July 2nd, 2007 Fred McVittie
There is an exercise taught in Philippe Gaulier’s mime school in Paris in which the participants line up against a wall and the workshop leader throws tennis balls at them. Inevitably those assailed by the balls attempt to protect themselves, throwing up their arms, cowering, covering their faces etc. At a certain point an instruction is given to ‘freeze’ and the participants must remain in whatever posture they have adopted during the onslaught. The instruction is then given to ‘feel’ the position that has been taken up: to note the position of arms, hands, fingers, and torso: to monitor the expression the face has taken up: to experience the tensions that have accumulated in muscles across the body. Once this internal observation has been carried out the instruction is to maintain this overall composition of the body but to begin to move it about: to walk around and try making gestures: possibly even to speak whilst maintaining this overall body gestalt. From this beginning exercise, (usually comedy) characters are then developed.
What is interesting about this exercise is that is uses a simple physical action, the defending of oneself against a projectile, to ultimately construct a complex character, including the movement style and voice of that character, and it is worth considering how this process is functioning.
The construction of a dramatic character, even the most simple stereotype, is a multivalent activity, with many variables that must be considered and mastered for an effective result to be maintained. These variables include such telling details as eye-gaze direction, length of pauses in speech, movement of the chest during breathing, angle of the head, etc etc. and although these actions seem small and possibly insignificant, it is the overall effect of such actions which makes the difference between an excellent (or ‘convincing’) performance and one which is merely competent or worse. Obviously, the acquisition of conscious control over all of these minute details is beyond most of us, and such a ‘bottom-up’ approach would be a highly inefficient way of gaining mastery. Most acting techniques, and techniques for improving performances of all kinds, not only within acting, involve other approaches which might be called ‘top-down’.
The exercise noted above, in which the avoiding of tennis balls leads to the creation of character, is an example of a top-down technique. This exercise uses the body’s natural defensive instincts to simultaneously organise a vast collection of psychophysical behaviour. In addition to the movements of hands and arms to protect the face, when such a physical attack takes place there is also an integrated choreography of somatic responses taking in all levels of bodily action from jaw clenching to contraction of the anal sphincter, and utilising most of the affordances of the body. This degree of coordinated response could never be achieved using the bottom-up approach, the shear number of variables, and the relationship between these variables is too vast. Also, the coordination of all these tiny actions is dynamic, shifting moment by moment as the assault continues, but even in this shifting an overall coordination is maintained, the defensive posture is never dropped even while the person moves around. It is this finely tuned, intuitive coordination which is captured in the command to ‘freeze’. At that moment, and during the few seconds following when the participant checks over the position and attitude of their body, they are given access to the gestalt and to the organisation that their bodies have constructed naturally. They are then, hopefully, able to mobilise this gestalt in the conscious playing out of a character and the carrying out of intentional behaviour away from the wall and out of the firing line.
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