JAN FABRE TROUBLEYN (Kasper Vandenberghe and Maria Dafneros)
31|01|20
Similar
to a lot of our guest artists over the last 6 months or so, the work we have
done with Jan Fabre/Troubleyn has a wide range of general applicability in
performance and theatre making contexts, without necessarily emulating the
specific processes and aesthetics of the company.
Going
into things 100%. So important. Not something I do naturally, at all, because of a multitude of
reasons. I need to be able to keep developing this though, otherwise I’m going
to become limited in my range, and that just won’t do. It’s worth noting that
this 100% thing is purely physical, not psychological, as otherwise you can get
lost in yourself and won’t be able to remain flexible for a following
scene/exiting stage. Bluntly, if you need 20 minutes to bring yourself out of a
particular emotional state, you aren’t acting – you’re just unloading. It’s
this idea of emotional athleticism that is really helpful to imagine: in the
same way an athlete trains every day in various physical activities in order
perform the best in a competition, a performer needs to be consistently training
in various physical and emotional states in order to access them efficiently
and effectively when needed. Even this idea of being in something 100% physically has come back to refresh some
work we did with Gecko at the beginning of the course. We were asked by Ryen to
use our breath to bring ourselves into a specific emotion in a high state, and
let it travel into our entire bodies – however, we all struggled to get it out
of a psychological place, and into letting the body lead us. Just recently in
the Gecko audition, we re-visited this exercise and although I have no idea how
well I did in this exercise, it did at least feel for me like I was able to find
it from a more purely physical basing, and therefore bring it to a higher
physical expression. It felt insanely exhausting, but good to do again. I just
need to try and keep stretching this range of expression, otherwise it’s going
to eventually disappear from my practice.
it’s out of my comfort zone, for sure, but that’s the point. Especially reflecting on my solo, it’s so difficult to take yourself out of your comfort zone without an outside impetus. It’s like trying to reach a lightbulb without a ladder. You can’t just ‘change’ yourself. There’s also the balance of trying new things, while still being able to be enthusiastic about what you’re doing. Like, if I just went and did a heavily text-based piece about refugees, something I would not do naturally because it doesn’t excite me all that much, would I be able to stay enthusiastic? Maybe it’s about finding enthusiasm for the simple act of trying something strange. On the other hand, maybe it’s a better tactic to focus on the idea of a disquieting of my habits. Understanding that I have a strong penchant for particular concepts, but also gently pushing these into newer areas. There’s a lot to unpack on this with my solo, because although part of me feels like this is just another “Marshall” piece, when I compare it to my previous work, it has many points of difference.
it’s out of my comfort zone, for sure, but that’s the point. Especially reflecting on my solo, it’s so difficult to take yourself out of your comfort zone without an outside impetus. It’s like trying to reach a lightbulb without a ladder. You can’t just ‘change’ yourself. There’s also the balance of trying new things, while still being able to be enthusiastic about what you’re doing. Like, if I just went and did a heavily text-based piece about refugees, something I would not do naturally because it doesn’t excite me all that much, would I be able to stay enthusiastic? Maybe it’s about finding enthusiasm for the simple act of trying something strange. On the other hand, maybe it’s a better tactic to focus on the idea of a disquieting of my habits. Understanding that I have a strong penchant for particular concepts, but also gently pushing these into newer areas. There’s a lot to unpack on this with my solo, because although part of me feels like this is just another “Marshall” piece, when I compare it to my previous work, it has many points of difference.
Going
back to getting out of your comfort zone, I think there’s a lot of value to
Troubleyn’s philosophy of doing the same exercises every day. Obviously there’s
a luxury in having the time and space to dedicate to the repeat practice of a
set of exercise and scenes, but that aside, there’s an essentialness in this
practice. You develop a specific warmup that indicates that the day has begun,
you get the room into a specific mindset to work in the way you want, and practically
you warm up bodies. The major difference between a set warmup with a
traditional company, and what Jan Fabre does, is that these exercises are
extremely performative and imagination based, whereas a lot of traditional
warmups are done with the goals of simply exercising the body and focussing the
mind. By repeating these exercises every day, exercises that are unequivocally physically
draining, you force the performer to keep finding new things in the work.
Honestly, I found myself in this position simply because to repeat what I did
yesterday is bloody boring for the mind. Setting small objectives for yourself
also helps immensely in finding drive in these scenes. To be honest, I hated
doing these every day, but I absolutely understand the worth, and maybe when I
have the opportunity to create my own warmup routine for myself or a company, I
will be able to draw upon this understanding.
This
imagination is also key to a lot of the physical work done in the company – the
meeting place of imagination and physical responses. An exercise like the floor
cleaning would not be as engaging or interesting (for performers and viewers)
if the task was to simply rub your body parts on the floor rapidly. The quality
would be different and your focus wouldn’t be as direct. By having an
imaginative objective, you have that quality that I’ve been speaking about a
LOT in these blog posts: intentionality. Even though the movements could be
near identical, that intangible feeling a viewer receives from the performer is
missing when there’s no intention beyond the physical action itself. I’m still
even investigating in my own solo the moments that I have an intention versus
when I do not, and hoping to find this intentionality in the two performances.
