GIACOMO VERONESI (Anatoly Vasiliev(?))
30|09|20
There’s a huge amount to unpack coming out of the previous three weeks with Giacomo and the practice he has shared with us. I’m sure a lot of it will be repeated throughout my journal entries, but my perspective on the work we’ve done has shifted significantly in the last few days.
First and foremost, this has been the most genuinely challenging, confronting, and stimulating three weeks of the course so far. This, I really did not expect. I’ve floated questions in my mind as to why this is – we’ve had other guest artists where we’ve worked significantly more intensely, and in methodologies not familiar to any of us. Throughout these, however, I don’t think we ever experienced a paradigm shift like we did with Giacomo. The work with other artists, though strange and new, still existed within a realm of familiarity. The work of the previous few weeks has demanded us to rewire the way we interpret the basic functions and fundamentals of text-based performance, which is quite a challenge considering how wide-spread and ingrained the more ‘Stanislavksi-esque’ techniques are for most of us. It wasn’t just changing how we played the game, the game was changed itself.
To be honest, I think for this significant of a change we could’ve been taken through the process more sequentially and step-by-step to ensure we were understanding the fundamentals – at the same time, there is a certain adrenaline caused by the recklessness of being thrown in the deep end and having to work it all out on the fly. Being comfortable with making mistakes is not my cup of tea, and boy, did my heart get a workout every evening when we were thrown into the Pâkoz (??).
It wasn’t until the penultimate evening of the workshops that I felt like I knew what was going on. Until then, it had been a trial and error process that ultimately confused me just as much as it gave me new knowledge. The night before, I had formulated a new hypothesis for my own understanding of the work, and decided to simply observe others in the etudes in order to confirm this hypothesis. In a wild twist of events, this was when I finally saw it. So much of what Giacomo had been pointing to was finally visible to me, and I felt like I could step through the doorway a little. It’s as if we had all been looking at the same cake, but while we were analysing the icing on the outside, Giacomo was pointing towards the filling.
I can’t articulate exactly what it was that I saw, or how I understood it for myself, but it had a lot to do with the structure of the etudes. In my mind, they had seemed like these wild artistic improvisations, and therefore very difficult to find my own work in. Once I saw the structure, I was able to apply it to my own etude with Keithy the next evening, and it somehow worked. I didn’t feel like I was performing for anyone, I didn’t feel like I was acting, nor did I feel any nerves. I was just doing the work. It’s a shame to have had this breakthrough so late in the workshops, but to be honest I am so glad I can leave it for now having had that experience. That will be the experience I will take with me.
Outside of the practical work we engaged in, the format and philosophies around how we approached the work had a significant impact on me. For the first time in a long time, I felt excited by the work, and personally engaged in it. It took some time to get here, but I did feel it. It’s a feeling I think I felt back when I was first dipping my toes into theatre – before it became about the technical and logistical aspects, and could just be about actually expressing something.
The biggest assist in taking me to this place is the concept of the concept. The underlying transversal action that everything orbits around. Obviously finding this in an existing text like the Seagull – one that is also very well written – is different to finding it for an original devised work, but this principle of having this anchor for all your choices grounds the work somewhat. This then fragments itself into each aspect of the work – the show has a concept, which a character relates to with their own concept, which is then explored in each scene/fragment through impulses and circumstances that are all drawn from the original concept. I think if I had done the work to explore this in my solo performance, it may have been a much more enjoyable work to make, as well as quite different.
I had this thought previously when reflecting on previous shows I have been a part of, but I am also quite enthralled by the practice of “concept talk” (or “table talk” as I have known it previously). This time that is set aside to simply express thoughts and build a collective understanding of the piece’s concept is wildly helpful in generating a passion and interest in the work. Even without having begun work on my final piece, I know this is going to be a staple of that process – I don’t want to be the sole provider of knowledge and understanding of the concept I am exploring. I want everyone to be able to help build our understanding, and then this collective understanding can make its way into the building of material and the work altogether. Ideally, this also means that - in what is intended to be predominantly physical piece – the physical action will have this concept and transversal action underlying everything, and fill the movement with an energy that you may otherwise need to generate artificially. It brings back an enthusiasm I have been missing.
