Posts Tagged ‘South Minneapolis’
Audiences Read an Actor’s Use of Space
Keith Johnstone: Impro
May Day Parade, South Minneapolis, 2013
When I was commissioned to write my first play I’d hardly been inside a theatre, so I watched rehearsals to get the feel of it. I was struck by the way space flowed around the actors like a fluid. As the actors moved I could feel imaginary iron filings marking out the force fields. This feeling of space was strongest when the stage was uncluttered, and during the coffee breaks, or when they were discussing some difficulty. When they weren’t acting, the bodies of the actors continually readjusted. As one changed position so all the others altered their postures. Something seemed to flow between them. When they were ‘acting’ each actor would pretend to relate to the others, but his movements would stem from himself. They seemed ‘encapsulated’. In my view it’s only when the actor’s movements are related to the space he’s in, and to the other actors, that the audience feel ‘at one’ with the play. The very best actors pump space out and suck it in, or at least that’s what it feels like. When the movements are not spontaneous but ‘intellectual’ the production may be admired, but you don’t see the whole audience responding in empathy with the movements of the actors.
–Keith Johnstone, Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre (NY: Theatre Arts Books, 1979) 57
Actors act on something the rest of us respond to without knowing why.
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Image Credit: Kirk Livingston
How to Cherish Your Provocateurs
Who has the power to rile you?
If you were an all-powerful despot, you might rid yourself of those who disagree. That’s the path of the Stalins, Hitlers and Kim Jong [Whatevers] of the world:
- “Off to Siberia with you.”
- “Work will make you free in this concentration camp.”
- “Here, Uncle, let’s execute you and your entire family.”
But the rest of us don’t have that power. And that is a good thing. Because it turns out we need these people around us who disagree and who see things differently. That’s because no one of us sees things entirely clearly. We need each other to piece together the big picture.
In my country, the United States, we are fond of cocooning with other like-minded members of our tribe. So we listen only to people who agree with us. We develop and watch television and listen to radio that reinforces what we think. We read only the diatribes that we might have written. In our age of cozy groupthink communities, we are quick to hit the panic button for any word that is off ideology, and quick to dissociate with those with a whiff of aberration.
Perhaps other countries have the same problem.
But what if we’ve got it all wrong? What if these different people, these provocateurs actually were providing us with a new, even more true way of looking at the world? What if these people were a kind of gift to us? And what if starting to see from their perspective was more akin to finding a $20 bill in the street?
Big groups of foreigners routinely make their way to Minneapolis and St. Paul. They are very odd, they speak in strange tongues, where strange dress. Have odd habits.
Until they don’t and aren’t.
Until they are us.
Walk back through the public rolls far enough and you’ll find your grandparents were these foreigners. Swedes, Norwegians, Italians, Finns, Hmong, Somalian. I suspect you’d even find a few people from Iowa. If the housing stock in South Minneapolis could talk, it would speak all these languages and many, many more.
The point: rather than fear the stranger, can we ask what there is to learn from this other way of looking at the world?
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conversation is an engine 