Similarly,
these set achievable objectives make work a lot easier, and enjoyable, for me.
Going
to my solo a little more, another philosophy with Jan Fabre is that of structural
freedom. Meaning, you have a succinct structure, but freedom to roam within
that structure. This is of course a specific way of approaching theatre/dance
that is subjective, but one that I’ve tried to take with my solo, partially out
of necessity due to a lack of rehearsal time and self-organisation, but also
because I think my structure is strong enough that I maybe don’t need to concretely
set individual moments. Having done my first full run of the piece last night
in a delirious 11:30pm state, there’s a sort of electricity that comes with
having to still be navigating things in the performance. Especially in a solo performance, I think this small uncertainty is
important, as it lends itself to an aliveness. In my previous solo at WAAPA, I
had to be counting a complicated sequence of numbers in order to hit certain
sound cues at the right time, and this intense concentration, or intention, was
readable from the audience, although not necessarily understood. Maybe there’s
room to find this same aliveness more often in performance – although with
certain structure, of course. Can’t kill all my loves at once.
30|01|20
The
final few days of Jan Fabre have really turned on their heads – I have
transitioned from participant to observer, and I think it’s important to have
that experience, because now I think I can understand better the work that is
being done. It really is all about the energy and the sharing of experience on
stage. Maybe it’s because I have experienced some of these exercises myself,
and therefore know how they feel (and I’m experiencing some form of minor PTSD),
but watching the old people exercise and the hot plates exercise made me subtly
uncomfortable.
The big observation I made was about the weight. So much of it is all about weight. Specifically, in the hot plates exercise, you can feel what’s going on in the body remarkably intensely when the performer is really trying to get their weight off the ground, using a real physical struggle. It becomes a charade when it becomes about hopping around and demonstrating that the floor is hot and painful. Similarly, in the animal sequences highlight the differences weight makes in the energy and transference of an image. Someone like Rasmus was extremely convincing as a tiger, as he naturally has a heft to his movement, but then he was less so as a lizard, because it’s difficult to change his weight so much. Some performers were technically “performing” tigers really intricately, yet they still felt light. I know for me personally, I am a very ‘light’ performer naturally, so this has highlighted how important it is for me to find the weight when needed.
The big observation I made was about the weight. So much of it is all about weight. Specifically, in the hot plates exercise, you can feel what’s going on in the body remarkably intensely when the performer is really trying to get their weight off the ground, using a real physical struggle. It becomes a charade when it becomes about hopping around and demonstrating that the floor is hot and painful. Similarly, in the animal sequences highlight the differences weight makes in the energy and transference of an image. Someone like Rasmus was extremely convincing as a tiger, as he naturally has a heft to his movement, but then he was less so as a lizard, because it’s difficult to change his weight so much. Some performers were technically “performing” tigers really intricately, yet they still felt light. I know for me personally, I am a very ‘light’ performer naturally, so this has highlighted how important it is for me to find the weight when needed.
23|01|20
Just
jumping in to make note of a very useful
exercise we did with Maria, that I am actually very keen to do again and share with others – for a number of
reasons.
I
don’t know what to call it exactly, except the 5 types exercise. You have:
-
Professional
-
Sexual
-
Spiritual
-
Icon
-
Aggressive
You’re
given a short amount of time to put together a costume, phrase, and movement
that all represent a character for each of these “types”, and quite importantly it’s explicit that you
are going for maximum clarity. There’s something unusually freeing being told
this, as it doesn’t create any pressure to be creative with your ideas – the creativity
comes in the how you pull it off. As
an example, my Icon is the Terminator – not a wholly creative choice – but the creativity
comes in the gesture, voice, and costumes I devise, to make this as obvious as
can be. Maybe this is a helpful way to think about a lot of creation work – simple
results, and nice and clear, just creative in how you get there.
The second aspect of the exercise comes when you have to line up, all your different costumes and props behind you, and in a set sequence present your types to the audience. You have to be able to switch costume, jump between physicality after physicality, while still staying on top of your cues (which are to be right on the tail of the person before you). I don’t think I’ve experienced an exercise that is so good at not only training your performative agility in character, but also your logistical agility in changing costumes and still hitting your marks exactly when you need to.
If you don’t happen to get all your costume on, you just have to own it and make it part of your routine – another great training for real world performing.
I genuinely think this needs to be used more often in training, because I am consistently bummed out to see talented performers with no sense of logistics when they perform. It’s half the job.