On a quick side note, this work with impulses is hugely helpful. As someone who is quite tech/audio based, it’s challenging my work for me to understand that technical aspects also send impulses. This can be a choice, but maybe it’s going to be part of my practice to be more conscious about who/what is starting the impulse, and when is a new one sent.
There’s so much more I am taking with me out of these workshops, but I think I’ll find them trickling in going forward. Something that has already linked with the work with Sasha is the idea of going deeper into the work, not wider. If you overload with symbols and impulses, the work becomes muddy. Stick with one impulse and go deeper into it. Don’t be afraid of the simple. Also, don’t be so concerned with your image, because you’ll never be in full control of it anyway (Imanuel’s blossoming tree thought experiment).
Although I think I would be very keen to explore this work more in the future (I mean, I’m 24, I have plenty of time to come back to this, maybe even in Venice next time), I don’t think I will pursue the exact processes we explored. I do believe I will be taking a huge amount of information and philosophical concepts of working with me going forward however. It’s been real good. I’m excited.
v23|09|20
So, there’s been a shift. I don’t know whether I can articulate exactly what it is, but my motivation and interest in the work we’re doing has launched forward into a place where I feel genuinely driven to explore the work and methods. Maybe it’s a case of “oh shit, it’s the last week I need to get this” but I think it’s more a case of “OH. I am starting to understand this a little, now”.
I know I’ve been making progress in my understanding of the work this whole time, but before it was the learning that you don’t see so much. Let’s shove another analogy in here: when learning to ride a bicycle, you spend a long time just falling over immediately. It’s frustrating, and you don’t feel like anything is really changing. Eventually though, you will have that moment that all that confusion has been building to. You manage to ride the bicycle for a split second – a split second where you actually feel that you’re riding a bicycle. You of course fall down again immediately, but now you have a sense of what it is to ride a bike.
So.
This is where I feel I’m at now. It doesn’t mean I have made any leaps forward, and to be honest I think my work this week in etudes has been some of my worst yet, but I also take encouragement in the fact that I can now recognise that. Awareness is the first step to learning and changing. Even just watching other’s etudes, I am beginning to see the work a little more clearly, and can discern when it appears or falters to a degree.
This interest also manifests into a certain aggressive determination, which I am conscious can sometimes appear as me challenging the work or questioning Giacomo, but it’s really just me expressing an enthusiasm to understand that I didn’t have in the previous weeks. I don’t think I’ve felt this for a long time.
It’s also been very helpful going back to the exercises and structural work we began with, to remind us of the simple elements of the work. It’s like finding an anchor again. For instance, I had completely disregarded the concept of power exchange and what it means to explore someone else’s impulse. By finding this anchor again, I can re-associate all my new knowledge back to this anchor. Not to say that this is the work or anything, but it gives me a waypoint to grasp while I explore the poetic work of impulse and circumstance.
There’s also the more practical information that Giacomo drops that is good to hold onto. Firstly, (and I hope I am not misunderstanding this) remembering that this work we’re doing is not for performance. It’s probably more than what you need to do for performance, but it’s good to take bits and pieces. Similar to an athlete going to a gym to destroy their body working out. It’s more strenuous than what they’ll ever do in a competition, but they do it so the competition is manageable.
Secondly, and this is significant for the upcoming monologues, that no one gives a shit about your personal life on stage. If you walk on out and just start telling a story, it is difficult to generate the momentum that takes you anywhere. It’s useful to find the literal reason for the monologue – who are you responding to? What’s their perspective? Then instead of the monologue being you sole contained subjective view, you are forced to look at it through another perspective, another response. If I was going to bring it back to regular acting technique, this would be like an objective – what are you trying to do with the monologue, and to whom?
Even just this idea suddenly makes writing a whole monologue much simpler. This is a good thing.
19|09|20
The waves keep coming and going – those waves of understanding, and absolute whatthefuckishappeningIdon’tunderstandanyofthis.
Right now, I think I’m in the latter.
