Saturday 1st October Of Ghosts and Stowaways

The scorching sun energized all as it shone down on the 1st October.

With sweaty brows we started with some light warm up games and vocal exercises. It's always hugely important, particularly early in the morning, that we warm up together as a group. The voice is the toolbox of the performer and therefore needs to be looked after as an athlete looks after their body. It's a strange fact that so many actors, singers and dancers smoke cigarettes when this means that they are directly damaging their means of earning a living.

Ghost ships and stowaways were still fresh in the mind from last week, to the point that two students shared wonderful dreams of Captains and ghost battles, inspiring us all to look more closely at how to create a performance from these themes.

Earlier this week I had attended a Meisner workshop as an actor. It's increasingly rare in Brighton to find high quality professional acting classes and I must admit that I held some trepidation as we started. However, my fears were soon dispelled as two experienced practitioners stood up and showed us all how it was done.

Sanford Meisner champions the behavioural aspects of Stanislavski's 'method'. He developed a series of workshops that were designed to hone the art of using 'impulse'. Now, impulse is a bit of an 'actory' word - we talk about following our impulse, going with our impulse or reacting truthfully to our impulses. I suppose one might also describe it as our 'instinct'. Putting that into an acting context, it's the feeling inside us that pushes us to react in a certain way. However, it isn't an idea. We don't 'think', "right I'm going to stand now", rather we simply stand because we feel 'impulsed' to do so. When working with a partner this helps us to put the attention directly onto them rather than focusing on our own thoughts. Hence, the moments when we respond to our impulse are completely unplanned but wholely truthful to who we are and the situation that we're in.

So it was interesting bringing this with me into the acting class. The question still remained, how do we convince 7 - 12 year old actors that they need to follow their impulse?

Following the warm up we split the class into two. One half worked on creating story through text and devising, whilst the other half looked at how repetition of physical acts could begin to tell a story of their own. Of course, the theme of ships and ghosts still prevailed.

I am always amazed and yet more and more I find myself expecting great things from this class. They never fail to live up to the expectations us adults put on them and it's important to remember that in directing. If we expect greatness then a child responds. If we expect them to fail then how do they know different?

With some great physical representation of life on the ship, mixed with some original pieces of text both scripted and improvised, things began to slowly take shape. Then came the Meisner. Taking a small piece of text from each piece we began using the repetition exercise. Each actor takes one piece of text and then repeats it in dialogue with another actor. Slowly, through repetition small stories begin to emerge alongside telling subtext.

It wasn't long before the group were acting totally on impulse, responding truthfully to every moment and yet all they were doing was repeating movement and text. Meisner was certainly onto something!