The second aspect of the exercise comes when you have to line up, all your different costumes and props behind you, and in a set sequence present your types to the audience. You have to be able to switch costume, jump between physicality after physicality, while still staying on top of your cues (which are to be right on the tail of the person before you). I don’t think I’ve experienced an exercise that is so good at not only training your performative agility in character, but also your logistical agility in changing costumes and still hitting your marks exactly when you need to.
If you don’t happen to get all your costume on, you just have to own it and make it part of your routine – another great training for real world performing.
I genuinely think this needs to be used more often in training, because I am consistently bummed out to see talented performers with no sense of logistics when they perform. It’s half the job.
17|01|20
This
philosophy of Jan Fabre’s, of performer discomfort, pain, and exhaustion being
radiated out to the audience is really against so much of who I am as a performer,
and as a person.
I’m not meaning so much in ethics, aesthetics, or methodology, but rather how I approach work. I think it’s a combination of my personality as well as some of the training methods I have worked in over extended periods of time. To put it simply, I approach most things with resilience and control. In my personal life, this is who I am: analytical, efficient, robust – but it’s also how I perform and make a lot of my work. I am so used to being able to push through any physical discomfort in order to produce text, that I find it insanely difficult to allow my physical being to ‘contaminate’ the words. Not to say I haven’t been able to do this before, I know in some performances I have done this, but more through accident than a direct intention to do so. It relates to a lot of my shortcomings in theatre (and life), and so this work is very helpful in encouraging me to lose control a little bit more, feel a little bit more.
I think I’m good at making things into a comfort zone for myself, and maybe I need to just let things be uncomfortable. How, is the next big question, especially when being comfortable is my default. This is especially important for my solo.
I’m not meaning so much in ethics, aesthetics, or methodology, but rather how I approach work. I think it’s a combination of my personality as well as some of the training methods I have worked in over extended periods of time. To put it simply, I approach most things with resilience and control. In my personal life, this is who I am: analytical, efficient, robust – but it’s also how I perform and make a lot of my work. I am so used to being able to push through any physical discomfort in order to produce text, that I find it insanely difficult to allow my physical being to ‘contaminate’ the words. Not to say I haven’t been able to do this before, I know in some performances I have done this, but more through accident than a direct intention to do so. It relates to a lot of my shortcomings in theatre (and life), and so this work is very helpful in encouraging me to lose control a little bit more, feel a little bit more.
I think I’m good at making things into a comfort zone for myself, and maybe I need to just let things be uncomfortable. How, is the next big question, especially when being comfortable is my default. This is especially important for my solo.
15|01|20
Jan
Fabre work is fucking hard.
That’s really the point though, isn’t it? I mean, on their website it clearly states that the tension, pain impulse, and exhaustion are all meant to be experienced by the performer to radiate to the audience. I need to think a lot about what this maybe means for me and my practice, because it is a far leap away from the route I would usually go. To be clear, I’m not against performers feeling real physical impulses on stage that then radiate outwards, and in a lot of cases it can be quite effective, but I’m curious about that being a cornerstone of the methodology. I do hope by the end of the two weeks that we get a taste of how a Jan Fabre show might be built, to see how these principles are brought into the process.
That’s really the point though, isn’t it? I mean, on their website it clearly states that the tension, pain impulse, and exhaustion are all meant to be experienced by the performer to radiate to the audience. I need to think a lot about what this maybe means for me and my practice, because it is a far leap away from the route I would usually go. To be clear, I’m not against performers feeling real physical impulses on stage that then radiate outwards, and in a lot of cases it can be quite effective, but I’m curious about that being a cornerstone of the methodology. I do hope by the end of the two weeks that we get a taste of how a Jan Fabre show might be built, to see how these principles are brought into the process.
There
is definitely a lot of great training and experience to be garnered through
these exercises, even just on a performer level. The very strong notion that
you need to have precision with energy
and power is really important, and for many of us it’s either one or the other.
In one such exercise, we’re also playing with emotions at a 100% level, and I have now reaffirmed this as a real struggle for me. Emotional work is not something I play with often in my theatrical work, and to be honest it’s probably because I’m not a very emotional person in real life. What I often end up doing is demonstrating an emotion rather than experiencing it, and that’s a difference I really need to break down.
In one such exercise, we’re also playing with emotions at a 100% level, and I have now reaffirmed this as a real struggle for me. Emotional work is not something I play with often in my theatrical work, and to be honest it’s probably because I’m not a very emotional person in real life. What I often end up doing is demonstrating an emotion rather than experiencing it, and that’s a difference I really need to break down.
After
this exercise though, we were given the task of performing a very teasing
striptease, and although this was nerve racking for a myriad of reasons, once I
started it became quite enjoyable. I thought about why this was more enjoyable
than the emotion work, and I think it could be a problem with power. In the
striptease, I was able to feel like I had the power in the room, whereas in the
emotions I felt very small and inferior.
I guess with the Jan Fabre philosophy I should
be encouraging myself to lose control a bit more and release into the emotions,
and try find this same feeling I had in the striptease. I think this work will be good for me.