I’m having a lot of trouble quantifying things in my mind, when viewing the etudes, but also especially when being in one myself – it’s like all the exercises and discussions we have throughout the day just disappear and I am back to square one. To be honest, I’ve been really enjoying and engaged with the work that we do earlier in the day – when the elements are all broken down into their own individual parts, they are much more digestible. When we have to put them back together in an etude, that’s when things fall apart for me.
I think part of it comes down to the absolute lack of familiarity with the play. It is becoming increasingly obvious that to engage with this work fully, you need to know the dramaturgy intimately, and that is difficult when we’re working on it in a learning context. It’s like trying to memorise the turns of a racetrack, while you’re still trying to understand how to get the car to work properly.
I’d be very interested to apply all of this work from a new text, where we can engage with the process wholly from the get go, as I don’t feel my own personal interest in The Seagull as it keeps looking like this abstract exercise, rather than artistic material.
I also struggle with the notion of understanding the circumstances through yourself, and making it felt in your centre, but while still engaging in the work of the author. Maybe it’s my own block of sorts, but I find it so hard to make it genuine for me, without it becoming analogous – eg. My frustration with the kid who glued his hand to his face as a substitution for the frustration Dorn feels towards the youth and Masha. Maybe this is alright though. At least we didn’t just play the scene.
At the same time, even though I don’t believe the etude Liisa and I engaged in last night was very successful, I can draw on things from it that I hadn’t considered – maybe Dorn actually wants things to fuck up a bit, get messy.
It’s also worth trying to remind myself that all this work is what we already do as performing artists. Only this time we are specifically drawing our attention to it. It might be in my best interests to stop thinking of all this as alien and brand new, rather, it’s just making the invisible, visible.
16|09|20
It’s like being told what the colour blue looks like. Except you’re colour blind. You can hear all the details you want about blue, how it makes one feel, where it appears, its social functions – but until you can actually experience seeing blue yourself, you won’t be able to comprehend it.
This is what this process feels like.
I realised yesterday that my physical heart has had the most work out this week than it has in months. Each time we are tasked to get up and work, I am so utterly uncomfortable in my ‘not-knowing’ that my chest starts thumping so hard I can feel it all over my body. I hate being this lost; I’m starting to enjoy it.
It also brings into question the more black & white attitude I think I hold towards knowledge and ability. That there is a “not knowing” and you want to run towards the “knowing” as fast as you can. In this case, it seems more useful to wallow in the “not knowing” and eventually finding myself at the “knowing”. I want to know what the knowing is going to be, so I can go there, but I won’t know until I’m there. What a conundrum.
This work seems to have a beautiful interplay between the structural and concrete, and the abstract. I’m a big structure boy, so when we’re working in terms of this, I am finding it quite enjoyable. That enjoyment brings a lot of learning in itself. I become much more lost when it comes to the impulses, and the interplay between the material and ourselves. It feels like a very fine line to walk when you have to find the relevant impulse within yourself, and eventually marry it back to the text from the play, but not let it just become a scene. It’s a whole mindset shift, and it’s really easy to see when observing others – meaning the moment in which it snaps into being a scene, not an exercise.
Speaking of the exercises, I am a big fan of the Chair Ceremony structure, and I am very keen to appropriate it a bit for the next time I find myself teaching drama (which will likely be soon enough, because ya boy needs MONEY). Even disregarding the eventual development of the exercise into more of the abstract work, it’s a great tool for teaching performers an array of abilities and senses for stage:
- The understanding of when power has been transferred from one performer to another
- Understanding impulse and learning to explore within impulses
- Tuning in to when an impulse has ended
It reminds me on a very basic (and obvious, VERY obvious) level of introductory improvisation exercises that are usually much more game-y and dramatic. One makes an offer, the other accepts, they develop and close. So for me, this exercise is great for working in this format, but within a slightly more sophisticated context.
12|09|20
It slowly begins to make more sense. As does everything learnt, I suppose. You don’t begin being able to juggle by being able to juggle – you slowly begin to understand the physics, the coordination, all the elements until you can’t imagine ever not being able to juggle.
This is where I hope I can begin towards with this practice, although, I do believe this work is something you’d need an entire 3 year degree on to really immerse yourself. Though, I’ve already picked up a lot of very helpful tools, that even outside of this specific practice, can be applicable.
