makes a home? Is it the four walls? Our belongings? The person or
people we share it with? Is the meaning of home all of these and also much
deeper values such as security? safety? being accepted fully as ourselves?
As they begin the process I ask the actors the following questions to consider as they being the creation of their characters. What does 'HOME' mean to your character? The place you live, certainly; Is home a place connected to your history, heritage, friends, family, country? What does that look, sound and feel like? I ask them not to be too literal but to play with what comes up and to allow themselves to be curious and observe, not to edit at this stage. I might begin with a suggestion such as this quote (source unknown):-
‘Our literal home is a sacred mythic place, even for non religious people. We all believe in a special space within and beyond our own doorsteps that simply cannot be violated. This is MY place, where I can close the door on chaos and find some kind of cosmos, peace, assurance of
purpose. This is mine. Here I belong.’
Who was it said - ‘Home is where the heart is’?
......and, like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz....if we click the heels of our ruby
slippers together and repeat 3 times -‘There’s no place like Home’, will we be
magically transported back there? I think it was the poet Robert Frost who wrote - ‘Home is the place when you go there, they have to take you in!’ I like that one.
One finite meaning of home is not an easy concept to isolate. It seems to
encompass a broad sphere of emotional experience, sensory perception,
memory and feelings of nostalgia. For many native peoples, like the
Australian Aboriginals, home relates directly to the land - they feel displaced
from the city, their traditional lands represent places where they experience
safety and wholeness.
Home is a central characteristic of our everyday lives - but it seems to be
something most of us take for granted. It protects us, connects us with all the simple rituals of life, comfort, relationships, relatives, friends and all that gives
meaning to our lives. How can we take it for granted?
The Art Critic, novelist, poet, and screenwriter John Berger writes the
following on the deeper meanings of home:-
‘Originally home meant the centre of the world - not in a geographical, but in
an ontological sense. A sense of being. Home was the place from which the
world could be founded. A home was established ‘at the heart of the real’.
In traditional societies, everything that made sense of the world was real; the
surrounding chaos existed and was threatening but it was threatening
because it was unreal. Without a home at the centre of the real, one was not
only shelterless, but also lost in non-being, in unreality. Without a home,
everything was fragmentation.
Home was the centre of the world because it was the place where the vertical line crossed with the horizontal line. The vertical line was a path leading upwards to the sky and downwards to the underworld. The horizontal
line represented the traffic of the world, all possible roads leading across the earth to other places. Thus, at home, one was nearest to the gods in the sky and to the dead in the underworld. This nearness promised access to both. And at the same time, one was at the starting point and hopefully, the returning point of all terrestrial journeys.’ (words on home by John Berger.)
When human beings are uprooted from home, they experience severe
trauma - after a break-in, or loss of home through natural disaster, or a
relationship split - even moving house is high up on the list of human traumas
and stress.
So whilst my exercise at the beginning of a rehearsal period is centred on the character finding their 'home' what often results is that the narrative demands the protagonist or antagonist to be in some way ripped or uprooted from a sense of 'home'. This catalytic action is at the heart of the text of many plays literally or metaphorically and is the thing that very often drives the action.
The piece I saw by Theatre Alibi on Saturday The Curiosity Shop explores this theme of homelessness explicitly. The actors playing Nell and Grandpa find a quality of performance that manifests this lack of groundedness through their twitching physicality, sense of urgency in movement and creation of the sheer physical exhaustion of the endless being on the move.
So, an apparently simple concept such as home has the power to unlock a text in a variety of meaningful ways that speak to us as human beings if the work is good enough and we manage to tap into them!
Have a lovely day.
No comments:
Post a Comment