The mysticism that enshrouds all the work is starting to clear – but I can’t help wondering whether this mysticism is helpful or not. In some ways, it feels like someone has handed us 3 balls and just told us to juggle, rather than guiding us step by step. Possibly, this is just the nature of this work that is such a mental shift – imagine trying to learn how to juggle, but you’ve never even seen what juggling is.
It’s this modality of thinking that is so frustrating and uncomfortable to pierce through. I have to consciously stop myself from relating these new concepts towards older concepts I am already familiar with, as these old concepts are based on a system that is contradictory to what we are learning.
It’s an easy mistake to make, though. There are parallels all throughout the process, such as: splitting the script into sub-divisions; identifying underlying themes; mining into each line.
However, all of this sort of work goes beyond the script itself in this case, serving the underlying transversal action – the deep-rooted movement flowing beneath everything. This concept of the transversal movement actually tickles my fancy a lot. I was once told in drama school that I had a very good eye for understanding the whole of a piece, but needed to work on the details. I don’t want to call it reductive (and avoiding naming it specifically is a step in the right direction) but having that sense of the entire underlying concept really does give a sense of anchor and ease for making decisions.
When I felt this in class, I hastily wrote a note to myself to explore what this could be for my final project. In making my solo, although I understood the literal action on stage, and the motivations etc. etc. blah blah blah, I don’t think I could say I ever identified a transversal movement underneath the piece. This transversal movement could’ve come ideally from Oedipus itself, or maybe simply inspired by, but I think it would’ve made that process more pleasurable in having an anchor of reference.
Therefore, I am now making it a goal of mine to identify a transversal movement for my work – maybe based on religious text, ritual, or personal experiences. Just something underneath it all.
10|09|20
It’s a very odd sensation transitioning from the all-out generative practice of the 99 hour Kuhu Minek project, into the much more considered process that Giacomo is taking us through.
The most immediate change that I feel – and that has clearly been highlighted to us – is that this new practice has little to no concern for the staging or the audience, whereas throughout the 99 hour process we were constantly reminded to create as if the audience was always there. It’s something I’ll be speaking to a lot in my longer reflection on that process, but it was actually quite difficult at first to create in that mindset. Conversely, it’s now difficult to jump back in the opposite direction with Giacomo.
An extra difficulty for myself personally in this practice is that I am often working from that place of looking towards what we are gifting to an audience. That is often my ‘why’ in the work. I want to give an audience an experience. So I find myself possibly in between these two modalities.
There’s also a significant amount of ‘mystery’ that permeates the work with Giacomo, and this has always been the case when working with him, but this time it is a little easier to follow the thread. The analysis of the text and the philosophy of finding in the work what interests and excites you is refreshing and encouraging, but I do have this deep fear that I won’t find anything to be interested in from the text that relates strongly to my personal experience.
It’s been said that this is likely to be something that is unknown to us/me, which makes me want to make it concrete even more! Something I have to resist, in this case.
This questioning of “why should I stand up from this chair?” is VERY POTENT my goodness. It’s something I think I’ve been struggling with a lot lately. A lot of my enjoyment in making theatre comes from the process of conceptualising, staging, and presenting work – rather than any pleasure I derive from investigating process or theme. A great example of this that I am very aware of is my Solo performance earlier in the year – successful enough for me to be content with the final work to a degree, but the actual process itself wasn’t pleasurable. I didn’t have a god enough reason to stand up from the chair and make it, other than “it’s a uni project, I have to do it.”
I know there have been shows I’ve made where I have had a very good reason to stand up from the chair, and these have often been successful – but more than that, they have been pleasurable to make. Difficult and strenuous, but if there’s that reason internally to keep digging, then it all becomes more engaging.
As we’re in the beginning stages of our final projects, I think I need to start really taking some of this preliminary work with Giacomo and transferring it to that process. Why am I making the work I want to make? Also, trying not to feel pressured to have some deep profound reasoning, but just being honest and interested. There’s a lot of pressure to be profound I feel, and I hope these 3 weeks with Giacomo will help break that to a degree.